Artist: Sonny Assu

(B) Longing # 4
edition 1/5

Medium:Bronze

Size:13" x 16" x 9"

Date:2015

(B) Longing #29
Edition 3/5

SOLD

Medium:Bronze

Size:15"x 11" x 9"

Date:2013

About

Through museum interventions, large-scale installations, sculpture, photography, printmaking and paintings, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop art sensibility in a effort to address contemporary, political and ideological issues. His work often focuses on Indigenous issues and rights, consumerism, branding and new technologies, and the ways in which the past has come to inform contemporary ideas and identities. Assue infuses his work with wry humour to open the dialogue towards the use of consumerism, branding and technology as totemic representation. Within this, his work deasl with the loss of language, loss of cultural resources and the effects of colonization upon the Indigenous people of North America.

There is a clear interest in materiality in Assu's work. The materials used for each work are carefully considered, particularly in relation to Indigenous culture: hand-painted deer/elk hide drums for their performance significance; and copper for its cultural importance to the Indigenous People of the Northwest Coast. Assu's projects emphasize the intersections and bounderies of traditional Indigenous art with the larger realm of contemporary art.

His work has been accepted into the National Gallery of Canada, the Seattle Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and in various other public and private collections across Canada and the United States.

Sonny is Ligwilda'xw of the We Wai Kai First Nation (Cape Mudge). He graduated from Emily Carr University in 2002 and graduated with an MFA from Concordia University in 2015. He received the BC Creative Achievement Award in First Nations art in 2011 and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012 and 2013.

View Artist’s Exhibitions

Media

Friday, April 7, 2017

Now Playing at TrépanierBaer

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

The Twelve Days of Christmas at TrépanierBaer
The Second Day: Sonny Assu

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Painting, Sculpture & Drawing:
1963 - 2015

Friday, September 26, 2014

TrépanierBaer Presents: SCULPTURE

All Media

Artist: Sonny Assu

(B) Longing # 4edition 1/5

(B) Longing #29Edition 3/5

Media

(B) Longing # 4
edition 1/5

(B) Longing #29
Edition 3/5