Exhibit features 60 pieces of humourous indigenous artwork
By Graham Cook
Photos by William Neville
A new art exhibit, Carrying on “Irregardless”: Humour in Contemporary Northwest Coast Art, opened at the Bill Reid Gallery in Downtown Vancouver and will run from Sept. 12 through March 17. It features 60 pieces created by 28 Northwest Coast artists including paintings, sculptures, drawings, masks, etchings, photographs, textiles, jewelry, and multimedia works.
The term “Irregardless” is in reference to Bill Reid’s humourous “Billisms,” with which he made plays on words. “Irregardless” was one of his favourite intentional misuses, and he lived a life full of humour despite being suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
As the title suggests, the exhibit focuses on humour in the indigenous community. One of the co-curators, Peter Morin, is a known stand-up comedian. Morin spoke to The Peak about the project, stating that “the goal of the exhibition . . . as curators, we were interested in investigating the use of humour in Northwest Coast Native art. . . . As an indigenous curator, I wanted to try and enact the tradition of exhibiting indigenous art work,” he said.
“This kind of exhibitition . . . has not really happened a lot, and across the country I think there have been maybe four in total,” said Morin of the exhibit’s uniqueness. He also said that they would use the satire to examine and raise questions about indigenous life.
Morin said that they “also investigated what humour is within the community itself, and how humour is used within cultural practice, and of course each community has its own distinct cultural identity and so . . . the use of humour is very specific for each community.”
Peter Morin said that one of the struggles of the project was challenging his colleagues to “find the funny” artwork in museums, as museums are generally “serious, silent places.” He described a scenario in which a friend of his who works on the Archaeology floor of the Royal B.C. Museum approached him while he was touring the floor with a class and said, “Peter Morin, I found the funny.” She had found the one funny thing out of the millions of objects, a prehistoric stone bull.
One of Morin’s favourite pieces was what he described as “the most elaborate fart joke [he] had ever seen,” which depicted four men carrying the Haida conception of the world when one of them passes gas and the Earth shakes as the others are distracted.
In 2011, the Bill Reid Foundation gifted its entire 158-piece collection of Northwest Coast art, with an approximate value of $10 million, to Simon Fraser University. In return, SFU continued to contract the foundation to manage the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art.
