B: 1991

Iqaluit, NU

Ooloosie Saila is an emerging artist working out of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut Territory. She comes from an artistic family: among other connections, she is the granddaughter of sculptor and graphic artist Patua Saila (1916 - 2009), and sister of graphic artist Susie Seeta Saila (b. 1998). As a child, Saila was inspired to draw through occasional visits to the home of Kenojuak Ashevak. At age 14, she won first prize at her high school drawing contest, joining the Kinngait Arts Co-Op (AKA, the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative) at the age of 24.

Saila’s drawings combine both recognizable animal and landscape forms with abstract visual elements including patterns, marks and gestures. The squiggles, stripes and dots in her compositions imply texture and movement with a controlled mix of expressive spontaneity and lucid compositional control. Her inventive use of positive and negative space to communicate setting and atmosphere with a minimum of means, contributing to an overall sense of play in storytelling.

Saila’s drawing Owl was translated into a print for the Dorset Fine Arts Annual Print collection in 2017. Her work was included in Art Toronto in 2017, during which one of her drawings was acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Following this success, she was included in the Art on Paper fair in New York in 2018, and her work was featured in the Summer 2018 issue of the Inuit Art Quarterly.

Since that time, Saila’s has continued to exhibit on a national and international basis; her work is in the collections at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal in Montreal, QC and Capital One in Toronto, ON, as well as several prominent private collections.

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