Edited by Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon and Ruby Arngna’naa
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Art and Cold Cash–a multi-layered, creative investigation that took place from 2004 to 2007–connected contemporary art to discourses surrounding money in a series of artistic activities 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 artists William Noah, two Inuit members of the 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 for exhibitions in galleries and airports in the north, and in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Barrie, Ontario. Art and Cold Cash features documentation of those activites and artworks, and includes essays by the collective members and other commentators, including Norman Vorano (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa), Smaro Kamboureli (Canadian Research Chair, University of Guelph), David Liss (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto), and J.J. Kegan McFadden (PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg). Central to the volume is a series of fascinating interviews, in English and Inuktitut, where eight Baker Lake residents, some of whom are artists, recall their poignant first engagements with capitalist exchange in response to the query, ìDo you remember when you first used money?