GLENN GEAR

Essay by Franchesca Hebert-Spence

I have had the pleasure of seeing different iterations of Glenn’s animated work over the years. Our relationship began at Banff in 2018, the origin of Glenn’s running huskies, and as recently as this past spring, where Ullugialijak (Starry Night) was projected upon the side of L’Imagier in Aylmer, Quebec overlooking the river. Every animation and iteration between has always been contextualized within a place, be that: as a projection onto a building, presented in an art fair, open house, film festival or art gallery. Glenn’s storytelling thrives in this continual revisiting and shifts in context. Each iteration has explored a new facet of presenting and thinking of Kimutsik (dog team), as it remains a central part of Glenn’s body of work and fractures into different explorations.

It’s in this action that Glenn’s work defies modernist understanding that art has a singular meaning; a “right answer” to what it is about, and that ‘The Meaning’ is dictated by the mythological ‘genius artist’. This understanding of how artists operate within the world is something that Glenn actively resists through a practice of thoughtfulness, curiosity, and visiting - methods that center his community and community histories. I’ll proceed to list some of the iterations of Kimutsik and how my understanding of them has changed repeatedly in each space they have been exhibited, and the ways those strategies carry over into his current and upcoming work. 

Beginning with the pack running across the wall at the Banff open house¹, an international tourist destination as well as a retreat for artists – which, coincidentally, has a few dog-sledding tours available nearby to provide the “quintessential Canadian experience”. Which, maybe it is quintessentially Canadian to market and brand a national identity of repackaged Indigenous technologies - maple syrup, hockey, and now dogsleds. The tone of those tour packages is quite different when reading accounts of the brutal dog slaughters that occurred in Nunavut², Nunasiuvut (northern Labrador)³, and Nunavik (northern Quebec)⁴ from the 1950’s to around the 1970’s. These mass-culls were an attempt at genocide and to undermine Inuit sovereignty and self-sufficiency. This isn’t the be-all-end-all of what Kimutsik is about, but when I think back on seeing the pack for the first time, experiencing it in a place like Banff, it was when I truly understood what had happened in the eastern Arctic. Maybe I needed to hear that story in that place to get there. As assinajaq put it during an interview explaining the rationale for making one of the themes of Tillutarniit history,  “I think history because it’s like, we can’t remove it from our understanding of where we are. So it’s important to start there, to have the bearings for understanding the contemporary.”⁵

So, the manifestation of the pack began in the physical location of Banff, a place of contradictions, but also within a residency called the Space Between Us led by Julie Nagam and Johnson Whitera. The participants were makers from Canada and Aotearoa, many of whom were making digital art and had their families with them. Glenn often talks about how the Kimutsiijut lead him, like spirits - but I also think that it’s in these group gatherings that Glenn’s work flourishes. For example, in 2019 Glenn also participated in Memory Keepers I / Gardiens des mémoires; a residency of Inuit and Montreal-based Indigenous artists organized by the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq / Pijariuqsarniq Project. Other artists part of the project included Darcie Bernhardt, Megan Kyak-Monteith, Tom McLeod, Caroline Monnet, Jason Sikoak, and Jesse Tungilik, with their final projects being presented outside FOFA for Montreal Nuit Blanche. Memory Keepers was the first time I put Glenn and Jesse Tungilik’s artwork together - Jessie Tungilik’s sculpture within a Jason Sikoak’s canvas tent sculpture contained and grounded their works, with Glenn’s Kimutsiijut behind, all in the rush of bustling bodies generated by Nuit Blanche. This is what a collaboratively made Inuit space looked like.

Not only was this the first time I saw Glenn’s work outside of a gallery, and in a public space, it was the first time seeing Kimutsiijut interact with an architectural surface or container. This theme of curiosity and having to explore or investigate is gaining traction in Glenn’s more recent installations such as Iluani/Silami (It's full of stars),  an animation and mural within a shipping container, made in 2021 for the inaugural exhibition of INUA at Winnipeg Art Gallery - Quamajuq. INUA, The Making of a Sealskin Spacesuit, and Iluani/Silami (It's full of stars) also became another marking point of the creative discourse between Jesse Tungilik and Glenn. Glenn helped sew Tungilik’s The Making of a Sealskin Spacesuit and included within Iluani/Silami’s mural a husky in a space suit, whimsically speaking back to his relationship with Tungilik. In the way that Kimutsik led Glenn through and around discussions of history, memory and resilience, these gathering places with other Indigenous artists offer a space of critical discourse that brings Glenn’s work new strategies and opportunities for discourse within a larger Indigenous arts movement. 

The next presentation of Glenn’s Kimutsik that I stumbled upon was at the Toronto Art Fair in 2019 (at this point, it wasn’t me following Kimutsik, they were following me). Toronto Art Fair is yet another bustling space, the rush is similar to that of Nuit Blanche, but one crammed with artwork. This was the first time I saw Glenn’s sled dog projected onto a sealskin. Until now, Glenn did the laborious process of animating sealskin, beadwork and the texture of the charcoal into the running dogs, projecting onto a wall or canvas surface and bringing them to life. I was pleased, because it just made sense to have the pups physically be of the surface. It was also a nifty and creative way to take projection installations that are generally these monolithic-gallery/public oriented projects, to be something small and intimate (and acquirable with a nice short throw projector). While a great solution that would make any commercial gallerist happy, it became yet another turning point in Glenn’s work conceptually and practically.

There are connotations between seals, holes in the ice, and portals that are explored in Inuit cultural production. I’m not knowledgeable enough to go down that route in this essay but arguably there is a connection there that would make a really wonderful exhibition or essay for someone better equipped. I can say with certainty that Indigenous understandings of time and space are different to that of Euro-western conceptions. In Rickard’s essay Aesthetics, Violence, and Indigeneity, she begins the essay telling the story of a guest lecturer spilling water to demonstrate Haudenosaunee concepts of time embedded in language and writes “the underlying point was that time as a representation of reality is fluid, not static or fixed. Inevitably, a revised comprehension of time will be demanded in order to understand art rooted in Indigenous philosophy.”⁶ These portals began with Glenn’s understanding that the Kimutsiijut exist in another realm as spirit dogs, and carried through as he continued to build spaces around them, to act as medium – both literally and figuratively. These sealskins act as veils, which is interesting because the sealskin hides are carefully selected and retrieved from Newfoundland – the region Glenn grew up in. In Tilllutarniit: History, Land, and Resilience in Inuit Film and Video, Heather Igloliorte says, “Maybe film is a way for all audiences to connect with a place they may never get to visit… They get to experience something that has always been separated by a vast geographical distance."⁷ By bringing seals from his home region into these art spaces he’s giving that connection, the land he’s familiar with, as a grounding point for these ephemeral spirits.

Now Glenn is magnifying this approach again, as you can see with Tuktu/Tuttuk above. The animals presented are diversifying to include animations of animals from Gear’s family’s region of Nunatsiavut, Adlatok Bay – caribou, ravens, bowhead whales, seals and more. But there’s still a piece of the very first running dogs that is still in this new work. The charcoal used to animate his animals was collected from the fire pits in Banff, the same fires that Glenn sat around with his residency-mates telling and listening to stories. After four years of following Kimutsiijut they’ve led Glenn back to his home and become an jumping point for future explorations of networks of interrelational and interspacial exchange.⁸

In a space like VUCAVU, I have no sense of when, where or who will be reading my musings on Glenn’s work - it serves as its own portal or time capsule in a way. So, I’d like to end with a thank you for sitting with Glenn’s work, being patient with the circles I’ve slowly meandered through, and I hope that this time has sparked stories and memories of your own place that connect to Glenn’s animations.

- Essay by Franchesca Hebert-Spence