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Call it the New North. Yes, there are Inuit who still take part in the seal hunt, but there are others who simply watch it on television.

Yet traditional imagery – think Arctic wildlife and mythological creatures – continues to dominate the work of many Inuit artists. This is, after all, what sells. But in the small arts-producing town of Cape Dorset, a younger generation of artists is pushing past that legacy, reflecting the modern realities of the north – realities that aren't always pretty.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa reveals just how much Inuit art and life has changed.

“[Cape Dorset] was nothing at first: a Hudson's Bay trading post, the co-op and a church,” says Leslie Boyd Ryan, the director of Dorset Fine Arts who also lived in the region for more than a decade.

“ The kind of system that developed in the sixties and seventies – that insisted on the fact that Inuit art was separate from the Canadian canon of art – I don't think that served Inuit artists well.”

The Inuit-run art co-op was incorporated in 1959 with help from the federal government to foster and sell Inuit art. Local artists were either employees of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, or used studio space and materials, and were paid for their artwork. Their first drawings were primarily expressions of traditional culture; and many of them were incorporated into an experimental collection of limited-edition prints released in Stratford, Ont., in October, 1959.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the co-op, and of that first batch of prints, which came to represent the face of Canadian Inuit art. Since then, Kinngait artists (Kinngait is what the locals call Cape Dorset) have produced more than 100,000 original drawings and thousands more limited-edition prints.

Today, Cape Dorset is part of what Boyd Ryan calls the New North. “There's been every kind of change you can imagine,” she says. “It's now a modern community. It has satellite TV, broadband Internet and 21/2 schools. It's growing all the time.”

Ningeokuluk Teevee: Arctic Appetizer, 2009

“[Young artists] are not as isolated as they used to be,” says Boyd Ryan. “Their expressions of reality are very different than their grandparents' reality, and that obviously began to inform their work.”

It was Annie Pootoogook, daughter of the late Napatchie Pootoogook, granddaughter of the late Pitseolak Ashoona – both accomplished artists – who made, Boyd Ryan says, “the first crossover” from Inuit to contemporary art.

Pootoogook's work was highly influenced by that of her mother and grandmother, but it was also a marked departure: She chronicled her experiences, both good and bad, matter-of-factly, and did so on paper sizes and shapes not typically used by Kinngait artists. Some were large-format – later works spanned more than 14 feet – and she used a range of materials from oil stick to watercolour to graphite.

“People were fascinated that she drew the dark side of community life,” Boyd Ryan says.

In one piece, Memory of My Life: Breaking Bottles , Pootoogook is smashing bottles of liquor outside a home. Other pieces have equally deadpan titles – Man Abusing His Partner ; Lover's Embrace ; Watching Jerry Springer ; Watching Seal Hunting on Television – their content juxtaposing memory and current events, mundane routines and complex social and psychological issues, traditional Inuit food and frozen dinners. Pootoogook's work documented a culture in flux.

“Annie was the first Inuit artist who said, ‘I don't care if it sells or not, I'm just doing what I need to do,'” notes Patricia Feheley, director of Toronto's Feheley Fine Arts, a contemporary art gallery specializing in Inuit art. Feheley gave Pootoogook, now 40, her first solo show.

Breaking with tradition was not an easy decision to make in Cape Dorset, especially when your craft is your livelihood, and when those who buy it have expectations about how that craft should look.

“The kind of system that developed in the sixties and seventies – that insisted on the fact that Inuit art was separate from the Canadian canon of art – I don't think that served Inuit artists well,” says Boyd Ryan. For all Dorset Fine Arts's successful marketing, it had, in a way, pigeonholed Inuit art.

But that did not discourage Pootoogook. In 2006, she had an unexpected, meteoric rise to contemporary art stardom, thanks to a major solo exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto and winning the $50,000 Sobey Art Award.

Then in 2007, she exhibited at the Montreal Biennale, the Basel Art Fair and was the first Inuit artist to take part in Documenta 12, held in Kassel, Germany. Pootoogook's work was widely admired in the contemporary art scene for what it was, “but also for the new direction she was going in as an Inuit artist,” Boyd Ryan says.

Pootoogook: Joyfully I See Ten Caribou, 1959

This year, in addition to her works showing at the AGO and the National Gallery, Pootoogook has a travelling solo exhibition, now in New York at the Museum of the American Indian through Jan. 10.

“The explosion in her art led to a new crop of collectors, many of whom had never paid attention to Inuit art before,” Feheley says.

Barry Appleton, managing partner of Appleton & Associates International Lawyers, had been collecting Inuit art for 26 years until he tired of it. “[Inuit art] was shackled by traditional motifs and restrained in its cultural approach,” he says. “But once I started seeing what looked like a really contemporary approach, I was very excited and returned to it. While the primitiveness, the lines and symbolism, the organic achievement is what appealed to me initially, a return to that concept but with new ways of speaking it was something I'd never seen before.” Appleton now owns hundreds of pieces by contemporary Inuit artists.

In addition to attracting new collectors, Pootoogook's explorations inspired other artists such as Shuvinai Ashoona, Tim Pitseolak and Jutai Toonoo (who also works in sculpture), all of whom have pieces in the National Gallery exhibition.

Pootoogook's freedom with imagery, says Feheley, meant other artists realized that “we don't have to keep doing birds, or whatever. We can do what we feel.”

And yet there will always be people who will be attracted to traditional Inuit art. “It's easy, it's very approachable and culturally related,” Feheley notes. “But if it wasn't evolving, it would simply die out.”

Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset Celebrates 50 Years of Printmaking runs until Jan. 17 at the National Gallery in Ottawa.

Special to The Globe & Mail