Sonny Assu‘s new sculptural works are difficult to pin down. When I first looked at them yesterday, they looked like the blocks of discarded cedar that they are. But the more I stared at them, the more I thought they looked like Northwest Coast masks. After a while, I couldn’t look at them without seeing them as masks.
I interviewed Assu while walking around his exhibition Longing at the West Vancouver Museum. As well, I also talked with Eric Deis who has collaborated with Assu on Artifacts of Authenticity, a collection of photos of Assu’s cedar masks in various art and museum settings. **
All 18 masks in Longing are cut in a V-shape with the bottom point of the V a roughly flattened surface that resembles the bridge of the nose. Although similar, each of the found objects has its own unique character.
Longing #9, for example, is mounted at a slight angle as if it’s cocking its mask head to listen or make sense of something. The original cut reveals the beautiful shapes of the concentric rings on either side of the V. The smallest rings have become the mask’s eyes.
Longing #10 has what looks like an perfectly-shaped oval eye. Bounded by an arc created by the way a chunk of wood has broken off, it looks like it has been purposely framed. Is the eye hidden in the wood? Or is it an eye of a face trying to get out?
Occasionally when I was looking at them on display I’d get a whiff of the rich woody cedar smell. It immediately made me think of the forest and the outdoors where the wooden chunks originated.
In some of the masks, I could make out the gouges and rough edges left by the teeth of a chain saw. Others have developed big cracks as they’re continuing to dry. All of them have a blunt rawness to them. They look caught in the process of transformation. Like the found objects that they are, they didn’t become art until Assu picked them up and decided that they were.
Assu said the idea for Longing started when he and his step father were wandering around big piles of discarded wood on the traditional territory of the Wei Wai Kai Nation, Assu’s reserve on northeastern Vancouver Island. Considered worthless, the wooden off-cuts were either left to rot or were chipped for cat litter. The two of them were looking for pieces of cedar for Assu’s mother.
“My step dad pulled up this cut join and he said: ‘Hey, Sonny doesn’t this look like a mask?’ I’m like. ‘It does.’ He said: ‘You could probably do something really interesting with it.’ I’m like: ‘I probably could.’
Initially, he thought about modifying them slightly. He considered adding some cedar bark hair or pieces of copper, a traditional sign of wealth among Northwest Coast nations. He toyed with the idea of sanding them down to show the smooth surface of the cedar grain.
As he stared at them, he started to think about them differently. In fell in love with their qualities as found objects. He liked their roughness and way the cuts revealed the wood grain. Over five years, he began thinking about them in a conceptual way and how each one already has a face and story in it.
As discarded objects, they also fit into the trajectory of Assu’s work and its exploration of the collision between signs of wealth of Northwest Coast cultures and western consumer culture. One of his most recognized works is Coke Salish, a sign with the words Enjoy Coast-Salish Territory done in the style of a Coca-Cola logo. Another is 1884/1951, an installation of disposable coffee cups in copper that refers to the years during which the potlatch was prohibited in Canada.
The works in Longing, however, are different from his other works which have had a pop art sensibility in their use of colour and form. With the found cedar discards, Assu resisted the urge to change them in any way except by having them mounted on brass stands.
The title Longing wasn’t his working title. Originally, he imagined calling the exhibition Faceless in a very direct and political reference to the lack of voice aboriginal people have traditionally had in the country, especially as it related to the build-up for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Being without a voice to him was equivalent to being without a face – being invisible.
But when he and Deis did a photo shoot for Artifacts of Authenticity in the Museum of Anthropology, he noticed something. He realized that the found cedar masks were having a relationship with the other historic masks around them. Assu thought they looked at the other objects with longing – as if the cedar pieces were looking at what they could have become under different circumstances. With a more poetic point of view, Assu felt the title was much more inviting and less confrontational.
“That’s the way I like to approach my work,” he said. “I like to have people feel they’re being welcomed into the pieces, welcomed into the conversation. Because for too long there has been this stance of the angry Indian – and rightly so. There are issues out there that are so contentious that they need to have anger behind them.”
In his work, Assu has found that humour and compassion help bring people into the conversation.
“I’m not yelling at you and turning you away.”
He said he tries to get to the point where people can say to themselves: ”Okay, I can get where Sonny is coming from and why he might be angry at things and how things happened to his family like they did.’”
In three photographs, Artifacts of Authenticity questions ideas of authority when it comes to deciding what is and what isn’t Northwest Coast art. The photos show the ‘masks’ in three settings: a display case of Kwakwaka’wakw masks in a museum, a commercial art gallery and a tourist gift shop.
Longing is curated by Petra Watson. The exhibition continues to Saturday, Nov. 5.
*Artifacts of Authenticity, a collaborative work by Sonny Assu and Eric Deis. The original horizontal photo has been cropped to fit the vertical space. One of Assu’s found masks is on the top row, right side.
**This blog was edited to make it clear that Artifacts of Authenticity is a part of the exhibition Longing.