Dr Jack Davy (UEA)
Research Associate, ‘Beyond the Spectacle’
‘Beyond the Spectacle’ has begun its second of four planned artist residencies, which seek to bring contemporary Native North American artists to Britain. For June and July 2019 therefore, we are hosting First Nations artist Sonny Assu at the University of East Anglia.
Sonny is a prominent and successful artist from We Wai Kai First Nation, which is a Ligwiłda’xw/ Kwakwaka’wakw community located on Vancouver Island and Quadra Island in British Columbia. His work is well known in North America, but little acknowledged in Britain, where First Nations art and in particular the distinctive formline art of Kwakwaka’wakw and other Northwest Coastal Peoples is uncommon. We hope that this residency will improve knowledge and understanding of both the artistic practices and the political advocacy inherent to being a First Nations artist in contemporary North America.
Sonny’s work embodies this relationship; he has written that “The impetus behind my work is to bring to light the dark, hidden history of Canada’s actions/inactions against the Indigenous people. I often infuse my work with wry humour in an attempt to foster a dialogue; to speak to the realities of being an Indigenous person in the colonial state of Canada. Within this, my work deals with the loss of language, loss of cultural resources and the effects of colonization upon the Indigenous people of North America.”
He has previously addressed such contentious issues as consumerism, colonialism and the devastating legacy of Canada’s residential school system. During his time in Norwich, he will produce art which speaks to his encounter here with Britain and the British people and in particular the discovery of and engagement with sacred objects from his people currently located in UK museum collections. This art will form a body of material which presents an emotional and direct correspondence with Beyond the Spectacle’s most significant objective; to explore and enable the relationship between Native North American and British peoples.
To this end, Sonny will be running a series of interventions with the British public, including a welcome tea on 4th July, a series of schools workshops and a public lecture on the 19th July. Each of these will bring Sonny into conversation with a section of the British public which will enable him to learn more about British society and customs, as well as crucially get a sense of what it is British people think about him, his work and his people. This will all inform his artistic responses to Britain over the course of the residency.
The residency is book-ended by two exhibitions. The first, held at Canada House in London and entitled “Sonny Assu, A Radical Mixing”
is a solo-show retrospective, curated by the Baldwin Gallery, which looks at the history of Sonny’s work and its engagement with both Canadian history and popular culture. Particularly important artworks include the “Treasury Editions”, which merge formline design with Marvel comics, and “The Paradise Syndrome” which comments on colonial cartography and the Canadian system of Indian Reservations.
The second exhibition will be held at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts following the residency, opening on 19th July and running until October. This exhibition, still as yet untitled, will be curated by Sonny himself, and will feature art from his own past and new works produced during his residency alongside artworks from the permanent collections of the Sainsbury Centre, both masterpieces by unknown historic artists of Sonny’s own Northwest Coast region and from modern European artists like Picasso and Francis Bacon. It will reflect on the transcultural influences and relationships between Indigenous and European art and the effect this has had on Sonny’s own artistic career.
The opening of this exhibition will coincide with a symposium exploring the presences of Native North American art in the UK. The second of Beyond the Spectacles planned symposia, this is entitled “Bringing Light to the Dark: Visual Sovereignties in Contemporary Indigenous Art of the Americas” and explicitly explores the relationship between Indigenous art and Indigenous political activism, with keynotes by Sonny and by the historian Philip Deloria, who is of Dakota descent.