Glenn Gear

tillitâk | pulse is a ten-year retrospective of Glenn Gear’s multidisciplinary art practice.

Presented in his hometown and alma mater (BFA, Visual Arts, 1992) for the first time, Gear’s experience as an Indigiqueer Inuk Newfoundlander, rings through the gallery through light, symmetry, material, and the imaginary.

Over the past thirty years, Gear has built his life and career in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, QC), looking homeward to Nunatsiavut (Northern Labrador) and Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands, NL) for imagery, language, and connection. Projections of place alongside material practice take over the gallery - literally, figuratively, and conceptually.

How do you connect to homeland when you are not there? Gear reminds us that the limits we perceive — in how we remember or envision — are themselves imaginary. Homeland can be both a physical place and an embodied knowledge we take with us.

The works in tillitâk | pulse are more than depictions, together they form a chorus, a breath, a heartbeat for home.

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Glenn Gear (b.1970) is originally from Nunatsiavut and Newfoundland, and currently lives and works in Montreal. An animator, filmmaker and visual Indigiqueer artist, Gear finds inspiration by exploring his identity as an urban Inuk with ancestral ties to Nunatsiavut. He frequently creates animated short films related to these explorations. His current work centres on individual and collective history, exchange between Indigenous and settler populations, folklore, gender and archival material.

A graduate of Memorial University and Concordia University, he is known for his work Kablunât (2016) and for his series “Kimutsik” (2019-). His work has notably been presented at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq, Bonavista Biennale, Nuit Blanche Toronto and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre. Gear was shortlisted for both the 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award and the 2021 Sobey Art Award.