The latest in the Up Front mural series, Maureen Gruben’s Dance me through the herd (2024) opened at Onsite Gallery in Toronto, ON, on September 1 and will be on view on the outside wall of the Richmond Street West gallery until December 31.
Gruben’s piece is the seventh mural to be featured in the Up Front: Inuit Public Art series, presented in partnership between OCAD and the Inuit Art Foundation (IAF). The project is curated by Ryan Rice, Onsite’s Executive Director and Curator of Indigenous Art and an IAF Board Member.
From Tuktuuyaqtuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT, Gruben is an installation, performance and textile artist who often highlights the connection between the land and its communities in her work, incorporating a wide range of organic and industrial materials from her local environment. Gruben has participated in many group exhibitions, most recently Common Thread: Female Perspectives from the Arctic (2024), currently on view at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has been featured in several solo exhibitions, including The land that used to be (2024) at the Contemporary Art gallery in Vancouver, BC, and Meet me at the floe edge (2023) at Cooper Cole in Toronto, ON. Gruben was one of four circumpolar Indigenous artists longlisted for the acclaimed Sobey Art Award in 2021, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (KAMA).
“My dream is to have these beautiful caribou hooves—20 to 30 feet high—in steel,” Gruben told the IAQ in 2023. Viewers can see a version of this idea in Dance me through the herd, which features 3D-printed caribou hooves sitting on candle ice, a column-like ice form that develops at the end of spring when the sea ice melts. The forms were printed using 3D scans of hooves from the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, which Gruben cleaned by hand. Caribou hooves have scent glands, which is a way that herd members can communicate with one another as they move across the western Arctic. By arranging the hooves standing up on ice, Gruben hopes to evoke shelters, spaces meant for gathering and sharing stories and knowledge. “There are all of these conversations that we can have under the protection of these hooves,” Gruben told the IAQ. “They’re like shelters.”
The Up Front mural series began in 2022 and aims to highlight Inuit art by commissioning digital murals. Previous murals included TakKik by interdisciplinary artist Glenn Gear and Hopedale by painter, printmaker and textile artist Jessica Winters, as well as works by Kablusiak, Kyle Natkusiak Aleekuk, Robert Kautuk and Tarralik Duffy. The next mural will be by Kalaaleq and Danish artist Coco Lynge, up from January to April 2025.
Up Front is made possible with the support from the City of Toronto’s Indigenous Arts and Culture Partnership Fund and the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts.