KYRA KORDOSKI: The exhibition is called “Day School” — what was the impetus for that title?

SONNY ASSU: The title is a reference to one of the sculptures, Leila’s Desk (2013), a piece that speaks of my grandmother’s first day of high school. The work itself is a reclaimed 1930s school desk with a vintage bar of soap on top. I refinished the wood and copper-leafed its metal parts. My use of copper is a material allusion: the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Pacific Northwest Coast peoples see copper as a signifier of wealth. Before she went to a standard high school, my grandmother, Leila, went to an Indian Day School, which was similar to the Residential School system except the children were permitted to return home to their families at the end of the day. On her first day in grade nine, a boy left a bar of soap on her desk and called her a dirty Indian. I thought it was important to make this piece not only because it was a story she kept telling me, but also so that people understand that racism is ingrained within our seemingly tolerant society.

The other desk piece, Inherent (2013), is about my first experience with racism, coincidentally also in grade nine, in the early 1990s. During the Oka crisis in Quebec, a boy in my class was talking about how these “dirty, dumb, drunk Indians” just wanted everything for nothing. I stood up to him and his response was to call me “chug,” which is a racial slur for First Nations people. With that piece, I copper-leafed the underside of the flip top of this classic ‘70s desk with the sea-foam-green bottom, and “chug” is written there in a soft, graffiti-like script. The exhibition wasn’t planned around this timing, but this year happens to be the 25th anniversary of the Oka crisis.

It’s also just coincidental that the exhibition falls on the heels of the TRC releasing their convening report. How do you think pieces like these are activated at pivotal historical moments to which they are thematically tied? How would you describe their social function beyond the often-hermetic art world?

They become very pointed when we have the TRC report naming the effects of colonialism a “cultural genocide.” (To me, though, it’s just genocide. There is no “cultural” about it.) I want people to understand that there is a human face behind these issues, and I think the physicality of pieces like these can invoke empathy that might be missing from the language of a governmental document. They’re an important conversation starter, which is why I feel it’s important to have information available when these pieces are exhibited. There seems to be a backlash against didactics these days, but you have to take into consideration that there are narrative elements behind many of my works, and so the use of a didactic becomes important. It’s not your standard art-babble wall text; I’m giving people an “in” to the story behind these pieces in hopes that it compels the viewer to dig into the deeper issues.

Not all of the pieces in the show are as explicitly historical as Leila’s Desk and Inherent; there are many contemporary pop culture elements. How do you tend to go about connecting past and present, the pop and the personal?

I grew up in what I see as the pinnacle of our contemporary pop-culture: the early ‘80s. The influence of pop media, advertising, comic books, cartoons, sugary breakfast cereals, all lead into explorations of consumerism, branding and marketing with the works I did over a decade ago when I was coming out of my BFA at the Emily Carr University. That still has hooks in the conversations I create now, but it has flowed over to how we use social media as a form of totemic representation. With the Chilkat painting series, for example, I wanted to talk about how we communicate status in our social-media driven society, versus that of a traditional potlatch society. In 2010, I got to try on the regalia of my great-great-grandfather, Chief Billy Assu: a five-pointed Chilkat blanket that’s at the Civilization Museum in Gatineau, Quebec. As soon as it hit my shoulders a wealth of energy flew through me like an electric shock. I felt the history that was engrained into this object; I felt the status that my great-great-grandfather had. He’s an inspiration to me and he was highly regarded as a progressive leader and was recognized for his actions as a Chief. Since, in contrast, today we use platforms like Twitter and Facebook to talk about how important our breakfast was, most of the titles in the Chlikat series have hashtags. Status (2015) is a copper spray-painted pentagonal panel with abstracted forms that, to me, are reminiscent of the graffiti culture that indigenous youth have embraced as a way to communicate their status.

And certain works, such as your Longhouse paintings, seem to reside even more in abstraction?

If you look at the art from Northwest Coast, referred to as Formline, it’s very formulaic and narrative based. A good example of this would be totem poles: if you’re standing in front of one of these majestic markers, and if you happen to know those stories behind the iconography, you can formulate the narrative. With the Longhouse series, I wanted use the stylization of the Northwest Coast, but remove that traditional narrative and start thinking of Formline as pure abstraction. I was thinking about how the Cubists and Surrealists were inspired by indigenous cultures from all over the word, and in particular, how the Surrealists were influenced by the Kwakwaka’wakw. In essence I’m witnessing how they used their observations to inform their works, and I’m making work in response to their observations. It becomes this very circular, reflections-based view of art and art history.

The (b) Longing series touches on a fascinating intersection of art objects and ceremonial objects, found and discarded objects, and their relationship to particular spaces.

(b) Longing is an offshoot of my Longing series. I was going through piles of discarded wood from a log-home building site on my reserve on Vancouver Island, looking for cedar bark for my mom to use. I found these off-cuts that had been formed from the log joinery. Given that cedar is such a spiritual and culturally significant material for many Northwest Coast peoples, I found it compelling that they had been discarded. Essentially, through colonialism and luxury-consumerism, these cedar objects had become waste products. But by mounting them to museum quality standards and by being very cognizant of how to position the heads to capture the light, they’ve become anthropomorphized and invoke emotion. I’ve mounted 31 of these “masks” to museum quality standards. A photographic sub-series, Artifacts of Authenticity, documents them as in-situ interventions in places that I feel have exerted authority upon the First People, particularly on the Northwest Coast: anthropology institutions, commercial Northwest Coast art galleries, and tourist shops. As another sub-series, (b) Longing consists of cast bronze versions of some of these masks, which adds another layer of preservation to them.

Gone Copper! is another series of that address specific, traumatic events, but it does so with a definite lightness. What’s the value of playfulness in approaching history?

The pieces are meant to look like framed gold records, but they’re made out of copper and mounted on maple. It’s a new sculptural sub-series inspired by recordings of Chief Billy Assu. He was recorded in the mid 1940s at the height of the potlatch ban, which lasted from 1884 to 1951. Under the ban, it was illegal for the First People to practice their cultural and spiritual beliefs. Getting caught could mean a fine, being tossed in jail, and having your regalia confiscated. I found it interesting that that my great-great-grandfather was allowed to sing these songs for the sake of an ethnologist, but he wasn’t permitted to sing his songs out of his own free will. Billy and The Chiefs is a fictional band I conceived of, touring the country; their aspirations would not be to go gold or platinum, but to go copper. The fictional albums these awards represent have very political but also humorous names: Live From the ‘Latch; Busted; Giving It All Away; Colonial Eyes…

The title “Day School“ has a darkness to it, too, but with this exhibition I felt it was important to highlight two aspects that have always worked hand-in-hand in my practice: whimsy and darkness. I embrace humor as a way to bring people into more difficult conversations. A lot of people assume everything that happened around First Nations people in Canada took place 500 years ago. Sure, we can trace issues attributed to colonization back that far and pin them to those distant things to make us feel better about our ugly history. But I can trace these issues back just a few decades, to my grandparents’ or mother’s generation. The last residential school closed in 1996, two years after I graduated from high school. That’s my generation. I’m illuminating a very recent history in my work. I want people to understand that there is a hidden, parallel history in Canada that we refuse to acknowledge. I think that’s an important part of a lot of my work: invoking empathy, prevailing upon Canadians to live up our stereotype as a kind, gentle, compassionate country, because I would argue that compassion is currently lacking in terms of how First Nations people are treated in Canada.

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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