Tarralik Duffy: Klik My Heels

On May 24, Remai Modern opens the first solo Saskatchewan exhibition by multidisciplinary artist, writer, and designer Tarralik Duffy. Klik My Heels features recent digital drawings and soft sculptures that evoke personal and collective cultural memories, tracing her journey from Salliq (Coral Harbour), NU, to Saskatoon, SK, where she now lives.

Moving between North and South, past and present, Duffy reveals how culture is carried forward—not only through what is preserved, but through what is adapted, reimagined, and shared. Many of her works emerge through acts of visiting, shaped by stories, laughter, and wisdom passed between generations—exchanges that continue to inspire her practice.

The exhibition’s title brings together two soft sculptures: Klik (2023)—the canned luncheon meat familiar across the North—and Ruby Red Kamiks (2025), a pair of red leather kamiik (Inuit boots) inspired by her mother’s high heels and her father’s traditional footwear. Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, they symbolize transformation, inner strength, and the idea of carrying home with you wherever you go.

Duffy’s work belongs to a lineage of Inuit artists who have long portrayed the everyday. In Klik My Heels, she reimagines northern staples—flour, tea, canned milk—as icons of Inuit pop culture, infused with memory, humour, and contradiction. “We’ve been colonized by condiments,” she often jokes, referencing the southern goods that reshaped northern diets, economies, and daily life. Her approach echoes how 20th-century pop artists celebrated and critiqued American consumer culture through mass-produced items. Yet, unlike the broadly shared assumptions of that movement, Duffy’s works carry specific personal, cultural, and historical meanings.

Expanding on themes of home, family, and cultural knowledge, the exhibition also highlights works that reflect shared histories. One example is an image of a Robin Hood Flour bag, which pays homage to the mill in Saskatoon while replacing the words “All Purpose” with “Palaugaaq,” the Inuktitut word for bannock. Introduced alongside the displacement of Inuit from their lands and food sources, wheat flour became part of a complex colonial history. Over generations, however, palaugaaq has been lovingly prepared and shared, with recipes celebrated as sources of pride and cultural connection. This foundational food connects Indigenous communities from the prairies to the tundra, mirroring how the exhibition at Remai Modern bridges Duffy’s two homes of Salliq and Saskatoon.

Tarralik Duffy is the recipient of the 2021 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award and is on the longlist for the 2025 Sobey Art Award. Her work has recently been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; SAW Nordic Lab, Ottawa; and the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq. An accomplished writer, her Inuit Art Quarterly essay on artist Jutai Toonoo was included in Best Canadian Essays 2019. She also received the Sally Manning Award in 2014 for her story “Don’t Cry Over Spilled Beads.” Through her jewellery label Ugly Fish, Duffy uses natural materials to craft designs exhibited across Canada and Europe, including at Paris Fashion Week.

Klik My Heels is curated by Tarah Hogue, Adjunct Curator (Indigenous Art) at Remai Modern. It runs from May 24 to October 12, 2025, in the museum’s Connect Gallery.