At the Capture Photography Festival, Lindsay McIntyre's Tuktuit illuminates lost links to ancestral knowledge and natural world, to September 7
The filmmaker responds to colonial and industrial pressures with handcrafted practices that call out to her Inuit heritage
Lindsay McIntyre’s Tuktuit (still). Photo courtesy of the artist
Lindsay McIntyre: Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events is at the Contemporary Art Gallery from April 4 to September 7 as part of the Capture Photography Festival
ARTIST, SUBJECT, AND medium merge in fascinating ways in filmmaker Lindsay McIntyre’s provocative new experimental work Tuktuit. Standing at the centre of her solo exhibition Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events, which runs until September 7 as part of this year’s city-wide Capture Photography Festival, the resonant piece incorporates McIntyre’s practice of creating and processing the emulsions of her 16mm film stock by hand, allowing the tone and texture of her images to shift with changes in temperature, humidity, and other surrounding factors.
This process is central to Tuktuit, the artist’s intricate meditation on the skills and knowledge of her Inuit great-grandmother, and on the land and caribou that once fed her family in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake, Nunavut). Images waver and fade with irregularities in the handmade celluloid, created partly from caribou gelatin (instead of the cow gelatin used in industrially manufactured film). With Tuktuit’s still shots of landscape and the lichen that is the caribou’s primary food source, this instability evokes shifts in the northern ecosystem under the pressures of climate change, as warming and rapid freeze-thaw-freeze events disrupt ancient food chains.
Along with these images is footage of McIntyre herself, trying to process a caribou skin into rawhide without the expertise of her great-grandmother, whose presence on the land was removed in the 1930s by colonial edict—another broken chain. The tattered result of McIntyre’s efforts—a hide riddled with holes from her inexperienced scraping—hangs in front of the projection screen, one more strand in Tuktuit’s unsettling web of allusions.
Each connection opens paths to others, creating a uniquely powerful reflection on the fragility of natural and cultural networks and the stakes involved in their destruction. 
Lindsay McIntyre’s Tuktuit (still). Photo courtesy of the artist
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