Art and Cold Cash Collective | Visual Art | Inuit Art | Exhibitions | Economics
 
Ruby Arngna'naaq
Jack Butler
Sheila Butler
Patrick Mahon
William Noah
 
Art and Cold Cash--a multi-layered, creative investigation that took place from 2004-2008--connected contemporary art to discourses surrounding money in a series of artistic activites and experiments located in northern and southern Canada. Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, and Patrick Mahon, three contemporary artists whose practices are normally situated in southern Canada and internationally, worked on the project in collaboration with writer Ruby Arngna'naaq and artist William Noah, two Inuit members of teh Art and Cold cash Collective who lived through the change from a barter economy to capitalism in Baker Lake, Nunavut, during the twentieth century.
 
This book is a compelling document of a groundbreaking project that involved storytelling, interviews, community-based art practice, drawings, sculpture, and videos produced fro exhibitions in galleries and airports in the north and in Toronto (ON), Winnipeg (MB), and Barrie (ON). Art and Cold Cash features documentation of those activities and artworks, and includes essays by the collective members and other commentators, including Norman Vorano (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa), Smaro Kamboureli (Canada Research Chair, University of Guelph), David Liss (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto), and J.J. Kegan McFadden (PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg). Central to the volume is a series of fascinating interviews, in English and Inuktitut, where, in answer to the query "Do you remember when you first used money?" eight Baker Lake residents, some of whom are artists, recall their poignant first engagements with capitalist exchange.