> FUSE Magazine . volume 8 . number 3

FUSE website > www.fusemagazine.org

Art and Cold Cash seeks to discuss/explore contemporary Inuit art within a context of a politics of interpretation by southern Canadian cultural workers. It also acknowledges that in the wake of European nineteenth and twentieth century art history, art works as commodities occupy troubled ground. As a creative response to these conditions, on December 14, 2004, Art and Cold Cash collective members Ruby Arngna'naaq, Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon and William Noah sat down to talk about art and money, in a conversation that reveals radically different views of notions of monetary and artistic exchange.

This conversation is recorded in the July 2005 issue of FUSE magazine, with accompanying photographs of the Art and Cold Cash "Recycling Art Exhibition", a community event staged in Baker Lake, Nunavut in May 2005. All members of the community, young people and adults, working alone or in groups, were invited to use junk or useless materials to make forms of art that are different from more familiar art forms and processes - art that is useful or valuable in a different way, or beautiful or funny in unexpected ways.

In response to this invitation the "Recycling Art Exhibition" included fifty-eight works of art produced by artists from age fourteen to eighty-two, making use of widely diverse materials, such as styrofoam, sealskin, pop cans, spark plugs, caribou antlers and bingo daubers. An invited jury awarded cash prizes to seven successful recycling artists.

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