Inuvialuit artist connects Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway with Arctic landscape | CBC News

That’s the name and the motivation for Gruben’s first major public installation and it brings her experience of modern Inuvialuit life to a skating trail on The Bentway — a public space that winds its way around the concrete supports of the Gardiner.

“It’s the idea of being out on the land and how much joy it brings you, because sleds are such an integral part of Inuit life and they always have been for generations,” she told Lawrence Nayally, the host of CBC’s Trail’s End.

Moving with Joy expands on an outdoor art installation Gruben created in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T. in 2019, using 14 borrowed traditional sleds. The hand built wooden sleds had been used and repaired for many years by local families.  

“I stood them upright like people and they’re all standing together, so they represent community,” she said.  

“That’s what I wanted to bring … how much joy you feel when you’re moving over the land and going to your favourite places.” 

The big-city version of the project uses large stylized fabrications that echo Gruben’s original sleds. 

They display videos and images from Gruben’s family life in Tuktoyaktuk — slices of Inuvialuit culture and daily living — celebrating the way people meet and visit when they are out on the land fishing or hunting.  

“We run into my cousin Sheila, who had just plucked a goose and she had a beautiful bright red handbag beside her, sitting on a chair with her gun, and fishing at the same time,” she said. 

“You know, those sort of images like feathers caught in the bush that are moving in the wind? Just little clips of the Arctic environment.”

Another part of the installation is called Annivik and involves photos Gruben took at the landfill in Tuktoyaktuk, combined with poetry. 

The poems were based on recorded stories from Inuvialuit elders, which were given to her by former N.W.T. premier Nellie Cournoyea.

“I kind of put verses together more like poetry and superimposed them onto the image just to show the difference of our life today and our contemporary world and how clean and resourceful our ancestors were,” she said. 

Kyra Kordoski is an art writer who works with Gruben and comes up to Tuktoyaktuk regularly.  

She says Moving with Joy brings together two contrasting environments — the concrete world of the city, with the landscape around Gruben’s home community. 

“You have the vehicles moving above you on the Gardiner, you have the video of the sleds crossing the land with the skaters. There’s movement, there’s a joy,” she said. 

She says she believes people in southern Canada are more familiar with the eastern Arctic, and having Gruben’s work, in such a high traffic, public space, is significant. 

“Inuvialuit culture is its own beautiful, distinct thing. And so it’s great just for people to kind of understand that there is a diversity of cultures in the North.”

Kordoski says this installation is a big step forward for Gruben as an artist, especially one based in a remote community. 

“She’s had work in urban galleries before, but this is a very wide section of the public that is going to have access to the work, I think in a really meaningful way.” 

Gruben says she never really imagined her work making its way to a busy public space in Toronto, “it just kind of took on its own trajectory.” 

While she’s happy to see her work get this exposure, Gruben says she’s just doing what she does, making her art. 

“For me, it’s educational and it brings awareness to the Arctic. It’s not about me … I think bringing awareness to the larger public is what’s important,” she said.