The Polar World combines fantasy and reality: giant squids, hybrids, and humanoid figures dance across Ashoona’s sensual vistas, lending a surreal quality to her work. Springing her imagination but rooted in the landscape of her Kinngait home, The Polar World combines Ashoona’s drawings from her 2017 exhibition with a narrative by Andrew Hunter.

Shuvinai Ashoona began to draw in the early 1990s with the support of her family and the Kinngait Studios. Her drawings, often a combination of reality and imagination, offer an abstract outlook on life in the North.

Shuvinai Ashoona's profile page

Andrew Hunter is an accomplished curator, artist, writer, and educator. He joined the AGO’s curatorial team on May 1, 2013. He is the co-founder and co-principal of DodoLab, an international program of community collaboration and interdisciplinary creative research.

Born in Hamilton and a graduate of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD), Hunter has held many curatorial positions, including roles at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Kamloops Art Gallery, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre Art Gallery to name a few. He has taught at OCAD University and the University of Waterloo (Faculty of Arts and School of Architecture) and lectured on curatorial practice across Canada, the United States, England, China, and Croatia. As an artist and independent curator, Hunter has exhibited widely, including solo projects at the National Gallery of Canada, Dubrovnik Museum of Modern Art (Croatia), The Rooms Art Gallery (Newfoundland), the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff Centre), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Yukon Art Centre, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Concordia University), and with Proboscis (London, UK).

Hunter has contributed to numerous exhibitions including acclaimed retrospectives Tom Thomson and Emily Carr: New Perspectives. Other major projects include The Other Landscape; Come A Singin'; Northern Passage: The Arctic Voyages of Jackson, Harris and Banting and The Road: Constructing the Alaska Highway (Art Gallery of Alberta); To a Watery Grave and Dark Matter: Remembering the Great War (Confederation Centre Art Gallery); Lawren Harris: A Painter’s Progress (Americas Society Art Gallery); Ding Ho Group of 7 (with Gu Xiong, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon); and Thou Shalt Not Steal: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Emily Carr (Vancouver Art Gallery)

Andrew Hunter's profile page