Consumer Goods and Cultural Roots Collide in Klik My Heels

In the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, a girl on a rural farm in Kansas dreams of being whisked off to far-off and exciting lands. Once that dream is realized, she discovers that her heart belongs not in Oz but back home.

Nunavummiut inuk artist Tarralik Duffy, from the small island town of Coral Harbour, Nunavut, now finds herself in Saskatoon, a city roughly 300 times bigger than her hometown. She deeply understands the plight of Dorothy in Oz.

“This longing to go back home took me by surprise as an adult. Because when I was younger, the last place I wanted to be was at home. I couldn’t wait to get out of Nunavut,” said Duffy.

“It’s one of those cliche things where you don’t realize what you start missing, or what you find beautiful, until you’re not around it anymore.”

Her newest exhibition, running from May until October at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, is aptly entitled Klik My Heels – a reference to Dorothy in Oz, core memories in Nunavut, and a shout to her pun-loving late father.

Her first solo exhibition in Saskatchewan features digital drawing and soft sculptures based on personal and collective cultural memories, tracing her journey from Coral Harbour to Saskatoon.

But leaving the analogy at Dorothy and Oz would be a disservice to Duffy’s work, which also incorporates ideas of consumerism, how language is understood, transformation, and being ‘colonized by condiments’.

“It’s a slow burn – you don’t realize the invasiveness of products. But they were there to help us survive. I think about this contrast – the products we have are also garbage. The things that are precious to us will pass back into the earth, but pop cans will last 500 years,” she said.

“These (consumer products) were introduced to us and now there doesn’t seem to be a way to survive without them.”

The exhibition’s title references two soft sculptures, Klik, a canned luncheon meat, and pair of kamiik (Inuktitut for ‘boots’) made from red leather.

Duffy’s late father, Ron, was a Canadian of Irish heritage, and her mother, Leonie, is Inuit – the influence of whom will both be very present in the show. Duffy said part of her exhibition is like a family portrait, with her mom’s Dororthy-like red heels and her father’s seal skin boots.

“I like this idea of that my mom is Inuk, and she’s wearing high heels, and my dad is white, and he’s wearing kamiks. It’s a homage to my parents and a recognition that I’m a mix of both, so maybe there’s that friction and tension within me.”

Duffy grew up immersed in her culture and language, around grandparents who only spoke Inuktut. She said, growing up her mind was always restless, but once she started making jewellery out of antlers, her mind became quiet and found it rewarding to create something with her hands. She started her own jewellery brand, Ugly Fish Design, where she creates pieces from natural objects like beluga bones.

She later discovered Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook, who is known for her pen and coloured pencil drawings.

“She was doing pencil crayon drawings of everyday objects, and that was the first time I was like, ‘I think I want to draw a Klik can’,” she said. “I like marketing, and I like visual contrasts of solid colours, so I started to play with those things.”

Influenced by everything around her, both natural and unnatural, including pop culture, consumer products, and her northern island home, Duffy’s art seems to often fuse these disparate worlds. Duffy’s art has drawn regular comparisons to pop-art icon Andy Warhol – a comparison she said she’s certainly not looking for but isn’t bothered by.

For Duffy, her art is more personal, and sometimes painful and both in its conceptualization and creation. She said she likes making things that are difficult, that cause a bit of a pain in the process. But, since losing her father last May, she has found a new element of grief has emerged in her work.

“Nostalgia became a double edged sword – before I missed home so much, but since losing him, I don’t want anything to do with home because he’s not there,” she said. “With art, you have to be submerged in it, and it was the last place I wanted to be. I’ll stay in Oz, forget Kansas. Leave me with the munchkins and the flying monkeys.”

And while Klik My Heels is a reflection of the beauty of her home in the North, she said it’s also a love letter to her second home of Saskatoon. Two worlds that Dorothy is learning to merge.

“There really is no place like home. That longing is always with me. But Saskatoon is home as well – I call it my home sweet second-home,” said Duffy. “So maybe both places can be a little bit of Kansas and a little bit of Oz.”