Along with his friend and colleague John Pangnark, Andy Miki is considered to be one of the great “Minimalist” Inuit sculptors. The two Arviat artists – with Pangnark devoted to portraying the human figure and Miki focusing on animal subjects – clearly shared a similar aesthetic sensibility. Many of their works exhibit a similar purity of form, with details largely stripped away. At their most abstract, Pangnark’s sculptures are almost unrecognizable as human figures. Miki’s works tend to retain their distinctly animal form, even if viewers often struggle to identify species. This, of course, is part of their great charm.
Andy Miki began fashioning skin-covered wood model kayaks to trade to qallunaat visitors when he was still living at Ennadai Lake in the 1950s, but it’s likely that he only began carving animal figures after his evacuation to Eskimo Point (now Arviat) and Rankin Inlet in 1959. Being a great admirer of Miki’s work from his later Whale Cove and Arviat years, I have often wondered what his very earliest carvings might have looked like. I guess I assumed that Miki did not hit the ground running as a minimalist artist, but I wasn’t sure. Imagine my thrill when I was shown his remarkable figure of a Dog a few months ago (Lot 85). I had been immediately struck by the figure’s head: its overall shape, but especially the trademark eyes and mouth. I looked at the consignor and said, “could it be…?” He smiled and told me to look at the signature. This little gem is the ur-Miki I had been waiting for these forty-odd years.
The unsurprising fact is that Andy Miki did not start out as a radical minimalist artist. Furthermore (just like Pangnark), Miki never was one all of the time in any case. The other two splendid examples by him in this Fall’s collection attest to this fact. Caribou (Lot 86) is instantly recognizable as such, even if the shape of the stone figure itself gives us no clue. The unusual thing is that Miki does give us a very clear clue, in the form of the antlers. For once, the artist’s playful sense of whimsy points towards and not away from realism. Delightful. Miki’s Animal Plaque (Lot 114) immediately stands out for having been carved in antler and not stone, but in the end, it is the sculpture’s almost precise realism and its elegance that are its most striking features. I wonder if Miki might have been briefly influenced by the work of his Arviat colleague Jacob Irkok, who began carving gorgeous and realistic antler animals in the 1960s (see Standing Caribou, Lot 158).
It is completely serendipitous that all three works by Andy Miki in this collection are distinguished by their degree of “realism” rather than “minimalism.” (Serendipity is one of the delights of being in this business.) There’s also a lesson here. Perhaps we shouldn’t pigeon-hole artists as much as we tend to do. I like to think of myself as having an open mind in these matters, but I guess there’s always room for expansion!
I hope you will enjoy these little marvels as much as I do.
Ingo Hessel
Andy Miki and his family were removed from inland Kitigaq (Ennadai Lake) to Arviat in 1959. They soon resettled in Rankin Inlet for a time (where he began carving) before moving on to Whale Cove in the mid 1960s and finally back to Arviat in 1969. Miki’s early carvings are generally dated to his Whale Cove years, but we are quite certain that this remarkable and incredibly charming Dog dates from at least as early as his stay in Rankin Inlet (or possibly even from his first stint in Arviat), making it perhaps his very earliest documented carving. The presentation on a base suggests that Miki was still learning how to make sculpture. Dog has the naturalism of Miki’s later Whale Cove works yet hardly any degree of stylization or abstraction – apart from the head with its trademark eyes. Exciting!
LOT 86
ANDY MIKI (1918-1983), ARVIAT (ESKIMO POINT) / TIKIRAQJUAQ (WHALE COVE),
Caribou, c. 1975
stone and antler, 3.75 x 5 x 1.25 in (9.5 x 12.7 x 3.2 cm)
ESTIMATE: $3,000 - $5,000
The great majority of Andy Miki’s sculptures were carved in stone, with relatively few made from caribou antler (see Lot 114 for a wonderful example). Even rarer are works combining the two materials. This marvelous and endearing Caribou from c. 1975 seems to us to be a reprise of Miki’s impressive Caribou Head from about a decade earlier, in the Vancouver Art Gallery collection. [1] Though considerably smaller than that sculpture, it feels more robust and looks more rugged in form and execution. Also, Caribou is not a “tabletop” sculpture but begs to be held on one’s hand. It leaves no guesswork as to the type of animal it portrays (unlike so many of Miki’s highly abstracted creations). The charmingly rudimentary antlers are, of course, a dead giveaway.
1. See Norman Zepp, Pure Vision (1986), cat. 4, pp. 34, 65; also illustrated in Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture/Inuit (1971), cat. 147.
ANDY MIKI (1918-1983), ARVIAT (ESKIMO POINT) / TIKIRAQJUAQ (WHALE COVE),
Animal Plaque, c. 1969,
antler and twine, 5.5 x 11.25 x 0.75 in (14 x 28.6 x 1.9 cm), dimensions reflect those of the figure only
ESTIMATE: $4,000 - $6,000
The great Arviat minimalist sculptor Andy Miki almost always carved in stone. His occasional antler figures are mostly quite rudimentary, made from cylindrical sections of the material. Exceptional, however, is a small handful of animal “plaques” that Miki fashioned from larger, flat pieces of caribou antler known as brow tines. Of the three examples we know of, Wolf Plaque from the Winnipeg Art Gallery collection is as large as our example and equally fine. (It, and a similar Animal Plaque in stone, are illustrated in Norman Zepp’s Pure Vision catalogue, cats. 10 and 11.) The third antler work, sold at Walker’s Auctions in Nov. 2017 (Lot 38), is a smaller, charming work. We suspect that it, and our superb specimen, depict foxes rather than wolves – but that, as with the identification of so many Miki animal figures, is open to debate! Remarkably, all these plaques are carved as “pendants”; whether they were made to hang on a wall or float freely like mobiles is also open to discussion. Notably, none of the four plaques is carved with the characteristic eyes we associate with Miki’s work (which makes us wonder about a possible spiritual interpretation). They really do seem to constitute a separate class of artistic object. Fantastic.