Onsite Gallery in Toronto, ON, is kicking off 2025 with a new mural from the Up Front: Inuit Public Art series, presented in partnership between OCAD and the Inuit Art Foundation. The eighth mural in the series—Maliina (2024) by multidisciplinary Kalaaleq Inuk and Danish artist Coco A. Lynge—will be up until April 2025.
Maliina is a digital illustration that combines different versions of the Inuit circumpolar origin story of the sun and moon. In all versions of the story, the sun and moon are sister and brother. Lynge centred this piece on Maliina, the sister, depicted in the mural as a woman who personifies the sun. The warm colours of her skin combined with the inky blue of her loose hair give viewers a sense of daylight and nighttime. The kayak in this mural represents the version of the story where the moon was lured into a kayak and cast into the water. The loons represent another version where a loon restores the moon’s sight by licking his face and eyes.
Lynge is a digital illustrator and designer originally from Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works across graphic design, fashion, illustration and character design for video games. Her work is inspired by her Inuit heritage and identity and is often characterized by vibrant colours and imaginative figures and scenes. Her pieces have been featured in several exhibitions, including Kusanartuliat (2022) at Kunsthal Nord in Aalborg, Denmark, and Qiaqsutuq (2023) in Halifax, NS. In 2024, she won a gold medal for Multicultural Fiction — Juvenile/Young Adult at the Independent Publisher Book Awards for illustrating the children’s book Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide (2023).
Since beginning in 2022, Up Front has featured digital murals by artists Maureen Gruben, Glenn Gear, Jessica Winters, Kablusiak, Kyle Natkusiak Aleekuk, Robert Kautuk and Tarralik Duffy.
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.