"RezErect: NATIVE EROTICA": Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Vancouver Sept. 25, 2013 to April 20, 2014

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Photo: David Brosha.

"Luu ahmhl goot’t lax Ha (Happy Sky/Heaven) Honour Indigenous Women Ourselves"

Angela Sterritt, "Luu ahmhl goot’t lax Ha (Happy Sky/Heaven) Honour Indigenous Women Ourselves," 2013, photo on canvas, 36” x 45” (wolf design: Valerie Morgan).

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Photo: Bill Pusztai.

"Octopus Dress"

Dorothy Grant, "Octopus Dress," 2006, silk charmeuse, silk screen octopus design, mother-of-pearl buttons, beads and satin fringe.

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Photo: Bill Pusztai.

"Chow Time (detail)"

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and Launette Rieb, "Chow Time (detail)," 2013, hand-thrown porcelain with clear crackle, red glazes and gold luster, gold-plated cutlery, crystal and lingerie, 30” x 32” x 23”.

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Photo: Bill Pusztai.

"Hot Box"

Shawn Hunt, "Hot Box," 2013, red cedar bentwood box, beaver fur and acrylic paint, 8” x 7” x 7”.

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Photo: Russell Johnson. Courtesy of Preston Singletary Inc.

"Geoduck"

Preston Singletary, "Geoduck," 2012, blown and sand-carved glass, 25” x 10” x 5”

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RezErect: NATIVE EROTICA

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Vancouver

Sept. 25, 2013 to April 20, 2014

By Maureen Latta

When Kwiaahwah Jones and Gwaai Edenshaw started talking about co-curating an exhibition of contemporary indigenous erotic art, people asked, “Native erotic art? Does it even exist?” Jones is amused. “We’re the fastest growing population in Canada,” she says. “It certainly exists.”

This wink-and-a-smile attitude permeates the smart and sexy exhibition featuring work by 28 Pacific Northwest artists. Edible seaweed panties and pornographic pictographs cleverly combine cultural references with sex and humour. Some gestures are subtle. Edenshaw’s interactive sculpture, Looking at You Looking Into, invites visitors to bend over and finger a clitoris-like button while jiggling a knob in order to peep through a keyhole. Intent on the tiny image inside, viewers might miss the joke being played on them. But the work has a serious artistic intent as well. The keyhole image is not erotica in the usual sense, but formline design, a characteristic feature of Northwest Coast art. “Eroticism is already inherent in formline,” Jones says. “There’s nothing you have to do to formline to make it sensual.”

Many works incorporate formline’s ovoid and U shapes to assert that sensuality has always been vital to indigenous art. Today, mainstream media portray First Nations people as sexually broken and in need of healing. The exhibition counters with what Jones calls “a beautiful sense of aboriginal sexuality.” Respectful, celebratory, sometimes cheeky and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the works take a wide variety of approaches, partly because artists had full interpretive reign and partly because they represent an area culturally and linguistically more complex than Europe. Catalogue texts by the artists are helpful in contextualizing each piece.

Critiques are embedded here and there. The title of Dionne Paul’s Reserved points to how indigenous sexuality was set aside when missionary zealotry turned sexuality into a tool of colonization. Nicholas Galanin’s photographic series, The Curtis Legacy, features a non-native model in a curio mask posed in soft-porn style. The series bites back at the influence of early American photographer Edward Curtis, whose portraits misled the public, through creative costuming and other falsifications, into believing mostly fictional conceptions of the ‘real Indian.’

The most interesting pieces open up cultural aspects largely hidden from non-natives. Jones’ Sexy Rhythms consists of a “drum with a bum” (that alluring double ovoid design) and a cedar-bark drumstick resembling a whip. The piece’s significance lies not in its saucy humour but in its reference to Haida music, which Jones describes as “hot.” Jones has an abundance of knowledge about Haida art, and a tour with her is highly recommended. Raised on a seine fishing boat, she travelled throughout Haida Gwaii, apprenticed with Haida artists, and trained as a curator at the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate.