Coast Salish Art - Campus Gallery

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RECORD (RE)CREATE
Contemporary Coast Salish Art 

from the Salish Weave Collection

January 10 to April 12, 2015
Campus Gallery
Artist's Talk: lessLIE, January 10, 2pm

Jane Marston, Charles Elliott, Susan Point, Stan Greene, Andy Everson, Chris Paul, lessLIE, Maynard Johnny Jr., Angela Marston, Luke Marston, John Marston, Thomas Cannell, Kelly Cannell, Dylan Thomas

Record, (Re)create: Contemporary Coast Salish Art from the Salish Weave Collection showcases a selection of works by artists of Coast Salish ancestry from the Salish Weave Collection privately held in British Columbia. The fourteen artists featured are frequently unified as Coast Salish, but they are representatives of a number of distinct First Nations that span the southern coast of British Columbia, and extend into Washington and Oregon. The common term “Coast Salish” is in fact a designation initiated by anthropologists and linguists to classify a widely distributed group of coastal Indigenous Peoples who speak related languages, share social commonalities, and interconnected histories.

The artists in Record, (Re)create represent multiple generations and voices and work in a range of media such as carving, painting, serigraphy, glass, hide, metal, and cedar-bark weaving. This diversity of materials and approaches is employed in the artists’ negotiations between traditional and contemporary aesthetics. To record history and recreate form is central to the reimagining of culture through art

Recent exhibitions held at Canadian art institutions such as Ebb & Flow: Rande Cooke + Sonny Assu (Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2012), Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop & Aboriginal Culture (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012), Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years (Winnipeg, various locations, 2011), Man Turned To Stone: T’xwelatse (The Reach, 2011), and Urban Thunderbirds | Ravens in a Material World (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2013) demonstrate the role of the exhibition space as one that is crucial in engaging with the general population on issues of colonization – and decolonization. Additionally, this public space plays an important role in providing opportunities to establish connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

Organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
Curated by Toby Lawrence

Image: Susan Point, Salish Path, 2010, Serigraph, 38 x 28.5"