We Come to Witness: Sonny Assu in Dialogue with Emily Carr

Opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery December 3, 2016, We Come to Witness is a dialogue between the art of modernist painter Emily Carr and contemporary artist and ECU alumnus Sonny Assu. In this exhibition, Assu creates a series of digital tags on Emily Carr’s paintings selected from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection, challenging the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race by interrupting Carr’s landscapes with an insertion of ovoids and u-shapes. The exhibition also includes Assu’s masks juxtaposed with Carr’s paintings and a special ceramic collaboration with artist Brendan Tang. Altogether, the paintings, digital prints, sculptures and ceramic installations in We Come to Witness appropriate, transform and intervene to explore the effects of colonization, providing an alternative depiction of the Canadian landscape.

Sonny Assu’s ongoing series Interventions on the Imaginary (2014–) 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.

Unlike the human activity present in her earlier works, the paintings Carr produced in the 1930s depict a solemn silence, including Vanquished (1930), in which leaning totems and mortuary poles stretch along the foreshore with a collapsing longhouse in the background. While Carr was actively trying to capture the conditions of life in the coastal regions as she saw it, her iconic paintings also perpetuated the myth of disappearing Indigenous peoples through these depictions of decaying totems and abandoned longhouses. This grouping of Carr’s works was selected by Sonny Assu as a counterpoint to his own exploration of the story of the land from an Indigenous perspective.

The exhibition will also include new and existing sculptural works from Assu in addition to a special collaboration with ceramic artist ECU sessional faculty member, Brendan Tang.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art.

Read the Smithsonian Magazine article.

Front page image: Spaced Invaders, 2014 digital intervention on an Emily Carr Painting (Heina, 1928)