Piliutiyara (saltwater taffy)

Kablusiak

Kablusiak's contribution to MOVEMENTS is presented on the billboard at Artscape Youngplace in partnership with Critical Distance Centre for Curators.

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“In the photo series Piliutiyara (2019), Kablusiak deconstructs the sexualization of Indigenous women and femmes by making viewers hyper-aware of the settler colonial gaze. The artist faces the viewer with unselfconscious power and authority. In these works the viewer will look at the artist and see them in a way that they control. These works force the viewer not only to confront Kablusiak but to face the tropes and conventions in which Inuit women and femmes have been depicted by settlers throughout the European colonization of North America.”

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—Lindsey Sharman, Sobey Art Award 2019 catalogue

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Kablusiak is an Inuvialuk artist based in Mohkinstsis and holds a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts. They are represented by Jarvis Hall Gallery, and their work has been acquired by public and private collections across so-called Canada. Awards include the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize (2017), short-list nominee for the Sobey Art Awards (2019), and the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Arts Award (2020). The lighthearted nature of their practice extends gestures of empathy and solidarity; these interests invite reconsideration of the perceptions of contemporary Indigeneity. 

Piliutiyara (saltwater taffy) is presented in the context of MOVEMENTS. As its title suggests, this online and site-specific program presents several projects by artists whose work references diverse definitions, experiences and enactments of movements. Bringing together a range of practices, MOVEMENTS reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, within transient gestures and encounters, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.

MOVEMENTS is made possible with support from Partners in Art​

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Image Credit: Kablusiak, Piliutiyara, 2019.