When Superhero Met Formline

Sonny Assu, whose lineage traces back to Kwakwaka’wakw chiefs, is known for mash-ups of pop culture and Northwest Coast iconography. Thank goodness he chose art over law school.

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Sonny Assu, a prominent member of the Generation X cohort of West Coast Indigenous artists, is known for work that brings together traditional iconography and pop culture with humour and political critique.

One of his early works, When Raven Became Spider, Embrace, saw him incorporate Spider-Man imagery into a traditional button blanket, a ceremonial robe embellished with mother-of-pearl buttons. Another early work, Coke-Salish, is a playful take on the soft drink slogan that cleverly enjoins viewers to “enjoy Coast-Salish territory.”

As a new book, Sonny Assu: A Selective History, makes clear, the artist came to these mash-ups naturally given his youthful interest in comics and sci-fi. He always drew, but his art career took off as he investigated who he was – a product of pop culture, far removed from Kwakwaka’wakw culture. He was raised in North Delta, a Vancouver bedroom community, as an "everyday average suburbanite" and only discovered his Indigenous heritage when he was eight. 

“I wasn’t interested in creating work that pandered to the exploitative stereotype,” he writes in A Selective History, published by Heritage House. “I was interested in telling my story. To this day, most of my work is autobiographical in nature to some degree.”

With an eye-catching cover, the book is attractive and effective. It’s heavy on images, which are grouped in series, each introduced casually with a brief quotation by Assu.

All his favourite work is here: Remakes of cereal boxes (Salmon Loops, anyone?); painted drums from the Silenced series; coppers, traditional symbols of status and power, remade as LPs to protest the potlatch ban; and digital interventions on Emily Carr paintings.

Engaging and informative essays by notable Indigenous thinkers – Candice Hopkins, Marianne Nicolson, Richard Van Camp and Ellyn Walker – nest well together at the front of the book. The foreword, by Mohawk/Tuscarora writer Janet Rogers, makes pithy observations, comparing Assu's works to Trickster. "They are playful pieces full of fun, with potent, dynamic, and brutally honest messages that pop up like a jack-in-the-box from his hiding place."

Assu joins in with his own essay. No slouch as a writer, he describes youthful summers plying the Salish Sea out of Campbell River on his grandfather’s fishing boat, and his growing awareness that he was not destined to captain his own craft – or go to law school, an alternative suggested by his grandfather as a way to “fight the system from the inside.”

Assu mentions a precocious talent with expletives – his only practical skill, he says, from those days at sea – and talks of the stress of an artistic career, his battle with depression and his MFA studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He’s now based in Campbell River, unceded Ligwildaʼxw territory on the east coast of Vancouver Island.

Assu is descended from chiefs and Hopkins, in her essay, tells how he found his great-great-grandfather’s ceremonial regalia in storage at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. “When the elder Assu’s robe was placed on the artist’s shoulders, he felt something of an electric shock, as though in that very moment the past reached out and touched him,” she writes.

The book holds many such gems. For instance, as Assu introduces his Longhouse series, he observes that traditional design elements make totem poles and ceremonial objects readable. “I speculate that if we had not been colonized, the form-line elements – ovoids, s-shapes and u-shapes – would have developed into a form of written communication akin to Asian character writing or Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

The book’s concluding series, Speculator Boom, returns to Assu’s love of comics. Here on sky-blue backgrounds are form-line elements carved from the pages of actual comic books and collaged onto panels. Assu writes that he has begun to explore pop culture again to experience catharsis in the breaking up of childhood memorabilia. “Through this, I’m finding a new understanding of the attribution of wealth by the deconstruction of something sacred to create something new.”

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.

Thank goodness Assu chose art, not law school. He thinks his grandfather would be proud of what he has accomplished over the last 15 years. “Sure, I’m no lawyer fighting the system from within," he writes, "but as an artist I’m attacking it from the outside.” ■