Art in Focus: "SHED" by Kablusiak

Akunnirun Kuupak Series: SHED, 2018; Ink on paper; photograph; Kablusiak: Born Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, 1993; University of Alberta Museums Art Collection, University of Alberta Museums; 2021.1.2

I believe in ghosts. Which is to say I know that the past can haunt us.

SHED (2018) is a photograph from a series titled: Akunnirun Kuupak by Kablusiak, an Inuvialuk artist based in Alberta.

The photograph has been composed and taken with great intention. There are many small details that tell us it is a contemporary image from the ghosts running shoes to the modern construction of the building and street lights in the background. The shed, however, defies a clear time and place, but we can see its age, its disrepair, its peeling paint. Drawing on a long history of landscape photography in so-called-Canada, Kablusiak inserts themselves into the image shrouded by a white sheet with only eye holes. Their hands are visible, as are their aforementioned running shoes. This gesture, of performing as a white sheeted ghost is made with a sense of humor, but embraces a sense of shared grief and empathy as well.

The ghost in the Kuupak Series of photographs can be understood as a documentation of performance. The ghost acts as a stand-in, representing Kablusiak’s urban inuk displacement. But the white sheet also reads as a symbol of erasure, of things lost - but still very present through a kind of haunting. Kablusiak’s ghosts don’t float, they have two feet firmly planted in place, perhaps a gesture of reclamation or firm belonging to time and place. 

While Kablusiak works across many different materials and visual art mediums, photography, as Kablusiak uses it, is a perfect medium for this confusion of time. Often referred to as a time based medium, the photograph captures a specific moment and makes a record of it. Kablusiak’s ghost reminds us of things we might not always want to see as part of recorded time.

SHED is a beautiful photograph. Its composition and light give the ghost’s sheet significant texture and form. The shed structure falls slightly into shadow, suggesting the figure is the more critical piece, but their relationship in size and proportion can’t be ignored.

In 2019 Kablusiak was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (which they won in 2023). Their work was featured at the Art Gallery of Alberta as part of a major exhibition featuring five Sobey Art Award shortlisted artists. When I entered the large third floor gallery my eyes immediately went to a massive vinyl graphic on the wall, and I have never openly cackled so loudly and for so long in an art gallery before. Kablusiak is funny. Their work is very funny. It is also immensely sad at times. And the space between their great humor and sadness is powerful. Their work creates a sense of longing, without lingering in the historical. It’s as if in their work they have created longing for the future rather than the past.

April Dean is a visual artist living in amiskwaciwâskahikan, on Treaty Six Territory (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). With formal training in both analogue and digital photographic technology and printmaking, her work is often constructed of lens-based and language fragments which reflect and denote the evidence of time, intimacy, and alienation. She is currently employed as Gallery and Exhibitions Manager in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta.

This web story is part of the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection Spotlight Series, a collection of web stories aimed to share works of art from the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection with the world. Posted monthly, these stories connect works of art in the Collection to important matters on our campus and in our world.