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Doreen Jensen Metamorphosis The Vancouver Art Gallery, Sept. 29, 1996 - Jan. 5, 1997 from the catalogue, topographies: Aspects of Recent B.C. Art [ 5,056 words ] This place called British Columbia — or 'Nisma, which means 'this land of ours' in the Nuuchaanulth language — is the organizing principle of the exhibition topographies. Consequently, my attention was focussed on art which explores the relationship between people and place. Metamorphosis; transformation; change and the will to change: these become meaningful and pervasive motifs when connections between time, place and being are uneasy. The site of this exhibition, in the building we call the Vancouver Art Gallery, evokes the notion of metamorphosis. Just 112 years ago, a powerful rainforest covered the place where the Vancouver Art Gallery now stands. Trees rose 312 feet into the coastal sky. Streams made their way through the woodland where bears, beavers, wolves, elk and other animals made their homes. First Nations people were part of this complex ecosystem. They harvested trees for lumber, cutting slabs from the standing trees in a way and at a season so the trees could continue to thrive. In 1884 — the same year a special law prohibiting potlatches was added to the Indian Act and the last big potlatch was held in Vancouver — the B.C. government granted the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) 6000 acres of land, including this site, in an agreement regarding the westward expansion of the railway from Port Moody. In the springtime of 1886, the giant trees on District Lot 541 were felled in great haste. A logger remembers the ethos of that metamorphosis:
The CPR sold the timber and began offering lots for sale. The city of Vancouver was incorporated that year. In the summertime, careless burning of stumps and branches on the CPR lands started a fire that destroyed the newborn city. The past creates an energy in the present, whether we know it or not. The ancient forest and its metamorphosis into timber, then real estate, is still part of this place. Susan Point's spindle-whorl sculpture Four Salish Women provides us with an image that speaks of this transformation from the rain forest to the contemporary city of glass and steel. Mentally spinning the cedar whorl in its cast-glass backing, with the ancient symbols from Musqueam baskets representing mountains and valleys around its perimeter, we journey through layers of consciousness and time. Isabel Rorick and Rena Point Bolton evoke the spirit of the forest with their weaving. Cedar roots, spruce roots and cedar bark, gathered in a way and at a season so that the trees will not be harmed, are the basic material with which they work. Isabel Rorick writes:
Rena Point Bolton regards the cedar tree as a friend, to her and to the birds and animals the cedar shelters and feeds. She writes:
Bolton's reverence for these trees was the inspiration for a new and innovative series of basketry that she calls Forest Babies. The idea came to her one day when she was out in the forest, gathering her basketry materials. When she examined the cones that had fallen onto the forest floor, the thought came to her, 'These are forest babies. These are very important.' That evening she wove a miniature Forest Baby basket, a tribute to the great laws of nature. Through the art and science of their sculpture, these women understand the natural world and give it a presence through culture. Utilizing ancient techniques, their work is profoundly contemporary, standing as a mediation between human beings and the rest of nature, between material and spiritual concerns. These sculptures enact a metamorphosis, transforming natural material — tree roots and inner bark — into consciously created artwork. With their impeccable geometry, they teach us a different approach to change, one that is grounded in knowledge, patience and infinite respect. The metamorphosis of naturally occurring materials into carefully crafted objects is at the centre of every artwork; it speaks to our human capacity for transforming the world. The history of District Lot 541 shifted again in 1906, when the provincial government bought Block 51 back from the CPR for the purpose of building a new courthouse. The land, a swampy vacant block, was on the very outskirts of the city. There were petitions opposing the selected site and other expressions of dissatisfaction by people who felt the Georgia Street location was far too inconvenient; perhaps its purchase was part of a plot to increase the value of lands in the western part of the city. Protests fell on deaf ears; the government paid the CPR $35,000 and bought two more blocks for another $11,000. (The 'value' of this site was estimated at just under $50 million in 1983.) First Nations artists continued to work in secrecy, as to do so was illegal under the potlatch ban; their work was confiscated, stolen, sold and traded off to museums around the world, whose mania for collecting Northwest Coast art was unprecedented in this period. In 1907, as the competition for the new courthouse design was announced, Squamish Chief Joe Capilano travelled with a delegation of First Nations chiefs to England. They met with the king and queen to seek redress of their land claims. The provincial government selected a courthouse design by British architect Francis Mawson Rattenbury and the plans were put out to tender at about the time Chief Capilano went to Ottawa to pursue land claims. On returning to Vancouver, he was jailed for his activities and went on a hunger strike. After his release from prison, he collaborated with Pauline Johnson to write Legends of Vancouver. For First Nations leaders, cultural work remains an important way to advocate aboriginal rights. In 1912 the courthouse opened for business and became the seat of justice in the province, a place where First Nations people were prosecuted for breaking the increasingly restrictive laws prohibiting the practice of their art and culture. In 1914 and 1918 amendments to the Indian Act expanded the potlatch ban to a more general prohibition against 'participating in any show, exhibition, performance, stampede or pageant in aboriginal costume.' The potlatch ban was most vigorously enforced during the 1920s, when a number of Northwest Coast Native people passed through the courthouse before serving their sentences in Oakalla prison. By the end of the 1920s, all political organizational activities were also explicitly banned. It was against the law to raise money to pursue land claims. First Nations people could not sit on juries or vote in elections, yet the great sculptures known as 'totem poles' were used as a generic symbol of British Columbia on tourism brochures. Made-in-Japan totem poles became ubiquitous in gift shops after World War II; 'Indian' art represented B.C. here and abroad while the actual practice of First Nations artists was still prohibited. It wasn't until I was eighteen, in 1951, that the potlatch ban was omitted from a revised Indian Act in response to intensive lobbying efforts of Native leaders. The ban on political organizing was also dropped. Finally, it seemed possible to openly create our art and to practise our culture once again. Our art began to come out of hiding. Thanks to parents and grandparents like mine, who kept knowledge of our art and culture alive against such enormous odds, we could begin again making the art that functions as part of a complex whole. For our painting and sculpture, our performance, oratory and song are our history, law, political and philosophical discourse, sacred ceremony and land registry. Rena Point Bolton was born on the Sumas Reserve at Kilgard in the late 1920s, during the time that the potlatch ban was strictly enforced. From birth, her family recognized and encouraged her as a carrier of her people's cultural heritage. Her grandmother taught her their songs, history, names, art and crafts. This training began when she was only three years old. Bolton learned, and she learned to teach. After the potlatch ban was lifted in 1951, she began actively exhibiting and teaching her cultural heritage, her basketry and blanket weaving. Learning and teaching is at the centre of Bolton's artistic practice. Her Tsimshian Chief's Hat, for example, is a result of fifteen years of research on Tsimshian weaving (which uses wool and cedar bark). After mastering this art, Bolton instructed a twelve-week course on Tsimshian cedar bark basket weaving in 1985. Bolton feels her main accomplishment has been to promote the ancient arts of her people. She has also been instrumental in motivating others to learn and inspiring them to teach the younger generations. In the 1950s and 1960s, First Nations artists took the contemporary practice of traditional Northwest Coast art out of hiding and began a dialogue with non-Native culture. The Vancouver Art Gallery was then located at 1145 West Georgia Street. The courthouse still functioned as a hall of 'justice' and law enforcement, a place for marriage and divorce, and a land registry. In 1962 Native people finally could vote in their first federal election and legally purchase liquor in B.C. In 1967 the Nisga'a argued here in the Supreme Court of B.C., seeking a declaration that their title to the land had never been extinguished. The Vancouver Art Gallery hosted its first exhibition of Northwest Coast art in 1956, its second in 1967. Though the curatorial context tended to display the fine art of First Nations as artifacts, these exhibitions nevertheless had an important impact on contemporary artists. Freda Diesing first attempted carving after attending the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition People of the Potlatch in 1956. Arts of the Raven in 1967 also inspired her. As in all cultures, the strands of art, activism, law, culture and environment cannot truly be separated. Throughout the 1970s, First Nations artists continued to claim space and voice in the cultural arena while activists battled for political autonomy and land rights. At the Vancouver Art Gallery, Doris Shadbolt curated a one-person retrospective of work by Haida artist Bill Reid in 1974. The courthouse was touched by the bloody battles of the American Indian Movement when, in 1976, Leonard Peltier's supporters battled with police and sheriff officers in the marble rotunda. But architect Arthur Erickson was already at work creating bigger, more modern facilities for the law courts. In 1979 the old courthouse was closed and another metamorphosis began. With a somewhat skewed idea of history, the sexagenarian courthouse had been officially declared a 'heritage structure' in the 1970s, while middens thousands of years old were still being destroyed to excavate development sites. Studies were commissioned into various functions the building might serve that would not require extensive changes to the exterior. The Vancouver Art Gallery was eventually decided upon. Erickson's firm supervised vast renovations to make the old courthouse suitable for a modern art museum. Construction, funded by government grants and a very successful campaign called 'Take the Gallery to Court' began in 1981, and the new Vancouver Art Gallery was opened to the public in 1983. The Vancouver Art Gallery in its new form bears the imprint of the old legal system in which First Nations were prosecuted and sent to jail for practising their art. The relationships between land, law and culture may yearn for transformation, but they have yet to be changed, whether they are enacted in a courtroom or an art gallery From the show Images: Stone: BC in 1975 and all through the 1980s, the gallery did not host one show featuring contemporary First Nations artists — despite the lobbying efforts of the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry (SCANA) and others. It was not until 1989 that the Vancouver Art Gallery accepted SCANA's proposal for an exhibition of First Nations artists. The show which resulted, Beyond History, still did not include artists from the Northwest Coast. The 1991 show Lost Illusions included work by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who incorporates Northwest Coast imagery in his large oil paintings. It was not until 1994 that the gallery hosted a show by a traditional contemporary Northwest Coast artist — Haida artist Robert Davidson. When I was speaking with Rick Rivet about his participation in this show in the redecorated Halls of Justice, he joked, 'I guess we will be exorcizing ghosts with our artwork, then.' Perhaps we will. Perhaps as with Teresa Marshall's Warriors — which she calls 'warriors of hide who speak' — the concrete and glass which surround us can be metaphorically 'gutted' and stripped bare, then made to resonate with a new language. Marshall writes:
Chuck Heit's Chief's Chair provides us with an analysis of the relationships between law and culture, art and historical memory, as they are played out in two very different societies. He writes:
In Haida Angel, Fred Davis addresses the way in which First Nations have been villainized by the legal system and the debate around land claims and rights to natural resources, while they have been excluded from institutions defining contemporary art. The work is a self-portrait of Davis's own transformation and achievement. Davis was born into the Raven Clan at Masset on Haida Gwaii so he depicts himself as a Raven. Raven wears a potlatch hat with two rings, one representing Davis's first major one-person show at the Derek Simpkins Gallery of Tribal Art, and the second representing this exhibition. The Raven's wings are huge and powerful; they look like angel wings. On closer inspection, we see they are Eagles, transforming into wings of Raven. 'This land is our culture.' These are the words of the late George Manuel. I also say, 'Our culture is this land.' The land and the culture are one. The history of the site of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the ongoing disputes over the ownership of land in B.C. resonate in the ways contemporary art is delineated within the institution. Yet artists have the power to reach beyond or inside this moment in history, to draw upon and urge us towards the power and promise of the natural world. Art is also metamorphosis: the transformation of natural materials into objects which bear the imprint of the materials' former life. As artists re-create and re-present our transforming and transformative relationship with the land, they urge us to a spiritual metamorphosis. Rick James Rivet, consciously working in the shamanic tradition, urges us to a spiritual metamorphosis in his painting Cosmic Zone Interface. He writes, paraphrasing Esther Pasztory in Shamanism and North American Indian Art:
In his painting Journey #15, Rivet examines the life-journey, exploring distances between conscious and unconscious, visible and invisible. He writes, 'The topography here is one of physical / mind / spirit convergence.' Ken Mowatt's Frog Bowl sculpture operates on many levels. He says:
Frog Bowl is about Mowatt's own personal identity; he comes from the Frog Clan. It is also an homage to the animals represented in the piece. Further, the sculpture represents the utensil as an idea; the holes in the bowl take it away from the utilitarian and force the viewer to see it differently. Mowatt describes 'a birth process happening in the bowl.' In both the imagery and the shape of the sculpture, we find metaphors for birth. Mowatt is deeply educated in both First Nations and Euro-American art traditions. Nevertheless, he says, 'Intellect interferes; creativity is specific and fragile.' Mowatt describes his work as 'abstract and spiritual.' Spirituality is the 'driving force' in his art. Freda Diesing also mediates between natural and spiritual realities with her sculptures. Her Moon Mask tells how the people of Haida Gwaii travelled to the moon in ancient times. Furthermore, Diesing is herself a mediator between elders and young people, between tradition and postmodernity, and between B.C. and other parts of the world. She studied at both the Kitanmax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art and the Vancouver School of Art. Also, she learned from old masters among the Gitxsan and was influenced by the carver Ellen Neel. Diesing studied art in museums and at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She became both a mentor and a teacher to many of her peers; among her best-known pupils are Dempsey Bob, Don Yeomans, Norman Tait and Alvin Adkins. Internationally, she has worked as an artist-in-residence in the Dominican Republic and attended sculpture symposia in Finland. Judith Currelly's work explores themes of metamorphosis and continuity as they emerge in the relationships between people, animals and places. The vast land commonly known as 'wilderness' appears in all her work, marked and unmarked by the passage of humans and animals. She writes:
The focus of Currelly's work is won through a connection with a particular place. She is a commercial pilot whose many sojourns in the North inspire her imagery. The painting Landmarks: Tracks, Maps, Memories is in some sense the key to my curatorial focus in this exhibition. Currelly urges us to look at layers of time, paint and being until we see and feel the dialectic between people and place. Her work speaks to me of metamorphosis; it depicts a startling change and loss that is part of a continuous natural process of disintegration and renewal. She writes:
Teresa Marshall's Land Escapes also addresses the dialectic between people and place with a humorous spoof of Canadian culture. She has transformed the 'landscape' — that empty icon of national identity — into drums by which the creatures of the land can be heard again. The marks on the hides — emerging from the unique imprint of each creature and brought out by the tanning process — are uncannily evocative of landforms. She writes:
Marshall urges us towards the metamorphosis of spirit and culture that would come if we embraced our intimate connection with all life. Such transformation emerges from living in a particular place and functioning inside its urgencies, at home in the complex network of life and death that each site imposes. The 'primeval wilderness' devoid of human influence is an imaginary construct; it never existed. All over the world, indigenous people live as part of functioning ecosystems. Chief Leonard George comments, 'We are all indigenous somewhere.' And this land is our culture. Our culture is this land. I do not accept academic distinctions between culture and environment. Nor has anything in my experience or education brought me to accept pedantic distinctions between art and craft. Susan Point, taking the spindle whorl from its traditional four- to seven-inch diameter up to an art object three feet wide, shows the fallacy of such distinctions. As Point writes, her work honours the spindle whorl itself as an art form, in addition to the decorative imagery on the whorl's surface. I do not distinguish between culture and environment, art and craft. Nor can I believe in categorizing work by living artists as either 'traditional' (valid anthropological artifact) or 'contemporary' (valid fine art object). Such distinctions are at best irrelevant; at worst, they are racist. Isabel Rorick's fine basketry is an example of the kind of artwork that such academic distinctions would exclude from a fine art exhibition. And true enough, this art was not taught at colleges and universities, written up in textbooks of art history, or published in international art magazines. Instead, Rorick learned from her grandmothers. Rorick comes from a long line of weavers on both sides of her family. Her mother Primrose Adams taught her how to make chief's hats. Her aunt Delores Churchill encouraged her to weave and to pass this knowledge on. Her 'nonny' (grandmother) Selina Peratrovich was a very important person in her life. Even though Peratrovich lived in Ketchikan, Alaska, she visited Haida Gwaii at least twice a year. She would harvest the materials for her basketry in Haida Gwaii and sometimes would make baskets while her granddaughter watched. As Peratrovich worked, she would sing or tell stories — she was always happy. Rorick remembers:
Basketry is traditionally a women's art, and although highly regarded in all First Nations, its practitioners have not been accorded the same status as male artists in the literature. Rorick's great-grandmother Isabella Edenshaw was rarely recognized for her fine basketry. Her husband Charles Edenshaw, who painted the woven hats, was the only one recognized for his artistry. Today Isabel Rorick has achieved international recognition for her fine contemporary weaving. Occasionally, she hires someone to paint designs on her chief's hats, and she acknowledges them. In the case of her Haida Chief's Hat, she hired Charles Edenshaw's great-grandson Reg Davidson to paint the designs for her. How does it change a work of art, to see it in a public art gallery instead of an anthropology museum? So-called traditional work, though typically excluded from the economy and discourse of contemporary art (unless appearing in an oil painting by a non-Native artist), is as contemporary as any you will see in the Vancouver Art Gallery's collection or in the pages of Canadian Art magazine. This work speaks directly to the living world, including the artist's immediate community and the larger Canadian society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of the Sparrow sisters, Debra and Robyn, and Chester Patrick. Chester Patrick's panel Mythical Women urges the viewer to investigate. The seemingly disconnected hand in the left corner is explained by Patrick:
The panel includes a representation of Eagle Woman, Otter Woman, Dogfish Woman, Young Woman, Bear Mother, Volcano Woman and Uuints'iits, also known as Mouse Woman, the supernatural being who always comes to us when we are in great need of help. One of the women in the panel is not a 'mythical woman' but actually a 'medicine woman,' whom Patrick includes to counteract the 'medicine man' stereotype and to honour the medicine women he knows. Debra and Robyn Sparrow's weaving results from many years of study, trial and error. They analyse examples of old Salish weavings in museum collections and in books. The last known weaver before the contemporary revival was the Sparrows' great-grand-mother. Debra Sparrow says, 'At the beginning we had no one to ask but our own inspiration.' The inspiration, Sparrow feels, comes from her ancestors, whom she describes as
Today the Sparrow sisters have developed the art of weaving to a very high form, with their innovative designs and colour sense. Debra Sparrow says of her weaving:
These artists seem to have very different aesthetic considerations from those held by artists educated in the European-based cultural traditions. What do these different aesthetic considerations indicate for the future of art in this site? Perhaps the whole notion of 'art' is itself flawed beyond repairing. In my language, there is no word for art. This is not because we are devoid of art, but because art is so powerfully integrated with all aspects of life, we are replete with it. Ki-ke-in (Ron Hamilton) objects strenuously to being described as an artist. He doesn't want his work to be linked with the notion of fabricating useless objects seen, thought about and exchanged within the thin air of the art world. Ki-ke-in calls his work 'creativity' rather than art. Making meaningful, beautiful things is part of everyday life for him — in First Nations tradition. His Ceremonial Screen makes reference to his home region of Barkley Sound and to his mother's Hee-Koolth-aht heritage. LaxHösinsxw is a very important word in the Gitxsan language. It means honouring and respecting others, place and space. In this city, at this site and at this time in history, it is a word we might learn from. The place and space in which the Vancouver Art Gallery stands, physically and metaphorically, is a contested one. Here, where a city has been incompletely exchanged for the forest and newcomers have incompletely replaced the aboriginal inhabitants, LaxHösinsxw may be key to the creative process and to our future. Ki-ke-in has written powerfully of the creative process and the links it makes between time, place and being:
LaxHösinsxw — honour and respect — like song, sculpture, painting, weaving — these are ways of knowing, and knowing takes us beyond the surface of things. Ken Mowatt explores this idea in his work. 'While form leaves an impression of space and replaces space,' Mowatt says, 'a hole is an interpretation of thought.' We are drawn to absences, omissions and gaps; they can kindle a metamorphosis. May these artists illuminate the openings, so that we find our way to change. Research assistance by Caffyn Kelley from the catalogue, topographies: Aspects of Recent B.C. Art Text: © Doreen Jensen. All rights reserved.
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Copyright ©1997, 2009. Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art. All rights reserved. |