Q&A: Inuk artist Glenn Gear explains his latest work on display at The Rooms

Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer, multidisciplinary filmmaker and artist originally from Corner Brook. 

He finds inspiration by exploring his identity as an urban Inuk with ancestral ties to Nunatsiavut. 

Gear's newest installation, Ivaluk Ullugiallu-Sinew and Stars, is on display at The Rooms until Jan. 21. 

He sat down with CBC Radio's The Signal to chat about how his culture informs his art practice.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How does the Inuit culture impact your art?

A: Well, talk about the big questions right out of the gate!

I think growing up, even though I didn't have a direct connection to Inuit culture, it was always there in my environment through soapstone carvings or little figures that were made from seal skin or stories that were told within the family.

As I got older I explored more of my genealogy and understood my father's past. My father is Inuk from Adlatok Bay. I began to realize that there's a cultural breakage there, and there are systemic ways that those breakages kind of happen, like through the residential school system and systemic racism. I guess I always knew that there was more and there was a lot of family, a lot of culture, a lot of deep roots in Labrador and a lot that I had to explore as I got older.

You work with many different mediums. What's your favourite artistic practice?

Oh my goodness. I am not sure if I have a favourite type of art or artistic practice, but I do love to make things that are often very big such as murals and video projections on large walls. But I also love to do things that are more intimate and maybe more tactile, like beadwork with sewing and seal skin. So I feel like my practice is very materials based.

But it's also very much about experimental animation, video projection and kind of understanding and creating those spaces in between. So I think the art that I most like is art where there's a dialogue between those different mediums, if that makes sense.

Can you tell me about your installation that you're currently working on now at The Rooms?

The installation that I'm doing is probably the largest mural that I've done to date. It's called the Ivaluk Ullugiallu. I'm just learning the language now and learning the dialect from Labrador.