Sonny Assu - A Radical Mixing


Complex exhibition at Canada House of work by Sonny Assu who investigates what it means to be an Indigenous Canadian.

I liked these pieces in on immediate look but you had to know a lot to understand them. Luckily there was a good handout! Assu works with the formline tradition of indigenous art which uses a complex series of ovals, s-shapes and u-shapes to mark useful and ceremonial objects. For examples some of the works took romanticised Canadian landscapes by 19th century artists and tagged them with these shapes to show the rewriting narrative of a ‘vanishing race’.  See what I mean!

I’m always a sucker for art works made from maps and some of these overlaid these shapes onto colonial marine charts owned by his grandfather to destabilise the borders on the maps. I also liked the works where he uses his old comic book collection to replicate the formline tradition of storytelling. I particularly liked this triptych.

Closes 26 October 2019

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