 My name is Luke Farnal, by the way. I work here at Emily Carr. You've probably seen me around. Okay, Sonia Sue. He is Laquata from the Wibikai First Nations. He graduated here from Emily Carr. He received the BC Creative Achievement Award in First Nations Art in 2011 and was long listed for the 10th annual SOBI award in 2012. His work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions over the past years. Most notably Don't Stop Me Now and Comic Relief at the National Gallery of Canada, Beat Nation and How Soon Is Now at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Changing Hands Art with Reservation Part 2 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. His work has been accepted into the National Gallery of Canada, the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. His work is conceptually and aesthetically designed to challenge the authenticity of indigenous art while simultaneously reflecting upon our Western civilization's consumption of culture. He is currently living and working at Montreal. Ladies and gentlemen, Sonia Sue. Thanks everybody. I'm trying to use a microphone. I feel like a big rap star right now. I'm not gonna rap. I'm not gonna do that. That's just gonna be really embarrassing for everybody in the room. Is this thing on? Can everybody hear me? Okay, cool. I'm gonna cue up the audio, the visual guy. Yay, there I am. So yes, thank you for having me. Brenda, thank you for bringing me in. Thank you, Emily Carr, for hosting this event. I'm really excited to be sharing my work with you around the reconciliation conferences here in Vancouver. I'm really proud to be an Emily Carr graduate. I graduated in 2002 and I was just thinking about this today. All my friends, all the staff, all the instructors that I've had here, you helped me become who I am today and I really want to thank you for that. So Emily Carr has probably been the best experience of my life and it's stuck with me forever and you're part of my family. So thank you for having me back. So I'm gonna show you my pretty much my entire body of work over the past 11 years. We've got an hour to get through it all. So I might blast through some of the earlier stuff and then focus on some of the newer stuff I've been working on most recently. But basically, I'll just start off and tell a little story about myself and pop cultural influences. Basically my work is very autobiographical in nature and it started off by exploring who I am as a liquid top person and who I am as a child of pop culture growing up in the pinnacle of 80s pop culture and really trying to discover who I was and when I was in my final year here at Emily Carr I was really trying to challenge the stereotype of what it was like to be to be an Indigenous person and to be an Indigenous artist working in this super strong discourse here in Vancouver around Northwest Coast art. And the work that I was doing at the time, I didn't really feel like it really challenged my own self-perception of really making something uniquely my own. And I just started one day just thinking about my work and thinking about young Sunny, like why I got involved in art in the first place and thinking about how I used to love comic books and how television and movies and radio and media influenced me as a child and it really started it to peak in my mind about this one specific story that I had when I was going to school in grade three. I moved into Vancouver with my mother and I was going to a school there of course up to the kid and my teacher at the time was teaching the class, teaching me about my own people. He was teaching me about the Kwak-Wa-Ki-Wa people back then referred to the Kwak Udall and I don't know, maybe this didn't dawn on me, maybe my mom can answer the question later on about why Sunny didn't know he was an Indian, but but I didn't know and it was funny because the teacher was talking about these people in the past tense. These people used to live in this area where I spent my summers. These people ate the food that I ate on a daily basis, salmon, oolikens, all that stuff. And these people made this iconic artwork. At the time my mom was married to a carver, Jerry Smith, an artist, Northwest Coast artist, and he's making this work. And so I started drawing all these connections. I'm like, I spent my summer there. I eat that food. That's the stuff that Jerry makes. What is this all about? And I remember running home and my mom probably was lying on the couch after a long day's hard work. I came in, kicked off my shoes, looking for my mom. I got this cool stuff to tell you. I got this cool stuff to tell you. And I told her about all the stuff I learned about these people in the past, their artwork, their food, the same food that we do. They live in the area where we spend our summers. The stuff they make is what Jerry makes. And she just looked up to me and says, well, that's who you are. So I'm going to ask you later why I didn't know. And so basically I took that story and that kind of time frame in my life and thought about how media and pop culture influenced me. And I came up with a series called the Challenging Tradition Series. And this was really just about exploring who I was as a Likwata Kwakwakiwak person, but also being a child of pop culture and what influenced me. What influenced me was mass media advertising comic books, movies. So from the Challenging Tradition Series, we got, you know, the iconic guys of Spider-Man and Hulk, Mickey Mouse, another Hulk and Respez. And that really kind of spurred on this kind of creative notion to start understanding who I was as an individual in this world. And I'm going to jump ahead a number of years to 2006 when I made the Breakfast Series. And this was done for a show, my first solo exhibit in Vancouver called Sunny Eye Sue is defined by the Indian Act, a little tongue-in-cheek title. And again, I just started thinking about, you know, my childhood, my past, how I was just enveloped in this notion of pop culture where pop culture and media and advertising was bombarding me on a daily basis by this stuff, by these toys, eat this food. And I started really thinking about it about this becomes my heritage, my traditional heritage, this is what makes up me as an individual. This media that we live in influences my life as much as my traditional culture does. And so I made the Breakfast Series to kind of reflect a number of different issues that I was thinking about at the time. And when I made this work and pretty much the work that I was doing at the time and the work that I do now, I make it from a very kind of just a quick response to a thought that I've had in my head. I bring the concept into my work at a later time. And so the concept for this work came a little bit later, but this is really just kind of exploring the notion of who I was for a very humorous way. What I discovered when I started thinking about this in a humorous way and then inserting issues of colonization, loss of food, loss of land resources and loss of identity, I was able to approach it in such a way that I was introducing humor to the conversation where there's when I was kind of when I first started going to Emily Carr and exploring my culture through the diverse community that was here. A lot of the artists that I was looking at and referencing were from a very angry Indian discourse. And for me, that was I wasn't really I didn't really felt the need or the understanding that I had to hold on to that anger because I wasn't really directed directly influenced by the notions that they were getting at, but I understood the reasoning as why they were angry and why they were ranting and why they were berating through their work very powerfully. But I didn't feel I had the right to to be that angry. So I felt that humor was the best way to get people involved into the issues. And just sorry, I had another slide on her. But just, you know, talking about this piece is, you know, we got Lucky Beads, which is kind of exploring this notion of stereotype that Manhattan was sold for a handful of shiny beads to the Indians. You know, being funny, Kwak-Wa-Ki-Wok bannock pops, Kwak-Wa-Ki-Wok treaty flakes, potlatch salmon crisps, potlatch, sorry, Kwak-Wa-Ki-Wok salmon loops. And what I found interesting over the years is what I really found interesting about my work in general and how people approach it is that I have a base understanding of what my work is. But people always bring something unique and interesting to the conversation, no matter where they're from. So I really appreciate when people come up to me and say, you know, Sonny, you know, you made this work in 2006, but it's resonating to me today in 2013 about the loss of the salmon coming into the Fraser River. So I just like how this work has been able to transcend over the years and influence a lot of people. This is Coke Salish. I did in 2006 as well for my show at the Belkin Satellite Gallery. And I want to start off by thanking the Coast Salish people for for allowing me to live in their territory. And this is what this piece was really was really made for, was to pay to pay respect to the Coast Salish nations in Vancouver for allowing all of us through colonization to live in their traditional territories. And I came up with the idea for the piece, I think it was in 2003 when Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Winter Games. What I found interesting was that the games were being marketed as Canada, the world coming to Canada, coming to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, but they weren't really honoring or recognizing the traditional territories of the First Nations people that were here. And they're thinking about it in the terms of pop culture and media and advertising and how I've been influenced by that. I made this piece to kind of subvert that notion of the welcome of the people. And then going on through this piece and presenting it in various formats. What I found interesting, and even with the cereal boxes, is that it became invisible to people in a way that this image became invisible to people, which I found really interesting because as an artist, you don't want to be invisible. You want people to see you work, you want people to know who you are and have a conversation with you. And it kind of came out of this this this notion of the invisible notion behind these works came out of a quick little anecdote that I was an interaction I was having with a security guard at the Museum of Anthropology. He was walking me down to the area where I was going to be giving a presentation and he said, hey, Sonny, I really love your work. It's really smart. It's really funny. But can you do me a favor? And I'm like, oh, OK, security card, I'll be a favor. And he's like, yeah, can you can you just make some kind of like a little panel, some little text information about this piece? Because I'm really tired of all these tourists coming up and going, where's the Coke machine? Where's the hot dog cart? I went up to the Coke sign and there's no Coke machine. There's no there's no cafeteria. And so it's interesting how people just kind of glance over the stuff because it does mirror and mimic the piece that I'm appropriating so perfectly that people just don't recognize it. Another anecdote from from this specific piece. I don't know if she's in the room. Penny, are you in the room? She she was at the World Urban Forum with her partner Tim a couple of years ago where we did this piece really large when in 2007 or 2006. So when you walked out of the forum, you were seeing this giant Coast Salish sign, Coca-Cola sign, and you were acknowledging that you were still in Coast Salish territory and entering back into it. And she looked up and I heard the story from her second hand and she look up the sign and she got mad and she was telling me on Sunday I got so mad. I was getting mad. Tim was like starting to get a little bit embarrassed and he's like, you know, can you just calm down a bit and then take a look at the sign, just take it in for a second. And she looked at it and she goes, oh, this is iPotlatch version one again from 2006 for my first solo show. It's five thousand ancestors in your pocket. And again, like I really wanted to approach my work from this this area of humor. And it's really kind of talk about not even really it was just me being fun. I was just having a lot of fun with this work. And you know, this this was very kind of at an early stage in my career. And I was just really exploring my my my career and the work that I wanted to make. For me, I was really starting to explore this notion of totemic representation. What makes up our clan based structure from a traditional standpoint? You know, it's the raven, the bear, the salmon, the eagle, whatever it may be. But in our today's modern technology based society, we don't really recognize that we are the iPod clan, the Blackberry clan, the Android clan. And this really came about from having an observation on the bus one day. I don't know where I was going, but I was on the bus standing there and I watched these two people come on the bus at the height of iPod's fame. And we really started taking off and they had their little white earbuds in and they are scrolling through their list of songs. They sat down next to each other. They didn't interact with each other at all. I'm not too sure if they knew each other or not. But I found it really interesting to that observation that they were connected even though they were ignoring each other. And that's essentially what Steve Jobs is really trying to do. This piece is like we're trying to connect the world to this technology. But what I've noticed and what a lot of people have noticed over the years is that this technology really kind of puts us on our own little bubble. We're constantly like this. And even more so today, you know, we're always constantly like this on our phones. We're kind of ignoring everything around us, put our earbuds in. We just ignore the world. And so that's why I kind of started thinking about this theory of, you know, this becomes our new personal totems. We are the iPod clan, the Blackberry clan and all kind of stuff. This is some more work from the series. This is I Hamatsa, iPod Latch Ego in the center and I Hamatsa Dancer over on the side. And through that, through these pieces with that kind of notion in mind about these technologies as new personal totems, I started thinking about what would a traditional dancer do in the future to ready himself for a potlatch. And I started kind of painting these imageries of Hamatsa Dancer on other sides, embracing this notion of technology to ready themselves for a potlatch. Or maybe even in the future, we're going to have potlatches in our own heads. You know, we're going to be just plugged into these machines and we're just going to plug in our earbuds and we're going to dance in a room. Maybe it's going to be virtual. Who knows? That's what has this really kind of stipulating with these pieces. And painting myself in the last two as the self-portrait, it was just me really kind of situating myself in the middle of this kind of technology culture. And I am such a techno person. I love collecting all these gadgets. And I am super immersed in this technology. And it's been interesting because over the past probably the past month, if anyone follows me on Facebook, you know, I've removed everything and I'm trying to get myself off this stuff. But it's so hard because I'm I'm living a Montreal now. And it's, you know, it's a really good tool to be connected to the people that you love and you care about, especially when you have such great distances between you. So it's interesting to find a balance between being on the grid and wanting to be off the grid. This is the iPod version two. It's actually called 10,000 Ancestors in Your Pocket. And this was done in 2009 for a show called Continuum at the Bill Reed Gallery downtown. And they approached me and they said, you know, we're having a show called Continuum and we're really trying to approach traditional Northwest Coast artists who are working in traditional mindsets and we want to kind of help them think outside the box. We recognize that you are thinking completely outside the box with your work and we just want you to be in the show as an inspiration to them. And it was a really a really great show to be in because it also challenged me to think about my work in a very different scale. This piece is three foot by six foot. I actually painted this in a five foot by four foot room. It was and I lost my studio at one point and I moved back into my I moved my studio back into my house and it was just like essentially a walk-in closet. So I was able only able to paint this thing up or down and I wasn't really able to step back and look at it. But this is one of the pieces that I really kind of see myself embracing this notion of abstraction through my work. And I'm going to talk a bit more about abstraction later on. But this is a very kind of abstract piece for me. At the time I was painting some drums and I'm going to show you those in a minute. And they were fairly and my work is fairly abstract in terms of North West Coast standards. But I was still kind of framing a lot of my stuff. Even when you think about the Ahamata pieces, I was still kind of framing it in a very kind of narrative way. I was thinking about my work in a very traditional narrative by taking stories from my culture and taking appropriating from the general pop culture and then reforming it into my own stories. So it was very kind of narrative based and story based. And so this piece allowed me to actually think outside that box and really start to think about abstraction in my work. And this is one of the first pieces that I did where I was using the headphone cord to really break up the space and to create a different layer of dynamics throughout the paintings and throughout the works. The potlatch band. I'm going to talk a bit about that. From 1884 to 1951, it was illegal in Canada under the Indian Act, which is still in that today. For my family to practice our traditional cultures. For 67 years it was illegal for us to practice to sing, to dance, to have potlatches. Doing so meant you'd be thrown in jail, you could be fined or both. Commonly regalia masks, dancewear were confiscated by the Canadian government and they had sold off to various collections around the world. And this piece is an installation of 67 copper cups, the grand day sized. It was funny to make this piece and to think about it, because I had these fabricated here in Vancouver and just thinking about it and I was talking to the company that was making these pieces for me and I brought in this like grand day sized Starbucks cup, paper cup and I plopped it in the counter and I said, I want to make this in copper. And he says, why you're going to burn your face off when you have a coffee? And I said, no, it's not the drink, it's art. And he says, oh, okay. And he kills right off the ticket. He really is funny because he's like, whatever. So yeah, so I have 67 copper cups installed on a Hudson's Bay Blanket and it's kind of discarded pattern. And it came out about an exploration of the potlatch band in Canada that lasted 67 years. And thinking about traditional notions of wealth from my people on the copper shield was the epitome of a family's wealth or a chief's wealth. And this piece, thinking about copper and thinking about how it juxtaposed our Western society where a potlatch society hordes wealth, keeps wealth to give it all away at these big events. Where our Western society, what we're all living in right now we hoard wealth, we keep wealth to buy inanimate objects to buy condos, to buy cars, to buy iPods to save it. And then that wealth either gets transferred to someone other than our family or it just disappears when we die. And so it's a dramatic difference between how a potlatch society sees their wealth and how our Western society sees the wealth. And this notion of discarding really came up and the reason I used the coffee cup because I recognized when people, especially in Vancouver because there's such a strong, large coffee consumption culture here, that people walk down the streets with these cups no matter the size, no matter what's in them, these paper white cups, they're filled with, it could be a $2 Americano or just a quick coffee, but more often than not it's a six or $7, $8 latte, right? We're able to take these cups and we're able to walk around town showing our wealth subconsciously. We'll walk around like this, this is our wealth, I'm sipping on it, but when you're finished the cup is empty, the cup is worthless to you, it becomes garbage, it becomes recycling. So we just toss it away. So it's interesting to see how we do that in our society where we waste everything. But our traditional potlatch society doesn't waste a lot of things, we see our wealth in a dramatically different way. And for me, the discarding pile of these cups came about from that notion of how Canada over the census colonization has really treated the indigenous society, how they have just discarded my people, discarded your people and just tossed our culture away through this banning, through this ban. And the piece really came about from hearing a story. I can't remember who was telling the story. I think it was someone in my family. They were talking about a chief at a potlatch. And commonly what would happen at a potlatch is the chiefs would all get together after a potlatch and essentially have a pissing contest. It's called boasting, let's say boast, they boast. And they get around, they sit around the fire and they sing these little songs and they chant and they boast and they say, hey, I had a potlatch last year and I gave away a bunch of stuff and this is how rich I am. And they'd break off a piece of their copper no matter how big, depending how big they wanted to seem how much their wealth was they can break off a piece of copper, of their copper and then they would offer it to the host chief. If the host chief recognized that his wealth or his potlatch would he give away because that's the essence of the potlatch, the more you give away the wealthier you are. If he recognized that he gave more away he would have to break off a smaller piece or he would break off a bigger piece to indicate that he gave away less. In the background, there was this one chief. He was just thinking about this, watching these two guys boast. And he just had this piphany. I had a potlatch a couple of years ago and I gave away so much stuff. I gave away all my wealth and it's represented to you and this copper shield. I'm gonna prove my wealth to you right now by destroying my copper. And he threw it in the ocean. He said, I don't need my wealth anymore because it's just material stuff. And that's it. And so essentially that's how I came to install these cups in this discarded pile to draw connections to that traditional story that I heard and to how Canada has treated its indigenous population over the time of colonization. This is the fourth install that I've done with it. And this is most recently in Sakahan, which is the big indigenous exhibit of the National Gallery that happened this summer in Ottawa. It was 83 indigenous artists from all over the world which was an amazing experience. I went down for the opening and I met other white Indians from all over the world. I was blown away. I'm like, oh my God, you're a native too and you're from Sweden? This is cool. So I installed it for the installation there. And it was really powerful. It was a really powerful room. I don't know if anyone got down to go see it or not. But it was installed kind of in the first, it started off on the top floor. So if you walked into the top floor, this is the first room you'd walk into. And so you're greeted by my installation of cups. Along the wall on the side was Nadia Meyers Beaded Indian Act. And on the other wall facing Nadia's piece and facing my piece was Lawrence Paul's Shaka which he used to shoot the Indian Act. So it was a very, very powerful room. Anyways, when I installed this work, I really want to try and install it in a new configuration every time just to kind of challenge myself. Because every time I installed it a couple of times the exact same way, but I challenged myself to try and make it, make this discarded pile look like a discarded pile. It's very hard to do. Anyways, for this installation, I discarded it, made this big discarded pile in the center. I'm gonna use this fancy laser pointer right now. And then these four guys right here, what I did for this installation is I was paying respect to the four founding members of the Adelamoor movement, the four women who stepped up to engage Canada to step up and see past the oppression that the Canadian government was putting everybody through to challenge everybody in Canada to step up and fight for the environment. Not just for indigenous peoples, but the fight for the environment, fight for Canada's fabric as a whole. So I installed these four cups that Greeks see when you walk in to pay respect to those four women who started that movement. Over the course of the last couple months, there's been news and stuff that the Adelamoor movement has now been dead. It's gone. The funny thing is when people say that, I always like to correct them by saying, the movement may be dead. This particular movement may be dead, the indigenous resistance movement is never gonna go away. We're gonna be fighting for a very long time till we get the recognition from the Canadian government to treat us like equal people. Because under the government, I'm not an equal person and that's really sad. I'm gonna talk more about that later. This is the Silence series. Again, dealing with the Potlatch Band and the Indian Act. I started off with the top one right there. That was Silence number one. And I was just trying to think about, because I was painting so many drums at the time, trying to really think about challenging my work and challenging my own perceptions of the work that I was doing. And this even challenged the notion of the drum because these drums for me were a canvas. It was a service for me to paint on. They'd get collected by people, by institutions, and they'd be hung on walls. And they weren't really used for their intended purpose of the drumbeat and producing ceremony, producing culture. So I challenged my notions of that by stacking them up and referencing the Hudson's Bay Blankets. The Hudson's Bay Blankets were used during potlatches. They were given away. They were prized for their warmth and value. They were given away to people as a gift. Because if you do attend a potlatch, you do walk away with something. Everyone who goes through potlatch walks away with a gift. Because that's the essence of the potlatch. So I started stacking these drums on the floor, painting them to look like Hudson's Bay Blankets and painting the point lines on them to indicate the worth of these people through these point lines. Traditionally, the point lines and the blankets reference one point line equals one fur. So if you go into the Hudson's Bay Trading Post back in the day, you bring in four beaver furs, you get one four point blanket. And I stacked them up to reference the potlatch giveaway because I'd seen a number of photographs. And even at the Museum of Civilization, as it used to be called, in Gapno, they have the Northwest Coast Longhouse procession on the ground floor and there's a Kwakwakiwak House. And as soon as you walk in, you see all these artifacts that are gonna be given away at a potlatch and there's this huge wall of Hudson's Bay Blankets that were just stacked up. And I've seen these photographs of just hundreds and thousands of Bay Blankets are stacked up to be given away at potlatches. So this is what these pieces specifically reference. So number one, two and three across the top. This one down here in the bottom corner is called Silence the Harbinger. And to me, I wanted to also reference this piece of how these blankets were used to spread smallpox and tuberculosis amongst the first peoples through Canada's history. And this is a little known fact. And this is stuff that I discovered through my education through Emily Carr and even through my self education after I've left here that there's a lot of hidden history in Canada that we don't learn about at various levels of our scholastic careers. And so I really wanted to bring this story to the forefront to tell people that these blankets were used to enact genocide in Canada, but we don't talk about it. So if you were to peel, this is called the Harbinger to indicate that this blanket is coming to get you. And the red line to me references the smallpox infection. If you were to peel off every drum layer, you'd see this smallpox ovoid continue on to every drum. The one in the center is on number five. It's one of two or three that I did kind of just abstract the Hudson Bay iconography even further. And then the one on the very bottom there, I can't remember what I called that one, but I painted that one for a good friend of mine. He's a performance artist, his name is Terrence Hool. A very strong artist, he's Blackfoot. He's from Calgary, Alberta. He contacted me one day and he told me that he was, and this is just when I was just moving out to Montreal. And he said, I'm gonna be going out to Val d'Or to do a residency just outside Montreal. And I want you to paint me a drum. I wanna use your drum in a ceremony that I'm doing. And to me that I was really honored that Terrence think about me in that way because my drums normally don't get played. They're treated as works of art and they get hung on a wall, which is great. But they never get used. And so I was really honored that Terrence asked me to do that. And I started doing a bit of research into the Hudson Bay blanket at that time. And I discovered that there was a blanket that was issued to, I don't remember for what reason, but it was issued in the royal colors to pay respect to the queen. And at that same time, Prince Charles was adopted into Terrence's Blackfoot community. And so I painted it in the royal purple colors with these kind of abstracted ovoids breaking up the space and the four point lines. And Terrence used it in his performance. He ended up giving it to his father, who was a traditional powwow dancer, which again was another just great hit to me that these things were being played and being honored and being used. And Terrence was telling me a while back when I ran into him, he said, no, my dad, I gave him the drum. He loves it, but he's a little bit embarrassed to bring it out because he goes to these powwows and there's all these other guys with these little chump drums and Terrence were just chump, chump, drums and he brings out this Cadillac of drums and he starts playing on it a little. So it's interesting. This is Silence the Hidden. Again, stacked up drums and these ones, this one is an insulation of 67 stacked drums, again to reference the potlatch band in Canada. This one I painted tone on tone, so the kind of the whitish color you're seeing here, that's actually skin tone paint and this is actually the skin. So I have the skin producing itself as the negative space of the ovoids in the abstracted form lines from the Northwest Coast. I installed them back into the corner because I wanted to indicate that the people were back into a corner through colonization over the years and even still so today. And I painted them with skin tone, so I wanted to indicate that this is hidden notion of the hidden history in Canada. And I didn't paint any point lines on these drums because I wanted to indicate that the government continues to consider us worthless in terms of the eyes of the colonizer. To juxtapose that, this is Silence the Hidden and I had these, Silence the Burning, sorry, I had these facing off, this is at the Equinox Gallery here in Vancouver and I had these facing off against each other, so this one was in kind of almost the center of the room looking over at the other drums and these are stacked up. And it's called Silence the Burning because this is one of the first pieces that I made to reference my family's history through colonization, whereas before I was really referencing my personal history, I started thinking about my own personal history or what made up my history and that's going back and doing research about my own family. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather chief, Billy Asu, was a highly regarded chief on the Northwest Coast and I started doing some research into him and his iconography as a human being has made his way into my work a number of times. And this one specifically references a story that I heard that my grandmother had told me about around the same time, I think it was just before the potlatch bust in 1921 in Alert Bay where an Indian agent approached my great-great-grandfather chief Billy Asu and said, I know you're gonna have a potlatch, it's legal, you're not allowed to do that. So you got two options. You can either continue on with your culture and you could produce your potlatch and we're gonna come bust it, we're gonna come confiscate all your regalia, we're gonna find you and we'll probably throw you in jail. Or the nice guy that he was, just give me all your stuff right now and I'll walk away. I'll let you sit with that one for a second, you said. And I'll come back and we'll talk about it. So chief Billy Asu went to his village, went to his people and said, this is what's been presented to me, this is the ultimatum that I have. We can give up our regalia and we could just go on with our lives and we can kind of maybe try and keep our culture continue on our grounds. Or we can continue on the ground in their culture anyways, we can have our potlatch, we can have their celebration, but we're gonna get busted, I'm gonna get thrown in jail, we're all gonna get fined. You know, what do you want me to do? And the people said to him, just give it up. We don't need it, it's just material. We need you, you're our inspiration. We're wanting you to stay around. With that, my great-great grandfather dragged all his regalia down to the beach and he burnt it. Just destroyed it all. I don't need it, it's just material. I can make more. So that's silenced the burning. This is Ellipsis and Billy and the Chiefs this is the quick insulation shot of the work. And this was inspired, this is my great-great grandfather right here. This is Chief Billy Asu. And these are the recordings that I found of him. Right here, actually my mother found these. Right there, my mother. She was working at the treaty office one day and she gets a call from somebody, I don't remember who. And he was just thumbing through this box of records and it said, free or trash? And he finds this collection of records and he thinks they're important, they must be important, they look old, they look interesting. He did a quick search on Google which brought him to my mother through the treaty office that she works at. And he called her up and said, I found these records and a free or trash bin, you know, do you guys want them? And he, and my mom said yes, bring them over. And I ended up getting them for myself to digitize and to produce copies for my community. And I started thinking about these records as a conceptual records of the potlatch band itself. I found it interesting that Chief Billy Asu was allowed to enter a recording studio to sing these songs for an ethnologist but was not allowed to leave that studio to sing those songs for himself or for his culture or for his family. And that's what ellipsis is. This was in Beat Nation in 2012 here at the Vancouver Art Gallery. And it's an installation of 137 copper records to indicate the Indian act in Canada. And the Indian act in Canada is, I see it as apartheid and it is apartheid. It segregates our society. It says that, you know, at one point in Canada's history it says you can't leave the reserve, this is segregation. And it is segregation. And I think about it in the ways of, how we as Canada have stepped up numerous times to fight oppression around the world but we continued to oppress our own people. We stepped up and said to South Africa, apartheid is wrong. But South Africa was looking at our playbook. We stepped up to say, some people, the Canadian government supports Israel but a lot of people support Palestine and Canada but they recognize that Israel has looked at our playbook and said, oh, this is good stuff. This is oppression. You can keep these people segregated. And this is essentially what the Indian act was designed to do and this is essentially what the potlatch band was designed to do. So I installed this 137 copper discs and an inverted equalizer pattern to indicate the waveforms that I was listening to while I was thinking about this piece and the other piece I'm gonna show you of how even though we've been oppressed or there is oppression in our society for 137 years, our culture has continued on the ground to make sure that we sustain our way of life and just sustain our culture from across Canada. This is Billy and the Chiefs, the complete band collection. Again, at the banks of our gallery of beat nation in 2012. And these ones were 12 inch records, 12 inch drums and 10 inch drums painted to look like spinning records. And I grouped them all up into collections. And again, this one was installed on the opposite wall of ellipsis, installed in the correct way up for an equalizer pattern to indicate that we are strong and that we are keeping on. And 67, again, references the potlatch band in Canada. And these are the individual collections. The one on top here, Billy and the Chiefs, that was the first one that I did just to give it a bit of a test to see how it was gonna work in terms of the painting, what I was gonna do with it. And then I started making all these little collections of these drums, these sessions as I was calling them. And I was recognizing, because one of my favorite bands, the Porcupine Tree, which my buddy Jeff got me into, I don't know if he's in the room or not, but they record all their music in these sessions. They just sit in the studio for how many days and they make all these recordings of their work. And I found that really inspirational that they just go, they sit, they lock themselves away and they just make all this work. And so when I was making this work and I painted all these drums, 67 drums in 20 days, which was just nuts. Cause I was living in Montreal. I had to get the drums made out here. They were shipped across the country. I had to let them warm up cause they got cold. And then I had 20 days to paint them and then send them back out again. So I just locked myself in my studio on these little painting sessions. And that's how I ended up titling these works in these various different sessions. So we've got the Raven recordings, the sessions for lovers and fighters, the Indian agent sessions and other underground hits, the Feast Collection, Live from the Latch. The Medicine Woman APs pays respect to the only woman singing on the recordings, the Indian giver recordings and the undersea sessions. And when I was painting these works and I was thinking about titles, cause as I was making these, I was really trying to figure out, even just in the titles of the specific sessions themselves, I was trying to think about, what am I gonna call this piece in general, the series in general? And I started thinking about it in terms of, well, what if my great-great-grandfather was like a big band player or something, or like a rock-ability star and he had a really cool band, what would it be called? Billy and the Chiefs, that sounds kind of 50s-ish, kind of 40s-ish, so this is Billy and the Chiefs. This is the poster that I did for the Vancouver Art Gallery for their fundraising initiatives. It's called Live from the Latch and it's presented to you in a copper shape to reference the chief's copper and you would break off a piece of your copper to be emitted into the paw latch. And this is a piece for the Strict Law Tour in 1921, the Winter Paw Latch in Village Island and this is the paw latch that was busted in 1921. So this is the famous paw latch bust from Alert Bay. And it's Billy and the Chiefs, the Headline and Tour, a band by the Canadian government, Strict Law Tour, 1921, featuring We Must Dance. And this is me being funny, but there's this unwritten rule within the Paw Latch Society, within the Likwatuakwaqwaqwaq people that it is within our fabric of being, that we have to dance, that we have to perform our culture, that we have to live our culture. And as a little side note to that, like I was playing my daughter who's 17 months, this is these drumming songs and she just started bopping. You know, I don't know if this is the baby thing, but just to see here, just reach in and take that traditional music and just be inspired by it was really, really cool. And it really kind of made me think about how we are through our Paw Latch Society ingrained in us to dance and perform our culture. Anyways, also featuring the Kwak Sisters, which is a play on words for two reasons, the Kwakwaqwaqwaq people, but also there's a family from the camp wherever Kate Magyari called the Kwak Sisters. And I showed this piece to my grandmother and she's reading it and she's got her glasses on and she gets the Kwak Sisters and she just laughs her ass off. It was just funny to see her do that. Also appearances by the War Canoes and the Hamata and special guests. If you attend this, there's door prizes, names, Hudson's Bay Blankets, feasts, all ages. And I did this, I sketched it out first and brought it into my computer and digitized it and have it printed. When I first finished it, it was just like your standard print so you didn't have all these kind of jagged edges and stuff. But what I thought about is I really wanted to make it look like this is a found object from that era that could be seen in an anthropology museum. And through the course of the past year, the MOA has acquired it for their own collection. So I believe it's up in their Kwakwaqwaqwaq display case right now, which was pretty fun, pretty fun. Recreating language and identity. And this kind of started off through a series of paintings that I started in 2009 called the Longhouse series. And at first I was just really embracing this notion of abstraction that I was talking about earlier. And I started thinking about it in terms of the abstraction of abstraction. Because I recognize that movements like the surrealists and the cubists were looking at Northwest Coast and indigenous cultures from all over the world and being inspired by it and using it for their own purposes to create their own artwork. So I kind of turned a lens around on it. I saw that they were looking at me and my culture and I started looking back at them and their culture and being inspired by it. And that's how I came up with this kind of terminology called the abstraction of abstraction. The one on the bottom is called Ovoida's Language. And my good friend Dana Warren, who's now the curator of the Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg, came by the studio one day to take a look at what I was working on and talked about the show that we were gonna be doing together. And the first thing she said, and this never really dawned on me until she said it, but she walked in and she saw this painting at this stage and it was finished. And she said, that's cool, that looks like graffiti. And I said, yeah, it does, that's interesting. I never thought about that before, but you're right, it does look like graffiti. And so I started thinking about it in terms of graffiti as a language and graffiti as a culture itself, and started playing with all these different layers and levels within the surface itself and started thinking about language and the recreational language and how my culture's language has only 13 fluent speakers left out of 1,000 people in our nation all together, all three nations together, it's about 1,000 people. And there's only 13 or 14 fluent speakers left alive and they're pretty much all elders. So at any point in time, we can lose that language fully. And so I started thinking about, what would happen if we weren't colonized? Where would have our culture had gone? Where would have it developed to? Because there's always this conception or misconception or stereotype that indigenous cultures in North America didn't have a written form of communication. But I started thinking, I can read Totem Pole, I can read that mask, I can tell you what that mask is, I can tell you what the Totem Pole says. It is a language to me. And so I started thinking about it in terms of language and so that's why I call the top one dialect. And the top one here is called phonology. And this one I was really, and at this time when I was painting this, these specific series of work and these specific bodies of work, I was acting very intuitively when I was painting. I was just, I had these big oval templates and just plop them down, trace them out and then fill them in with the color. And then specifically for phonology, I kind of laid out these big spaces and these big shapes. And then kind of the other kind of wiggly bits here, I started being very intuitive with these brushstrokes and I just, I didn't have any layout at all. I just went to town and sort of painted these lines. And I was very conscious of thinking about when I was painting these lines of Asian character writing in Egyptian hieroglyphics. And I kind of started stipulating in my mind that I think that the old boy patterns themselves could have developed into a form of written communication to communicate and to be written communication much like character writing. The piece on the bottom is called Spont. And that one was painted to as a response to the 2009 sockeye run that was going into the Fraser River. The government scientists at the time were predicting 16 million salmon sockeye would be coming back into the river to spawn. But through some twists of fates, science of nature, 1.6 million sockeye returned to the river, which was a dramatic loss. It made me, it made my heart sink because this is a food source from my people, but not only my people, but all Northwest Coast peoples depend heavily on the salmon. And it started, it really hit me that I really wanted to think about this. And I painted this painting called Spont and it spawned salmon colors. But the year later in 2010, they returned. They were predicting, the government scientists were predicting 1.6 million sockeye would come back to the Fraser River. That's 16 million showed up. So maybe they got the papers wrong that year. I don't really know. My uncles talk about it like the scientists really don't know anything about the salmon. But so yeah, anyways, 16 million sockeye came back that year and everyone was all excited and happy and everyone in my family. And this is, for me, it's a bit of a contentious issue because I see that we are wiping out this species. We are bringing them to near extinction levels and it's hard for me to say that because I spent my later teen lives as a fisherman. I spent my life on a fishing boat. And I see how the sockeye and the salmon have helped produce my culture and produce my family and make sure that we're living. So it's very hard for me to criticize and say extinction. But I think it needs to be said so we know so we can try and figure out how to preserve it. So this piece was painted in response to the return to indicate the salmon have come back but we need to be wary of it and not overfish the population. This one's called Neon Supper Club with the hashtag. And this one was painted in response and this was the last longhouse that I've done thus far. I've been working on one in the studio and that will quickly finish this one, I'm gonna show it to you. But this is the last one I've done thus far. It's called Neon Supper Club and it does pay respect to Vancouver's former title of being the neon capital of the world. At one point there was more neon here than there was in Las Vegas. And I saw all these photographs from Fred Herzog of Vancouver and its heyday. And I started seeing all these photographs of my grandparents coming down to the big city to practice these kind of new cultural traditions of going to these Supper Clubs. So I've all these photographs of my grandparents and aunts and uncles in these Supper Clubs partaking in the kind of colonial society at the height of the potlatch band. So what I found interesting was that my family and my grandparents weren't allowed to practice our traditional culture, but they were allowed to practice the colonial culture. And that's what this piece really references. Social media influences. Again, there's my great great grandfather, Chief Billy Asu, and I forgot to put photos in here but I got the try on his blanket and it's at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau. My auntie Mitzi told me, when I was going out there for something, I don't remember what it's going out there for. I might have been going out there for a jury or an art show or something. And my auntie Mitzi said to me, well, you know you're a great, great grandfather's regalia. Is that the Museum of Man? It's what she called it, because that's what it was called at the time when she knew it. And I said, no, I had no clue. He said, well, I'll write you a letter and you could try it on. And I'm like, okay. And so I took my letter, I emailed the lady first and I said, hey, my name's Sunny Asu, my great, great grandfather's regalia's in the collection. My auntie Mitzi gave me a letter. I want to come try it. And she's so sweet, she's so cute. She's 92, she's this tiny, tiny person. And she gave me this letter and I went there and they brought out the regalia. They brought out the blanket, the chokeup blanket. They brought out the frontlet, which has these amazing beautiful ermine skins on the back. And they brought out the dance apron and the leggings. I was only allowed to try on the blanket because I'd probably break everything else because I'm so huge. But I found out my great-great-grandfather was actually a very big manufacturer as well. Anyways, when I put this blanket on, and it was funny because the conservators at the museum, they're wearing the right gloves and I'm just touching this thing with my hands. And they're picking it up and they're looking at me, they're looking at the blanket, they're looking at me, they're like, are you sure? Are we actually allowed to put this on you? I'm like, yeah, it's, you got a letter. It's on my hand, it's 92, come on, you can do this. And so they put it on my shoulders and it was just amazing, like I welled up. I almost broke into tears because as soon as that blanket hit my shoulders, this energy, this circulated right down through me, hit the floor and came back up and it was just this amazing experience that has inspired me to think about the work and to think about that traditional weaving. We got the weaving, the chokeup style is more prominent on the northern northwest coast, the Haida people use it, the Shimsham people and the Tingla people use it. And it's a specific form of weaving to that specific area. But through a series of wars, marriages, trades, potlatches, the chokeup iconography has woven its way down into the southern coasts. But it is an iconography or a piece of regalia that does denounce your status. It does show your status. And my great-great-grandfather, Chief Bilay Asu, was high in status on the northwest coast. He was widely respected by every people along the northwest coast. There was a story I heard, I need to confirm it, but I heard that when he passed away in the late 60s that the Canadian government did the military flyby by reserve to pay respect to him because that's how respected he was, but not only our people, but by the colonial government as well. And so this notion of status and how the blanket came into my family, the blanket came into my family through an arranged political marriage between the Mungo Martin family. And Mungo Martin was a very important guac-guac-guac-carver in the northwest coast. He has a couple poles in the total marry in Stanley Park. The big tall pole that's out by Vanny Park, that's his. He's got poles in Europe as well. A highly respected cultural maker and a very important family. And he approached my great-great-grandfather again recognizing the importance of my family and said, we need to come together to preserve our culture. We need to come together and marry the two families together. But it was a political marriage. There was no actual physical marriage involved. But through that, I called a dowry because I don't know how else to describe it. The Martin family gave my family their Chilkat regalia. And that was a status symbol and a status update. For my people and for my family. And that's what inspired this series here called the Chilkat series. And this is a status update. And I really wanted to try and think about it in terms of our modern society and how we utilize various modes of status within our society through social media. We're able to, I look at my great-grandfather who had this immense practice and this immense stature to him. But here I am going on Facebook posting photos of my daughter and my food. And so I really wanted to try and figure out how we go from that importance to that importance. And this is what this series is really kind of exploring. So this is the Chilkat series. We've got Tweetblast, Digital Native, Angry Birds. Because I was playing Angry Birds like crazy so I decided to paint a pinnacle Angry Birds. And Trending. These are the latest ones that I've done. This is Photo Bomb. So I've got all these little guys popping up and photo bombing the Hanata. This is Adel Amour painted in response in support of the Adel Amour movement. This is Potlatch Shades of Grey. I was actually gonna try and paint 50 different shades of gray, but I got at six and I'm like, I'm not going any further than six right now. This is the Selfie series. Those last ones that I showed you in this series was done for my first solo show in Montreal at a gallery called Art Mere. This is the Selfie series. Again, trying to explore how we place importance on ourselves through social media. And there's this phenomenon called the Selfie. So you hold your phone like this and take a photo and post it on Instagram. So we've got Shameless Selfie at the bottom. Selfie, do you wanna see my status card? And Selfie 2013. Challenging the Authority of Preservation and Consumption. This is the Longing series. And that's my stepfather Jack right there. We were going through these piles of discarded cedar on our log home developments sites on my reserve in Campbell River. Looking for usable bits of cedar for my mom to use for her basketry or whatever she wanted to do with. Cause we recognize that, you know, we have all these logs that this company is going down into our unseceded territories, cutting them down, bringing them back to our traditional territory, stripping them down and making all these elaborate log homes. And they're tearing them back down and they're shipping them off around the world to the people who can afford them. But there's all this waste on the site. There's sawdust, there's cedar bark. There's little bits of wood that don't get used for the log homes. And Jack and I are going through these piles of wood and he holds up these two pieces. And he said, Sunny, don't these look like masks? And I said, yeah, Jack, you're right. These do look like masks. And he says, I bet you could do something interesting with these. And I said, I bet you're right. And so I did. And what I did is I mounted these on traditional, not traditional, but museum quality mask mounts. So I approached the museum of anthropology and I said, can you recommend someone to me that could make me some mask mounts? And I mounted 31 of these masks that I rescued, reclaimed, from this log home development site. And they had sat in my studio for about five years before I did the show called Longing in West Vancouver. And I had no idea what I was gonna be doing at that time. I was just collecting them. Every time I go back home, I just grab more and more and more. So my studio smelled like glorious cedar but also beans from the burrito place that was underneath me. That was a really neat smell just right here on a daily basis. So yeah, so I had these things sitting in my studio and I thought about augmenting them, adding things to them, sanding them down, painting them. But as I started to look at them, I just started to just appreciate the fact that they were faces and that they were telling me a story and that the kind of poetics that the chain saw paired with the growth rings were telling me the story, this image of a face or a person or a personality was coming out of these works. And that spawned into this other series that I did where I wanted to explore the authenticity of who is an indigenous person, indigenous person and who is an indigenous artist. And so I started thinking about challenging those authorities. And to me, especially in Vancouver and the Northwest Coast, the authorities of who is an indigenous artist and an indigenous person is the Anthropology Museums, is the First Nations Commercial Galleries here in Vancouver, and is the tourist traps, as I call them, where you can go down and you can buy a Paramakasin, near Dreamcatcher, and you can say, I got an Indian thing in Canada, that's awesome. I installed this shot, so I installed the guy up here in the corner, number 13. And before, I called the series Longing, the series was gonna be called Faceless. And to me, I was politicizing the work through the title by thinking about how First Nations people in Canada have been or are faceless through our contemporary society. But when I installed number 13 in the museum of Anthropology, and it was up there for a month and a half, so it is the little intervention that was there. I made this little title of cartoon, like the numbers for them and everything. And when I stepped back to look at it, to allow my friend Eric Dice, who's the photographer for the series, I stepped back and I just looked up at number 13, and I just noticed the way that I placed the head and the way that the light was catching it, that he was longing for something, he was missing something in his life. And I just kind of looked at what he was looking at, and he was looking at all the other artifacts in those display cases. And I started placing these emotions onto number 13, thinking about, well, I could have been that mask, I could have been that rattle, I could have been that basket, I could have been that feasible, but through a series of weird fates, I became garbage. I have no purpose in life. I am not art, I'm not culture, I'm just waste. But for me, mounting them on those museum quality standards and placing them in these situations, I gave them the purpose of being culture and the purpose of being objects of appreciation. This is a shot called the Equinox Gallery, which I wanted to do to investigate that First Nations bubble of authenticity in Vancouver and in Seattle and wherever else that has these kind of unique First Nations galleries. This was installed in a show, it wasn't in the show, but it was just installed for the photograph. At a show, I think it was called The Inside Passage or Past the Present, I can't remember which one it was. But it was this collector, Don Ellis, that had all of his objects from his own personal collection that he's been collecting over the years, these post 20s, post 1900s, early 1800s objects from my culture. And so I placed them in these, by these oolukin dishes and these paddles on the wall. The oolukin dishes were really interesting. These ones right here, let's not talk about my work for a second, but these guys right here, they're still oolukin grease embedded in the wood. And so when the pieces were warmed up during the day, when the lights were on, you can actually see the grease come out of the wood, which is really, really beautiful. Oops, I hope I didn't laser somebody there. This is Robert's gallery and gifts. I'm too bad that my cousin didn't come by today to see this because this is her shop. And I wanted to investigate that tourist culture about how we have these galleries across Canada. It doesn't matter if you're in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, we're gonna have one of these shops that pedals these objects to people, that they can go in there and they can think they're getting this unique object of culture, but they're actually walking away with a mass-produced item that may or may not have been made in China. So I put the mask in the shop and I put him there and took the photograph. When I was giving a presentation out at Bishop's University last winter, there was a student there who was from North Vancouver. And he's talking to me about my work, he's talking about my paintings, asking me these questions about them. And he said, oh, by the way, that shop, Robert's Gallery and Gifts, that's on the corner of Brandville and something, right? Like, that's where it is. Oh, it's in Gastown? And I'm like, actually, no, it's in Steveston. It's like the complete opposite in a town. So what I thought interesting there was that it really hit home, that he said that to me, like he thought this was a gallery that was somewhere else in the city, which really kind of made it clear to me that this work was really just kind of speaking to the notion that every time you go into one of these shops, you're always gonna find the same thing. I think I'm running out of time here pretty quick. But I'm coming up to the end. This is the series that I'm working on right now. It's called the happiest future and it's really exploring this hidden history in Canada. And these are direct quotes from Duncan Campbell Scott, who was Canada's head of Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, I think it was. He was also a celebrated Canadian poet. He wrote a lot. He romanticized the Indian a lot through his poetry and through his work, but he was very oppressive towards them in his day job. His mandate was assimilation. So he says the happiest future for the Indian race is absorption into the general population. This is the policy of our government. What I find interesting there with this direct quote and thinking about how the current government is treating the indigenous people, I could take a Duncan Campbell Scott's name and place Stephen Harper. I can go back to the 60s during the White Paper incident and place in Jean Cretchens, man, because he was the head of Department of Indian Affairs back then. So it's interesting to see that this notion of propaganda or assimilation has been produced in Canada, but not in a visual way. And that's what this series is really trying to investigate through me is I really wanna try and get to the root of the hate in Canada against the indigenous people, the bigotry that is out there. And I really wanna figure it out because I'm perplexed by it. Because we as Canadians feel we live in utopia. We feel that we are just, we're united, we're tolerant, we're welcoming of all people or not. This is a country that's not based on that. You can think about what's going on in Quebec right now. This is the exact same thing. We're thinking about banning objects of religion through this notion of assimilation, essentially. So I found it really interesting that we have these perceptions of ourselves as Canadians, but we have the perceptions of hate against indigenous people. And it really came about for me by scrolling through different media sites like CBC, The Globe and Mail, whatever it may be, blog posts, the talk about stories of indigenous people in Canada, whether they be positive or whether they be negative, whether it's the abnormal or movements or whatever. There's always this element of hate that comes up. And it's an element of hate that sometimes is very on the surface and a very gut reaction to, oh, we pay your taxes, you should just shut up. You're just a dirty Indian, assimilate, get with the rest of society. You got your free house, you got your free land, you get your healthcare taken care of. And these are all things that I see on these websites by other Canadians, and I really want to try and figure out where this comes from. And for me, it is the words of Duncan Campbell Scott and it's perpetuated as hate. And so this series is really starting to think about propaganda and how at some point in Canada's history, this visual propaganda must have been populated out there to spread the intolerance and to spread the bigotry. This is a shot of it in Toronto right now. It's up on a show called Ghost Dance. It's curated by Steve Loft. So they're sort of big, they're 18 by 36 and I installed them in a line there. This is called Selective History. And this is another Duncan Campbell Scott quote. Hopefully I can read it from here. I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think it is a matter of fact that we ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone Our objective is to continue until there's not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian department that is the object of this bill. This is assimilation, this is segregation, this is apartheid, this is Canada's history and we don't learn it in school. This is information that I had to seek out while being here at Emily Carr and after leaving school. This is information that's hidden from us. This is information that really challenges the fabric of Canada's identity, of being tolerant and just. And I presented to you in such a way that I'm hopefully challenging people to step up to the notion of tolerance and understanding and utopia to learn about Canada's history and understand it and help indigenous people through the issues of colonization and not belittle them anymore, not berate them. And I called it Selective History because through this quote, Duncan Campbell Scott is saying there's an Indian problem. In the white paper they were saying there was an Indian problem. In the Omni-Bus budget bill that Stephen Harper passed, there was an Indian problem. It's not an Indian problem, it's a Selective History problem. On the bottom here, right there. Oh, that's just his name, Duncan Campbell Scott's Head of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1913, 1932. These quotes I got from Wikipedia, they're out there, you can find them online. These are two pieces within that series as well. We have Chief Speaker in 11 Nations. This is a direct quote from our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper in 2009 at the G8 G20 Conference in Philadelphia. We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all the things that many people admire about great powers, but none of the things that threaten or bother them. So his words in my piece are crossing out First Nations, Aboriginal, Native Indian. Sometimes I don't have any words after I read that quote because this is Stephen Harper. He prides himself on being one of the most history knowledgeable people of history, of Canadian history. But he says these words and it's just like, are you serious? He actually said these things. A couple of days later after the quote hit the news and people were tweeting about it and blogging about it, he comes up and says, oh, I didn't mean, I meant that we don't have any external history of colonization. So we don't go to somewhere like the Philippines and take them all. He didn't say the Philippines, I was saying it as an example. The bottom one is called 11 Nations. And this is a quote from Pauline Mouaw, who is now the Premier of Quebec. And she's in the news a lot recently. It is the responsibility of everyone that wishes to call Quebec their home to learn and assimilate the local culture and not replace it with their own. And her words cross out the 11 nations, the 11 traditional First Nations of what we now call Quebec. We're running out of time and I'm almost finished. So thank you for bearing with me. This is Product Rez. This is a piece that I did in 2011, 2012, first for a show called Decolonize Me that's now touring around the country. It's taking on this identity of consumption culture through the red campaign that Apple, Starbucks, Bono has adopted. You go out, you spend $35 on a t-shirt, $0.35 that goes to help people in Africa with AIDS. What I found interesting is that we will go out on our way to consume, to help people. But we will continually ignore the people in our own backyard. And so that's what these pieces represent to me. This is There Is Hope for RISE, number one and two. RISE and Round Dance. And this, again, was produced for a show, the Burnaby Art Gallery, the artist poster show that I was part of. And the Burnaby Art Gallery commissioned me to do these works. And it was inspired by the Idol No More movement. So the gallery wanted to produce these posters to hand out for Idol No More round dances, information sessions, teachings. And I developed 12 of them that have the common phrases from within the movement. There's RISE, Round Dance, Never Idol, Idol No More, Idol No More, Learn, Teach, Challenge Stereotypes, Lead, Confront, Resist, Decolonize. And they all have the four little ovoids on the bottom to pay respect to the four founding women of the Idol No More movement. But it's done in this kind of propaganda series style. And I was influenced by Shepherd Ferry's Hope poster that he did for Obama during his first presidential campaign. And this is my latest piece here. This is called Lila's Desk. And this is a story about my grandmother's first day of high school. My grandmother was given the great honor to be allowed to convene on to high school after grade eight. Up until then, it was illegal for First Nations people to attend school after the eighth grade. They were either subjugated to a residential school or an Indian day school. An Indian day school is a residential school throughout the state. If you're a man or a boy at a residential school or a day school, you're taught to be a laborer. If you're a woman, you're taught to be a housewife. As a funny kind of side story to this, I remember when I finished grade eight, I was in junior high at the time. It was my first year of junior high. And my grandfather was still alive. And he says to me, and he helped raise me, and he says to me, I'm so proud of you for continuing on and going into grade nine. You have no idea how proud I am of you. And I just looked up and said, well, thanks. It's grade nine. I still have four more years. What's going on? And he told me, I dropped out. I became a pool shark. And then I eventually became a fisherman. And he was one of the youngest commercial fishing captains in British Columbia for the BC Packers. And I just thought he had enough of school, because that's what I heard of. Like when you drop out of school, you just had enough. You don't need to go anymore, whatever. And for me, it was just, it was such a small achievement, grade eight, that it didn't really make sense to me at the time. But I found that he was not legally allowed to go to school. So he was older than my grandmother. So he stopped going. He said, I've stopped. I was done. He was done. Anyways, so for this piece, my grandmother was allowed to go to school. So in the late 1930s, early 1940s, they changed the law within the Indian Act to allow students to continue on to high school, if they wished. What my grandmother, and she told me the story a lot. What I found out through the story is that when she started going to school is that she was super far behind. They didn't really teach her anything. She didn't really know how to read all that well. She could not write very much. She barely knew arithmetic. But she failed. She went on. She graduated. She made it to grade 12. But on her first day of high school, of grade nine, a boy named Peter McFedrin popped the bar of soap on her desk and said, you're just a dirty Indian. I had a good laugh with friends and that's it. And it's a sad story because, you know, this is a story that can resonate to a lot of people in this room and to a lot of people within the residential school system because this is probably not a singular incident. And it's important that I tell the story because it really gives a human face to the issues. And that's essentially what I wanna do with my work is I wanna give the issues of colonization a human face because we are humans. You know, we were just treated not like humans. And this is what this piece is about. So it's a reclaimed 1930 school desk that I found on Craigslist. I refurbished it. I stripped it down. I sent it off all the crayon marks from various generations of kids playing on it. Refinished it. And I copper leafed the cast iron bottom parts and presented it as a story about my grandmother's first day. And I found the exact bar of soap on eBay called Life Boy. And this is the soap that she told me about. He plopped down a bar of Life Boy soap on my desk. You know, she remembers the details so clearly and it's eerie, it's so scary. You know, this is a story that stuck with her the effect of her entire life. You know, and this is a story that I'm constantly told and I wanna keep telling the story to you and to my daughter to remember, you know. So to lighten it up a little bit. This is just some recent stuff that I've done recently and I'm almost finished my presentation. This is TAG. This is at the corner of Seymour Pacific. It just got installed yesterday. It's my second public art piece. And it kind of lays claim to Vancouver through an indigenous discourse by using the iconography from my people and the various peoples in the lower mainland. And TAG references graffiti culture. On the off-ramp, on the Seymour off-ramp on the gravel bridge, there was all this graffiti on there that had been collecting over the years. But the developer washed it out because they don't wanna have that stuff in front of the people's eyes when they walk out of their houses every morning. And so I paid respect to that graffiti and to the artwork that was there by creating this piece called TAG. And I'm really excited that I was able to see it. It's finally installed. It's each, there's five panels in total and they're all around four by four, four foot by four foot. And so it's nice to actually see them in real life because I was just looking at them super small on my computer screen when I was making them. So it's really cool to have them out there. And then our last public art piece that I've done recently, this was from a couple of years ago for Vancouver's 125th anniversary. It's Indigenous Trail and Wagon Road. So if you're going along Kingsway, starting at Manning Kingsway all the way to Boundary, you will see these signs about every two or three blocks. And it's based on a story I heard that Kingsway was created from the wagon road that the settlers used. And the wagon road was created from the Indigenous Trail that the Indigenous people used that connected people around Cookitlam all the way down to where we are now. So this is paying respect to the Indigenous peoples in the lower mainland to give them a voice in Vancouver's colonial anniversary. And that's it. I thank you for your time. If you have any questions, thank you.