Facts about sonny assu
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Sonny Assu: A Selective History
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A stunning retrospective highlighting the playfulness, power, and subversive spirit of Northwest Coast Indigenous artist Sonny Assu.
Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu’s career, highlighting more than 120 full-colour works, including several never-before-exhibited pieces.
Through analytical essays and personal narratives, Richard Van Camp, Marianne Nicolson, Candice Hopkins, and Ellyn Walker provide brilliant commentary on Assu’s practice, its meaning in the context of contemporary art, and its wider significance in the struggle for Indigenous cultural and political autonomy. Exploring themes of Indigenous rights, consumerism, branding, humour, and the ways in which history informs contemporary ideas and identities, Sonny
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Biography
Sonny Assu (b. 1975)
Interdisciplinary Artist
Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) was raised in North Delta, BC, over 250 km from his ancestral home on Vancouver Island. Having been raised as your everyday average suburbanite, it wasn’t until he was eight years old that he clued into his Kwakwaka’wakw heritage. In his mid-20s, while attending Emily Carr, that discovery would be the conceptual focal point that helped launch his unique art practice.
Assu explores multiple mediums and materials to negotiate Western and Kwakwaka’wakw principles of art-making. Often autobiographical, his work can be humorous, laden with pop culture, comic book and sci-fi references. But it can also be solemn, political, educational and activist in tone. His diverse practice deals with the realities of being Indigenous in the colonial state of Canada, which mirrors the plight of Indigenous and colonized peoples around the world.
Sonny received his BFA from the Emily Carr University in 2002 and was honoured with the University’s distinguished alumnus award, the Emily Aw
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Sonny Assu: Études for the Settler
Exhibition
October 23 – November 17, 2018
Jacob Lawrence Gallery
Reception: Wednesday, October 24, 5–7pm
This exhibition brings together a new body of work by Sonny Assu, Territorial Acknowledgements, alongside his prior series that problematize colonial conceptions of the landscape: The Paradise Syndrome (2017), 1UP (2016), and Interventions On The Imaginary (2014). Through these works, Assu offers corrective visions of colonized landscapes.
A series on found, thrift-shop landscape paintings, Territorial Acknowledgements layers Indigenous land-based mark-making in red ochre (referencing petroglyphs) onto images of the North American landscape in the style of the Group of Seven or the Hudson River School. Alluding to the falsities of Manifest Destiny, Assu reinserts an Indigenous presence into the depictions of landscapes from which they have been violently removed. As Assu asserts,
Whether it is a Group of Seven member or a humble Sunday-painter, I see my ancestors being white-washed out of these landscapes, presenting only the
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