Maureen Gruben

For Nakataq, Gruben has hand-etched repeated forms into a set of found photographic aerial survey prints using patterns based on her father, Eddie Gruben’s, fox stretchers and traps. These prints were recently recovered from local work camps that oil companies set up and subsequently abandoned in the ‘80s; they chart ice coverage in relation to oil wells in the Arctic Ocean surrounding the artist’s home community of Tuktoyaktuk. Marks added by the artist converge with but are texturally distinct from the exposures, which themselves include surveyors’ annotations—names and numbers added in the darkroom when they were printed. This intersection of inscriptions touches on very different but deeply entangled relationships to land and concepts of value, particularly with respect to tensions between home and resource extraction. Eddie was renowned as the region’s most successful trapper and is remembered as a generous supporter of his community. Orphaned as a young child by famine and the 1920’s pandemic, his skill and efforts in trapping with a dog team over vast distances enabled him to eventually build the largest transportation company in the Northwest Territories. Gruben has added his Inuvialuk name, “Kagisaluq”, to Nakataq IV, which bears the darkroom annotation ‘Amundsen.’ Amudsen was a Norwegian explorer after which, it can be presumed, one of the oil wells was named. Varied representations of her father’s tools occur throughout Gruben’s practice. This ongoing process works to preserve not the objects themselves, but to reflect on the many complex memories and values that can be sustained by a form.