Jamasee Padluq Pitseolak, The Day After, 2010

The Student, 2010, operates as a brutal counterpoint. Here, the violence is immediate. A bathtub intervenes as a domestic and vulnerable space, but within it, the child is exposed and dominated by an adult presence. The asymmetrical scale, the harsh stabs of diagonal slashes, and the unsettling colour contrast between a pallid red and a garish green intensify the moral imbalance. The adult figure, fully coloured in green, appears monstrous in posture and gesture. The child, smaller and seated, becomes the vulnerable site of the image’s tension. In The Student, Pitseolak makes visible the predatory proximity of that institutional authority.

The works function as a pair: The Student anchors the violence in corporeal immediacy, while The Day After opens the aperture into its psychological residue. They act as interlocking sites of memory and resistance, each transforming trauma into a fragmentary but potent visual testimony. The pairing invites viewers to shift between moment and memory, between trauma’s immediate wound and its lasting echo. Pitseolak’s decision to work on paper, using etching and painted drypoint, further distances him from more representational forms of narrative, allowing his scenes to register as memory spaces rather than re-enactments.

Pitseolak has emphasized that these works were made for himself and were not directed to external viewers. This decision confers agency over disclosure: he shapes what is revealed, what is held back, and how the gaze is negotiated. The aesthetic choices of fragmentation, abstraction, and restraint are part of an ethics of witnessing, one that resists turning trauma into commodity or spectacle. It is an insistence that even silenced stories deserve to be seen—but on their own terms.

These works also implicate the viewer. The blank spaces, the slashes, and the distortions require interpretive labour. The viewer must pause, sense the rupture, confront discomfort, and bear responsibility. The figures are not legible in full; we see the residue, not the full event. It is a refusal of closure—a reminder that trauma remains alive, that reconciliation cannot efface memory, and that witnessing must persist. In this way, Pitseolak asserts a sovereignty of memory: his own, but nonetheless communal, calling us into a shared responsibility of remembrance. In doing so, he rejects spectacle and voyeurism, opting for careful allusion, rupture, and silence as his tools of disclosure.