Sugar Rush: Conversations on Contemporary Inuit Life

"The best part about art?" Tarralik Duffy says with a smile. "It's not up to me. It's up to the viewer. Whatever grabs them, that's their choice. My job is to make the work, and then my job is done."

There are no instructions waiting inside Sugar Rush. No prescribed lesson and no demand that visitors leave with a particular opinion. Instead, Duffy offers something much more generous: an invitation to look a little closer.

At first, the exhibition feels almost playful.

Brightly coloured sculptures inspired by familiar grocery store products fill the Kelowna Art Gallery. A can of Klik, bags of sugar, pop. Everyday objects transformed into oversized textile works that are soft, humorous and instantly approachable. Visitors smile because they recognize them and for many Inuit visitors, they recognize something even deeper.

"There's a heavy sense of nostalgia for me," Duffy says. "There are pieces that are instantly recognizable to people who grew up in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories. Everything changes—even the products. There's a certain era of those products that I remember."

Memory, she reminds us, isn't only preserved in photographs. Sometimes it lives in packaging.

The longer the conversation continues, the more it becomes clear that Sugar Rush is not really about grocery products at all, it is about the stories we attach to them.

When asked what she hopes visitors unfamiliar with Inuit culture might take away from the exhibition, Duffy doesn't begin by talking about tradition or history. She talks about stopping for snacks.

"Before we go out on the land, we pick up some pop, some chips, some chocolate before we go hunting or before we go driving up the road," she says matter-of-factly.

Then she laughs.

"Maybe people think we're just dog sledding or spearing seals."

It is a funny observation but also a profound one. For many Canadians, Inuit life exists most vividly in history books, documentaries and black and white photographs from another era. The images are familiar: snow, sleds, seal hunting, survival on the land.

All true but not the complete story.

"People don't always see the Inuit people that are here now," Duffy says. "The ones buying a pop can at the store."

Those ordinary moments depicted in the gallery become quietly revolutionary. Not because they replace tradition but because they refuse the idea that Indigenous identity belongs only in the past.

Later, almost in passing, Duffy says something that lingers long after the conversation moves on.

"We're here. We're modern."

The exhibition also asks visitors to examine assumptions many of us have inherited without realizing it.

Duffy recalls her grandmother asking for advance warning before white visitors came to the house.

Sometimes she would be preparing country food or skinning foxes and she knew people might feel uncomfortable.

"I would have to warn her before I brought a white person over," Duffy recalls. "Sometimes she'd be preparing meat, and they would get squeamish and judgy."

Then she gestures back toward the objects that inspired the exhibition - a can of processed meat. Factory-produced, wrapped in metal and mass manufactured.

"This is literally pulverized pork in a can," she says.

Why, she wonders, does one form of food become accepted as civilized while another is dismissed as primitive? The question hangs in the air. She never answers it and she really doesn't need to.

Throughout our conversation, Duffy returns again and again to contradiction.

Consumer culture, she says, arrived carrying promises of convenience and progress. Yet it also brought mountains of waste.

"Consumerism was the disease in a way," she reflects. "But it was sold as this thing that was so good."

For generations, Inuit hunting practices were criticized as cruel or uncivilized. Yet those same practices existed within systems built on respect—for the animal, for the land and for taking only what was needed.

"Inuit were criticized for killing a whale," she says. "And yet the footprint left on the earth is almost zero. Then these products are sold to us in shiny packages, and somehow that's considered the better way of life. But look at the footprint that's left on the earth."

Again, she isn't asking anyone to romanticize the past, she is asking us to look more honestly at the present. For all the difficult questions Sugar Rush raises, it never loses its sense of joy. Duffy laughs often. She jokes about her father's love of puns and about sugar rushes from childhood snacks.

"A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down," she says "I love comedy. You can't just beat people over the head with things. I don't like everything to be so serious all the time."

Perhaps that is what makes Sugar Rush so effective, it doesn't arrive pointing a finger. It starts with humour and nostalgia. Only later do visitors realize they have begun questioning ideas they may have carried for years. It's the subtle message wrapped in bright coloured packaging - gently replaces familiar stereotypes with something far more powerful.

Ordinary life, families, road trips, jokes, pop, chocolate, art.

The everyday moments that remind us Inuit life is not frozen in history, nor confined to the stories many Canadians have inherited.

It is living - modern living, changing, adapting - and, as Tarralik Duffy quietly reminds us,

it is here.

Visiting Sugar Rush

Sugar Rush is on view at the Kelowna Art Gallery through October 4, 2026. Through large-scale textile sculptures and familiar consumer objects, Tarralik Duffy invites visitors into a conversation that begins with nostalgia but reaches far beyond it—asking us to reconsider not only what we consume, but the stories we continue to tell about one another.

Photos courtesy of the Kelowna Art Gallery

Story by Mide Coker