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list price: $34.95
edition:Paperback
category: Art
published: Mar 2018
ISBN:9781772031706
publisher:
Heritage House Publishing
Description
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 Assu: A Selective History is the first major full-scale book to pay tribute to this important, prolific, and vibrant figure in the Canadian contemporary art world.
Editorial Reviews
Framed by contributions from some of our brightest Indigenous intellectuals, Sonny Assu’s canvas is more than an examination of how Indigenous Peoples respond to the Canadian experience. His witty and gentle hand offers Canada a mirror to consider its own scarred identity.
— Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
"A necessary addition to . . . contemporary indigenous art in Canada and beyond."
— BC Studies
This book, an appropriate resource for secondary students, contains many beautiful reproductions of Sonny Assu’s art and several analyses discussing his work. His pieces exhibit several strong influences: pop culture; the reclamation of classic art (Emily Carr and others); and the use of traditional West Coast form lines and media . . . Educators and students will find numerous access points through his bold expressions and the enlightening expositions. This resource offers many opportunities to examine our nation’s beliefs, actions, words, and legislation.
— Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools
The pieces feel young, brash, modern, and playful, often speaking directly to current First Nations and Canadian politics.
— Paul Kuttner, Cultural Organizing
The visually driven book highlights the artist’s work, with accompanying essays by contemporaries and Assu himself. Assu’s art leaps from medium to medium and includes graphic art, carvings, prints, photography and combinations of each.
— High Country News
It’s surprising to realize that Assu, a three-time Sobey Art Award long-lister, with a long exhibition list and work in important collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University only in 2002. His rise has been swift, his work sure-footed from the start, and he has been prolific in his exploration of installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking and painting. The book’s title, A Selective History, might sound presumptuous for one just edging into his 40s, but it fits both the artist’s personal trajectory and the wrongs of the past that his work confronts.
— GalleriesWest
Assu's mastery over his craft extends to an aesthetic refusal deeply tied to his ancestral teachings, his family, his territory and his community. With his practice, documented extensively in the anthology, Assu wants you to know that he will always be, at his core, a nerdy-boy troublemaker for his people.
— Lindsay Nixon, Canadian Art
This brilliant book not only provides readers with an overview of the career of one of Canada’s most important artists but also links his development to the contemporary creative practices of First Nations artists in BC politics and history—the intersection of stories with visual expression. All this unveils historical truths and artistic insights that elevate Sonny Assu to greatness.
— Dr. Ron Burnett, Order of Canada, Order of BC, President, Emily Carr University
“This brilliant book not only provides readers with an overview of the career of one of Canada’s most important artists but also links his development to the contemporary creative practices of First Nations artists in BC politics and history—the intersection of stories with visual expression. All this unveils historical truths and artistic insights that elevate Sonny Assu to greatness."
—Dr. Ron Burnett, Order of Canada, Order of BC. President and vice-chancellor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
— Emily Carr University of Art and Design
It’s surprising to realize that Assu, a three-time Sobey Art Award long-lister, with a long exhibition list and work in important collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University only in 2002. His rise has been swift, his work sure-footed from the start, and he has been prolific in his exploration of installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking and painting. The book’s title, A Selective History, might sound presumptuous for one just edging into his 40s, but it fits both the artist’s personal trajectory and the wrongs of the past that his work confronts.
— GalleriesWest
Sonny Assu’s eclectic blending of formline aesthetic and popular culture is amplified by a medley of contributors’ voices telling stories, revealing history, and setting the stage for Assu’s critiques of past and current colonial atrocities. The essays provide key insights into current modes of resilience and resistance by Assu and his generation of Indigenous artists, while his clever artist statements, through humour and biting commentary, reveal obsessions with popular culture, ignorance of stinging histories, and demand that we question personal responsibility.
— Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, curator of Northwest Native Art, Burke Museum
"Framed by contributions from some of our brightest Indigenous intellectuals, Sonny Assu’s canvas is more than an examination of how Indigenous Peoples respond to the Canadian experience. His witty and gentle hand offers Canada a mirror to consider its own scarred identity."
—Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
— Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
This book, an appropriate resource for secondary students, contains many beautiful reproductions of Sonny Assu’s art and several analyses discussing his work. His pieces exhibit several strong influences: pop culture; the reclamation of classic art (Emily Carr and others); and the use of traditional West Coast form lines and media . . . Educators and students will find numerous access points through his bold expressions and the enlightening expositions. This resource offers many opportunities to examine our nation’s beliefs, actions, words, and legislation.
— Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools
The visually driven book highlights the artist’s work, with accompanying essays by contemporaries and Assu himself. Assu’s art leaps from medium to medium and includes graphic art, carvings, prints, photography and combinations of each.
— High Country News
"Sonny Assu’s eclectic blending of formline aesthetic and popular culture is amplified by a medley of contributors’ voices telling stories, revealing history, and setting the stage for Assu’s critiques of past and current colonial atrocities. The essays provide key insights into current modes of resilience and resistance by Assu and his generation of Indigenous artists, while his clever artist statements, through humour and biting commentary, reveal obsessions with popular culture, ignorance of stinging histories, and demand that we question personal responsibility"
—Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, curator of Northwest Native Art, Burke Museum
— Burke Museum
