Cultural appropriation probed in Joseph Tisiga’s Tales of an Empty Cabin

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      Tales of an Empty Cabin: Somebody Nobody Was…
      At the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, until May 6

      Joseph Tisiga is a storyteller. His medium, however, is not oral but visual, not the spoken word but paint and collage, sculpture and assemblage, installation and performance photography. Tisiga’s show Tales of an Empty Cabin, at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, is informed, as the artist states in the exhibition catalogue, by “ambivalent identity constructions, spiritual amnesia and the effect of displacement”.

      This wide-ranging survey is bookended by works inspired—or perhaps provoked—by two Anglo-Canadians who made vocations out of “playing Indian”. One of them is Archibald Belaney, better known as the writer and naturalist Grey Owl; the other is Oliver Jackson, whose consuming occupation was the making and displaying of pseudo-Indigenous art and artifacts. Grey Owl is referenced in both the exhibition title and a series of colour photos of a performance Tisiga undertook in a deserted office building in Whitehorse. Jackson, who was based in Kelowna and who died in 1982, is represented here by a brand-new installation in a wall tent. Tisiga created it on-site and filled it with a mind-numbing array of Jackson’s wildly cross-cultural objects, from feathered headdresses and feast bowls to masks, moccasins, knife sheaths, cradle boards, and deerskin clothing. In both the Grey Owl and Oliver Jackson works, Tisiga probes the nature—good, bad, and ugly—of such concerted cultural appropriations.

      The exhibition also features Tisiga’s two-dimensional images, many of which conflate the past and the present, the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, the sublime and the banal, all within seemingly supernatural narratives. These narratives reflect not only the artist’s reclaimed Kaska Dene cultural heritage, from which he was estranged while growing up, but also the personal and intergenerational traumas he has witnessed as a community worker with at-risk Indigenous youths in Whitehorse, where he is based.

      Tisiga’s supernatural narratives are most powerfully realized in his acclaimed watercolours. Some of them depict the Kaska story of Dzohdié’, a young hero who slays a ravenous giant worm that threatens his people. Others feature recurring characters of Tisiga’s own invention, such as the Red Chief, a bare-chested man who wears a black top hat and performs sacred ceremonies, and the White Shaman, a blue-eyed man who wears 19th-century European clothing and performs magic tricks.

      Many of the watercolour images are so strangely surreal that it is difficult to fully understand what is going on. In Post No Bills, a naked Indigenous man crawls across the ground, dragging a wagon on which are perched pieces of weird machinery and a phantom drummer, this unhappy scene witnessed by Indigenous children in residential-school uniforms. The work is suggestive of the legacy of colonialism, although Tisiga has written that “colonial structures” is an inadequate term for the complex social, political, economic, and cultural realities with which First Nations people have to contend. In It Is Not Our Intention to Take Unnecessary Precaution (Bladder Head Man), the bloody hand of a First Nations man is caught in the mouth of a wolf. (The setup is like a weird inversion of an animal caught in a leghold trap.) The creature’s hind legs are held by another man, while a third swings an axe aloft. All this occurs in front of a high wall, broken in places to reveal a treed landscape. Power, it seems, is cruelly contested at the nature-culture interface.

      Also on view are a series of paintings titled “A Prop for Reconciliation” and incorporating characters from the Archie comics, as well as large-scale, hand-tinted photographs of a “scorched earth” performance in a fire-swept forest, oddly uninflected collages, and assemblages mounted on big squares of artificial turf, which Tisiga employs as a metaphor for the land. Some of the new work is uneven, but all of it contributes to a complex narrative of identity.

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