Inupiaq Artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs Showcasing Goodbye Exhibit at Yukon Arts Centre Later This Month

Thursday, 2 May 2019 12:01

Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Photo courtesy of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation)

Alaskan Artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs is asking the public to loan any mittens and gloves they might have for her upcoming "Goodbye" art exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre later this month.

Alaskan Artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs is asking the public to loan any mittens and gloves they might have for her upcoming "Goodbye" art exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre.

The display runs run May 30th through to August 24th, and aims to foster more dialogue and understanding towards suicide in Indigenous communities in the North.

Combs says one of the exhibit's goals is to transform physical objects into real living things.

"It's being able to go into a collection and creating an exhibit from the objects there. In the past, most people just selected objects that for some reason spoke to them, but I wanted to install these pieces to create a commentary. In particular, one of these pieces was called "Goodbye", and that's the piece with the mitten poems."

Combs, an artist of Inupiaq descent herself along the North Slope of Alaska, says mittens were chosen for this installation due to the shared symbolic value they hold to everyone.

"All of the mittens that I used in the first iteration of this series were in a collection and some have been documented really well of where they came from, others have not. I like the idea that it can be a very personal and individual thing or also a communal thing. Maybe we don't know these peoples names, but we're all connected to it. They are literally in a position of waving goodbye when you walk into the installation."

Combs says her over 15 years of art curation and installation in museums is comprised of materials used from Indigenous subsistence hunting.

"I've been doing all kinds of work, including installation-curational work, mixed-media paintings and sculptures. I do a lot of soft sculptures and a mixture of synthetic media and more natural material. That includes things like walrus stomach, cariboo and moose fur, and all the things that we harvest from the land. I use a lot of material from our subsistence activities."

Anyone willing to lend their mittens for the duration of the exhibit can contact Brad Shaw at Yukon College.

Combs has a Bachelors Degree from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and is a recipient of the Anchorage Cultural Council's Mayor's Award for the Arts.