Chiguer art contemporain is delighted to present Spirits in the Sky, a solo exhibition by Qavavau Manumie. Borrowed from the title of one of the works on view, the exhibition’s title takes on particular resonance in a remarkable series of drawings on black backgrounds, where animals, landscapes, and enigmatic figures emerge from the darkness. Moving between nocturnal scenes, vast northern landscapes, and extraordinary creatures, Manumie constructs a world in which reality and imagination seem to belong to the same territory.
In Qavavau Manumie’s work, animals never simply inhabit the landscape. They observe, act, protect, hunt, transform, and at times seem to return the human gaze. This relationship runs throughout the exhibition, giving the works a depth that gradually reveals itself, often beneath an initial impression of simplicity or humour.
A nearly costumed bird, its plumage transformed into an ornament, grasps a spoon with its beak. The juxtaposition is both strange and amusing: the beak and the spoon seem almost to extend one another, as though a human object had naturally become an extension of the animal’s body. This kind of shift is characteristic of Manumie’s universe. The familiar becomes uncanny without ever losing its lightness. Elsewhere, a caribou carries hunting implements in its antlers, overturning the traditional image of a trophy mounted on a wall. This inversion evokes both the memory of animals and that of nature, while subtly questioning the place that humans have assigned themselves within the living world.
This porosity between worlds also runs throughout the exhibition. Animals, humans, and objects can extend into one another, forming hybrid beings. In an imposing 2023 work, for instance, a bird seems to transform around a vast net filled with fish, while an almost human face emerges at the heart of the composition. In other drawings, the marine world unfolds in nearly symmetrical constructions, as though it possessed an order of its own. Manumie never offers a single way of reading these images; instead, he allows the viewer’s gaze to move between narrative, humour, strangeness, and wonder.
These richly layered compositions are balanced by landscapes of remarkable restraint. Mountains, water, horizon, and light are enough to assert the presence of the North. In Kinngait Mountain at Dawn, the mountain slowly emerges from the darkness until it becomes almost abstract. The land thus appears as the guiding thread of Spirits in the Sky: a living, shared space where humans, animals, stories, and memory coexist. In Manumie’s work, imagination is never far removed from reality. It becomes another way of looking at it.
Born in 1958 and raised in Kinngait, Nunavut, Qavavau Manumie has developed a remarkable practice in drawing and printmaking over several decades. Alongside artists such as Shuvinai Ashoona, he belongs to a generation of Kinngait artists whose work has contributed to renewing perceptions of Inuit art and asserting its presence within the field of contemporary Canadian art. His work brings together, with singular freedom, observations of the land, storytelling, humour, and transformation.
