Gukki Møller
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[kat.8.1] Split (Detalje)
Artist's ancestry appears in works
'At the Galleries' by Jack Anderson
Review Gukki Moller 'Between Two Cultures' the antechamber until May 30
The last time I wrote about Inuit art … was well over a year ago when I reviewed a show of traditional caribou bone and antler carvings from northern Canada. Tose works represented various aspects of the secular and spiritual life of Inuit people and, from the material to the conceptual, were largely characteristic of much of Inuit art.
Gukki Moller is a Greenlandic Inuit artist, now living in Regina, whose work is more variable than traditional, even though it finds its source in similar places, similar experiences, and a similar world. The work in his exhibition Between Two Cultures clearly rises out of his ancestral heritage and his upbringing. However, it is as well infected by a language other than Inuit.
The two cultures that Moller refers to here, the two discouses that run parallel in his work, are Inuit and Scandinavian. Born to an Inuk Father and a Danish mother, he was raised in Greenland and trained in art school in Denmark before moving to Canada four years ago. Wheather he is caught between two cultures or cradled by them, Moller identifies the place he occupies as one filled with 'dualities', as one wich is constantly in flux.
Straddling these two cultures, these two dissimilar psychologies, sociologies, anthropologies, and spiritualities, Moller has had to develop his own hybrid visual language that is a unifying amalgam of the two. As there is, then, no single lexicon wich help us decode his work, we understand the five large ceramic pieces included here in this small but very strong show to articulate the liminal and often shifting territory he occupies.
As a strategy, Moller re-assigns, through abstraction, places, objects and events remembered from his Inuit upbringing. He has systematically stripped away from his work any visual excesses or superfluities. The resulting symbols and forms he creates are all idicative of the sophisticated sensibilities of Scandinavian design. Thus, for example, two large sligthly flattened blue bottles, both sleekly 'uptown', actualy refer to traditional Inuit women's costumes from Greenland which feature a high-necked curved bodice just like these. Simultaneously in their acute simplicity, they reference the Bauhaus and Art Nouveau-influenced designs promulgated by mid-centruy Scandinavian mass-production potteries. And, too, his three large oval basket-like objects are more than refined and rarified craft objects of elegant form and subtle making; they are signifiers of Inuit fishing boats, which here seem to be riding high on the crest of ocean swells, their rims each more rippling than the last, like the waves of an increasingly agitated ocean.
Inscribed on the bodies of all these ceramic vessels are simple linear designs which appear to be nothing more than decorative motifs. However, like the shapes of his objects themselves they are, in fact, abstract designs representing aspects of Moller's heritage: concentric circles symbolize Viking shields; elongated diamond shapes symoloze kayaks; random recctilinear scratches symbolize both sled tracks and cracks in the surface of translucent blue ice. And these dry, dry matte surfaces are much akin to powdery snow, to the velvet of seal skin, to the arid Arctic wind.
Like the shaman in Inuit culture, who, throuh his transformative actions, links the phenomenal world to the other-than-world, Moller here consciously occupies a similar position as an artist. He attempts to identify the correspondences between his two cultures, and thus these object represent a meeting place between two worlds. By evoking one culture in his work, he simultaneously invokes the other.
Moller's deceptively formal work emphatically and knowingly does not critique either culture from which it rises: that is plainly evident in the assertion rather than the deconstrucion of both traditioins, in his obvious respect for both traditions. However, he does inquire into and identify not only the links between these two spheres of influence in his life but their divergences as well. With no irony, arrogance, or aggression, Moller represents in these pieces the complex and constantly shifting aspect of his heritage, and thus his own personality. And, in the most poetic and non-intrusive of ways, his work hints at similar certainties and uncertainties of our own.
The Leader Post, Saskatchewan, Canada, 13. maj 1999