Sonny Assu: A Selective History by Sonny Assu et al. (review)

SONNY ASSU: A SELECTIVE HISTORY chronicles the last fifteen years of the artist’s career by highlighting more than 150 full-color artworks such as large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting from the years 2002 to 2017. The works chosen for the book represent a wide selection from Assu’s career and are arranged loosely instead of chronologically to highlight the visual or thematic connections among his series of works. The text is similarly organized, with analytic essays authored by a (mostly) Indigenous group of fellow artists, writers, academics, and curators. The astute decision to include Indigenous writers is welcome; they offer careful assessments of Assu’s Indigenous heritage and artistic practice of employing popular cultural references. What emerges is a balanced narrative that reflects what established artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Cowichan/Syilx) describes as “modern” artwork “because the Pop Art imagery is combined with the traditional design elements specific to Northwest Coast art” (9–10). Assu cites Yuxweluptun as an artistic influence, along with his own family, both past and present.

Assu’s investigations into contemporary problems affecting Likwilda’xw/Kwakwaka’wakw communities in the form of unjust Canadian colonial laws offer a visual narrative resistant to settler-colonial discourses. For example, in the foreword, poet Janet Rogers describes Assu’s works as embodying a Trickster-like energy because they are “playful pieces full of fun, with potent, dynamic, and brutally honest messages” that focus the viewers’ attention on the oppressive history of Canada’s colonial record (9). In her essay, artist Marianne Nicolson provides significant historical information about Kwakwaka’wakw territories, their powerful origin stories, and the severance of their ceremonies from Indigenous politics as a space where she and Assu become intrinsically linked through their work. Both artists are connected through their ancestral heritage as Kwakwaka’wakw people who believe the fundamental truth that cultural survival depends on creative expression as an act of resistance. Curator Candice Hopkins offers a decolonial perspective by juxtaposing Assu’s use of copper material in his work with the symbolic wealth that chiefs earn during a sacred potlatch ceremony. This system of commerce was antithetical to colonial projects because wealth and status were attained by chiefs through the practice of giving away their worldly goods. Additionally, Hopkins explores the interventions that Assu performed on well-known landscape paintings by European Canadian artists Emily Carr, Paul Kane, and others in the series Interventions on the Imaginary (2014–16) in order to critically analyze power relations where the Indigenous voice takes precedence.

In her essay, “(Re)Sounding Beyond: Speculative Futures in the Drum Works of Sonny Assu,” Ellyn Walker discusses the significance of Assu’s cross-cultural imagery, such as his combining of recognizable Indigenous objects (drums) and Northwest Coast iconography with consumer icons like Apple products. Walker contends that in his drum series, Assu “is connecting ancestries of cultural practice to contemporary technologies of capitalism in a place that has been inhabited since the last ice age” (30). Not only does this strategy refute the idea that Indigenous people are artifacts stuck in the past, but the combination of Indigenous aesthetics and pop culture devices emphasizes the discourse of “Indigenous futurisms,” which reimagines, reclaims, and reframes colonial constructions of indigeneity in favor of radical futurity. The remaining two essays, by Richard van Camp and Sonny Assu, tell stories about Assu’s childhood, family, and other influences such as comic books and superheroes. Assu’s essay also examines his series of works included in the book, the art materials he used, and his commitment to creating historical interventions that, in his own words, “bring to light the dark, hidden history of Canada’s actions and inactions against Indigenous peoples” (31).

As the first full-scale book about Assu’s career, Sonny Assu: A Selective History engages its readers with critical essays by important scholars in the field...