ART CITIES:Montreal- Sonny Assu
Sonny Assu has been raised as an everyday average suburban white-kid by his grandparents, it wasn’t until he was eight years old that he discovered his Kwakwaka’wakw* heritage. Later in his life, this discovery would be the conceptual focal point of his work. He studied painting at Kwantlen College and then at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he combined his interests in pop art with traditional drum-making and cedar bark weaving.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Art Mûr Archive
Sonny Assu presents his ongoing series “Interventions on the Imaginary” (2014- ), and confronts the colonial culture’s portrayal of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race. The series’ title refers to art historian and educator Marcia Crosby’s 2002 essay “The Construction of the Imaginary Indian”, in which she questions the “Indigenous identity” created by celebrated Canadian painters such as Emily Carr who naively link Indigenous identity to nature. Assu reaffirms Crosby’s critique by marking Carr’s iconic British Columbia landscapes with an Indigenous presence through the digital insertion of Kwakwaka’wakw formline elements. “These interventions participate in the growing discourse of decolonization, acting as “tags” to challenging the colonial fantasy of terra nullius and confronting the dominant colonial culture’s continued portrayal of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race”. In 2014 Sonny Assu began thinking about a new project, what would eventually become the “Interventions on the Imaginary” series. Now comprised of over 15 works and growing, the series playfully challenges the way indigenous presence has been imagined, primarily by settler Canadian artists as a means of promoting a particular vision of Canada. Artists such as the iconic Group of Seven** have shaped, for better or worse, dominant narratives in Canadian art, and in many ways landscape painting has become the ‘national’ art. The works that comprise the exhibition are digital interventions on images of historical works. Most of the references that comprise the backgrounds in the series will be familiar to the viewer. In his work Assu don’t just make light of the imagined past but tease at an imaginary future. “What a Great Spot for a Walmart!” (2014), is built on Emily Carr’s “Graveyard Entrance, Campbell River” (1912), and set in Assu’s current home and his grandmother’s village. In this work, the artist probes the pros and cons of some First Nations communities’ choice to adapt to contemporary realities, while subtly questioning the future consequences of these actions. The pairing of the traditional and the contemporary isn’t new, artists have been creating a dialogue between the past and present for as long as it has been possible to do so. And yet, in the case of this series of paintings, the interplay of traditional and imagined First Nations imagery causes the viewer to rethink their ideas of what it means to be First Nations in Canada today.
*The Kwakwaka’wakw are a Pacific Northwest Coast indigenous people. Their current population is approximately 5,500. Most live in British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland, and on islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait. Some also live outside their homelands in urban areas such as Victoria and Vancouver.
**The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933. Believing that a distinct Canadian art could be developed through direct contact with nature, the Group of Seven is best known for its paintings inspired by the Canadian landscape, and initiated the first major Canadian national art movement.
Info: Art Mûr, 5826 St-Hubert, Montréal, Duration: 14/1-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, http://artmur.com
