Glenn Gear

Glenn Gear is an artist from Newfoundland now based in Montreal, QC. He is an animator, filmmaker and visual artist. Gear finds inspiration by exploring his identity as an urban Inuk with ancestral ties to Nunatsiavut [1]. He frequently creates animated short films related to these explorations. His current work centres on individual and collective history, exchange between Indigenous and settler populations, folklore, gender and archival material [2].

Gear has worked in animation, video, drawing, collage and installation, often employing experimental techniques in both digital and analog forms, which he utilizes to create a dreamlike quality in his shorts [3]. Gear’s 2016 animated short Kablunât: Legend of the Origin of the White People (2016) has screened around the country and received critical acclaim and draws from a Nunatsiavut legend recorded by a Moravian Missionary. Gear makes use of archival photographs collected over nine years to reinterpret a legend for a contemporary Inuit audience while framing the story as a reclamation from colonial retellings [4]. His animations have also been featured in the documentary The Fifth Region (2018), as well as in Ever Deadly (2022), a feature-length documentary showcasing the life and work of acclaimed throat singer Tanya Tagaq, CM.

At Gear’s 2016 residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Gear expanded his practice to include installations. He created a piece composed of two opposing murals, representing the city and wilderness, that met on a third wall where his own footage from Nunatsiavut was projected [5]. Gear has continued to build on this approach in projects such as Iluani/Silami (it's full of stars) for Qaumajuq’s inaugural exhibition INUA, which opened in spring 2021. 

Gear is also a graphic designer and has been a key collaborator and artistic lead in production of educational videos, web design, video games and graphic user interfaces [6], and he is known for sharing his expertise in these fields through mentorship, including during his tenure as the 2020-21 Artist-in-Residence with Inuit Futures [7]. For Gear, using contemporary technologies can be a vital way of engaging with Indigenous vitality and resilience. “I think a lot of outsiders do not see Indigenous cultures as dynamic,” he says, “but rather something that’s fixed in time and place and behind museum glass. Whereas, for a lot of Inuit, I think we really see the ways in which we are interwoven with new and emerging technologies.” [8]

Gear’s films have screened across Canada and throughout the world. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Memorial University and a Masters of Fine Art in Sculpture and Installation from Concordia University. In 2021, he was Longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. 

In February 2023 Gear was longlisted for the 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award.