SIGHTINGS is a program of satellite exhibitions initiated by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in 2012 to examine how we comprehend the exhibition space and the modes of display of artworks. This project refers to four pioneering essays written by the Irish critic and artist Brian O’Doherty between 1976 and 1981 – published together in 1986 as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. In these essays O’Doherty theorized certain issues linked to a modernist conception of the exhibition space that he called the “white cube,” neutral and adaptable; this conception has remained current because it still defines a large number of galleries today. SIGHTINGS was developed to emphasize the persistence and false neutrality of the white cube and provide an experimental platform for artists and guest curators to generate new strategies of display and to test the limits of its adaptability.
A first series of projects were realized by students from the Faculty of Fine Arts. The current series of projects features artists and curators from the larger art community.
SIGHTINGS is located on the ground floor of the Hall Building at 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
May 16 – September 20, 2015
A project by Sonny Assu
The Value of What Goes On Top/The Value of What Goes Within questions the elevation of inanimate objects to a higher status of art, based on where, how, and who places them. However, the view shifts to the absence of an art object, placing the value of art object onto the common museum plinth.
The Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of [what is now known as] British Columbia place conceptual wealth on objects made of copper and maple, elevating these to a higher status through the actions of high-ranking members of their society. Copper has inherent and conceptual wealth, and is often displayed as a shield-like shape held by a Chief. Simply referred to as “a Copper”, it gained its conceptual wealth through trade, war or union. A Copper could represent the wealth of centuries worth of sacred potlatch ceremonies; multiple canoes, sacred objects of cedar, maple and alder, cedar clothing, baskets of mountain goat wool, stacks upon stacks of trade blankets and other utilitarian objects would all be conceptually represented through that one object. Often having names, Coppers could be used to boast or to shame and the commerce value engrained into them could either be carried forward or stripped completely.
Throughout the Pacific Northwest Coast, cedar is understood as the “common” material, used in almost every aspect of Kwakwaka’wakw society, from longhouses to canoes, sacred, and utilitarian objects. Maple, while often overlooked, is a physically stronger material that could be crafted into highly detailed, ornate objects held by higher-ranking members of Kwakwaka’wakw society. Both maple and copper are materials conceptualized with inherent wealth, yet here they both function and challenge the notion of the Duchampian readymade. Challenging the norm of the Western readymade and challenging the elevation of cultural and utilitarian Kwakwaka’wakw objects is an act of decolonialism against the western gaze upon the “other”.
The Value of What Goes On Top/The Value of What Goes Within was inspired by conversations with community members who have a deep, unbridled understanding of Kwakwaka’wakw art and society prior to European contact. Through speculation, this installation conceptualizes a pre-contact understanding as a pre-colonial gaze. This concept proposes that a pre-colonial observer would question the elevation of ceremonial masks, regalia, and utilitarian objects placed upon a plinth or within other Western modes of ethnographic display. My question is, would this observer assume that the plinth holds the conceptual wealth over the object itself? To answer this question seems to be an exercise in futility. Could we really contextualize the pre-colonial gaze, given we are living within a colonial construct? The question in and of itself, whether it can be answered or not, is an act of decolonization. To invoke decolonial theory, we free ourselves from the colonial subjugation of our art, art history, and conceptual theory.
Sonny Assu
Sonny Assu (b. 1975)
Through museum interventions, large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, printmaking and paintings, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop art sensibility in an effort to address contemporary, political and ideological issues. His work often focuses on Indigenous issues and rights, consumerism, branding and new technologies, and the ways in which the past has come to inform contemporary ideas and identities. Assu infuses his work with wry humour to open the dialogue towards the use of consumerism, branding and technology as totemic representation. Within this, his work deals with the loss of language, loss of cultural resources and the effects of colonization upon the Indigenous people of North America.
There is a clear interest in materiality in Assu’s work. The materials used for each work is carefully considered, particularly in relation to Indigenous culture: hand-painted deer or elk hide drums for their performance significance; posters for their mass-distribution qualities; and copper for its cultural importance to the Indigenous People of the Northwest Coast. Assu’s projects emphasize the intersections and boundaries of traditional Indigenous art within the larger realm of contemporary art.
Sonny Liǥwildaʼx̱w (We Wai Kai) of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Nations. He graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2002 and is currently enrolled in the MFA in Studio Arts program at Concordia University. He received the British Columbia Creative Achievement Award for First Nations’ Art in 2011 and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012, 2013 and 2015.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Seattle Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Hydro-Québec, Loto-Québec and in various other public and private collections across Canada and the United States.