Art and storytelling play a big role in indigenous communities. Many art pieces tell stories; those that don’t tend to radiate an imaginative aura that makes the viewer think and wonder about the piece and what it could be representing. Here in town, Open Space is currently hosting Awakening Memory, a new art exhibit that looks at the role art plays in indigenous communities. Both traditional and contemporary stories will be explored by the three artists whose works are in the exhibit.
Leslie Robert Sam—better known by his decolonized artist’s name, lessLIE—is one of the artists with works in the show. He says that the artists involved in the exhibit are relatively young and have work that isn’t aimed toward the commercial market.
“We’re using contemporary Northwest art to reflect on something intellectually relating to Northwest coastal cultures beyond mere exploitation of cultural heritage,” says Sam. “That’s only the starting point.”
To prepare for the exhibit, the artists visited the Royal BC Museum for inspiration. Sam says his part of the work was inspired by the experience of visiting the museum and seeing some of the ancestral artefacts on display there.
“For my work in the exhibit, I looked at a couple of spindle whorls there,” he says. “I replicated two of them: one on acrylic on canvas, and the other is a sandblasted installation piece. My last canvas piece was inspired by and in the spirit of the other two that I replicated in some form.”
The artists have been sharing some ideas during two previous meetings, something that further inspired Sam.
“We’ve bounced ideas off one another in the meetings that we’ve had, and that inspired some courage to look in different directions as far as works go on my part,” he says. “They’re artists that I always really admired and I feel honoured to be working with them. There haven’t been any points of formal collaboration, but there are points where the work overlaps in some way.”
Sam is the only Coast Salish artist in the exhibit, a fact that brings some cultural diversity to the art on display.
“It was a bit different for me, since I couldn’t engage with what they were speaking about directly,” says Sam about the culture gap, “but I did in a more indirect way. The areas where we overlap in our work would be one of the more challenging things in the work.”
Awakening Memory
Until Saturday, April 29
By donation, Open Space
openspace.ca