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Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 200: Art and the Spatial Logics of Colonialism — with Marianne Nicolson

Speakers: Debbie C., Am Johal, Marianne Nicoloson

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Debbie C.  00:08
Hello listeners! I’m Debbie C. with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Marianne Nicolson, an artist and activist who mixes traditional Kwakwaka’wakw culture with contemporary gallery and museum-based artmaking. They discuss ways that Marianne uses art practice to uphold Kwakwaka’wakw philosophies and resist settler-colonial fictions about Indigenous peoples. Enjoy the episode!

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Am Johal  00:50
Hello, and welcome to Below the Radar. delighted that you can join us again this week. We have joining us this week as our special guest. Welcome, Marianne. 

Marianne Nicolson  01:02
Yeah, thank you for inviting me Am. As you've already said, my name is Marianne Nicolson, I'm an artist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations. I'm both traditionally trained and also went to Emily Carr University of Art and Design, so also trained in contemporary forms. And I would consider most of my practice to be activist based in terms of looking at the kind of social political conditions of First Nations peoples within Canada, and particularly strong amongst my own people, and our relationship to our communities and our lands. 

Am Johal  01:45
Marianne, I'm wondering if you could begin just sort of talking about what drew you first of all, to being an artist going to Emily Carr and choosing that route in the first place in terms of going to school.

Marianne Nicolson  01:57
It's kind of funny, when I think back on it. I always wanted to be an artist. I remember very distinctively, I was five years old, and I decided I wanted to be an artist. And so I followed that. But it's kind of weird, when I think back on it, my dad had a lot of these art history books, and I'd look at them, and so some of my ideas around what art was were formed from those books, on the other hand, it was also experiencing our more traditional forms in my home community of Kingcome Inlet, and those were very different. So I had two influences the whole time, and my dream, I guess, was always to go to Emily Carr. And then while I was going to Emily Carr, and this was in the early 90s, I was also training with Wayne Alfred, under more traditional formline. It was interesting hanging out with him at the time, he was living in Vancouver, and that was when there was a group of them like Joe Peters, Beau Dick. So you know, I used to go and visit and watch what they were doing and observe. And yeah, Wayne taught me formline. At the same time, I was also learning Western art history and trying to figure out a contemporary language to express my experience as a First Nations person in this country. And not completely comfortable using traditional forms only. So I ended up kind of blending the two in a way that could be critical of the systems under which I was working—the colonial systems under which I was working.

Am Johal  03:30
One of the early works that you did, the in your community, I'm wondering if you could speak to what led to that project and how you reflect back on it now.

Marianne Nicolson  03:43
I think it's the best work I've ever done. At the time I had finished at Emily Carr and I moved home to Kingcome. I was living in Kingcome for about five years and really noticing how much we were invisible to government and industry within that land system. And as I was leaving, because I had gotten into a master's program of Fine Arts at UVic, the logging company had decided they were going to aerial spray certain areas of the valley with pesticide and the community was against it. I really noticed how much it didn't matter that we were against it. I remember distinctively I was packing to leave to move to Victoria. And these airplanes were flying overhead and I was saying what's happening and being told "well, they're gonna spray the pesticides," and I thought this is crazy. You know, we've lived here thousands of years, we're people, and yet we don't seem to have visibility. And so that Cliff Painting, I wanted to create a work that was so visible that no one coming into the Kingcome Valley could deny the presence of the Dzawada’enuxw there. And so it was a very ambitious project and I think it worked because I was 28 and I didn't realize how dangerous it was actually to create that work. That's a 120 foot cliff and I miscalculated the height of it. I completely underestimated it and I struggled to create that piece. I failed the first time I went up there because I tried to climb it like a rock climber, and the wind kept pushing me and the rock climber that I hired to work with off the face and back. Like we would float up off because we were on top of this large tarp on which the design was laid out and it kept billowing out. But from that initial failure, I was able to revise everything technically and came back three months later, and it just went really well. Everything worked. And today that painting is still just as pristine as it was the first day I painted it. So it's really quite remarkable. But really, it was a statement about advocacy. It was completely anchored in uplifting us as a people, and had nothing to do with the gallery system or any any context of contemporary art. It was really a political act.

Am Johal  06:12
I think you have a show that you did at back around 2006. I'm wondering if you could speak to that work in terms of working with an artist run center. 

Marianne Nicolson  06:23
I started to gravitate more towards artist run centres, public museums, as exhibition spaces, and shy away from commercial spaces. Artspeak at that time was situated kind of in the heart of Gastown, which I had gone there often when I was going to Emily Carr and I was working with Wayne Alfred at the same time. And he would sell his work in, say, , and there was a few other galleries in that area that were selling Northwest Coast masks. It just really struck me that location, that here, are artworks, or what I guess people call artworks in English—they're actually sacred ceremonial pieces that traditionally would have been hidden—they were on display and for purchase. And that transformation struck me and so often, I'm very site specific with creations and in that case, then created this piece, , which really tried to talk about the consumptiveness and seduction of value in the materiality of the world, which I found, colonial society really anchors itself within. Versus the spiritual value, within which our traditions, infuse these objects through ceremony. And so I created this chest that was ornate, beautiful to look at as a physical object, and then lit it from the inside, so that the shadows were cast on the walls. And really, that work was looking at trying to regain a balance between physicality and spirituality within us as a people, because we were losing the spiritual aspect because of this desirability, or the desire of colonial society, for our material wealth. But they weren't valuing equally the spiritual aspect of our ceremony. And in fact, our ceremonies had been banned under Canadian law between 1890 and 1953. So that work was really seeking to express something that I felt very strongly about. And that was this devaluation of spirituality and the ephemeral versus the material, particularly when it came to the Northwest Coast artistic expressions.

Am Johal  08:54
There was a piece that you did at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I think I remember seeing it in the fall of 2008. But my memory is hazy, but I didn't know who the artist was. I didn't know you at the time. But I was walking home late at night, and I was doing a walk with a homelessness coordinator from the City of Vancouver, I remember just happening upon it. And the piece was just so beautiful. It literally made me cry. And I was like, who's the artist? I want to know more. And I've actually wanted to interview you since then, it's been taking about 13 years. Wondering if you could speak about that politics of showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery. And obviously, the space used to be a provincial courthouse as well. It's just such a stunning piece.

Marianne Nicolson  09:40
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for sharing your personal experience with that work. That work was called . And it was 2008-2009. It ran through the winter of 2008-2009. And it was a light projection onto the outside of the gallery. It basically transformed the architecture of the gallery from kind of this colonial facade, lintel and pillars, into the house posts of a Kwakwaka’wakw big house. And in doing that it actually as well transformed the exterior of that building into the interior of what we would call [big house in Kwakʼwala], or big house. And really, it was talking about the relationship to Canada and the banning of our ceremonies, the outlawing of our ceremonies, and reflecting on the history of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the building itself how it used to be the courthouse and say—I think was built around 1907, around that time—and it was during that time that our Potlatch ceremonies were banned. We have vivid recollections that were recorded of our elders who were incarcerated during that time, they were put in jail. And I thought it was interesting as well being asked to do this exhibition with the Vancouver Art Gallery, and really contemplating the relationship between Indigenous artistic expression and contemporary expressions and how there's something that doesn't quite mesh between the two. There's quite a difference in terms of their intent, and their foundational concepts very, very different. And my fear has always been that we would be absorbed into those contemporary systems. So I thought it was interesting that the work itself was actually exhibited outside the gallery rather than inside the gallery. In the daytime, there was a large banner that had Kwakʼwala on it, our language, and this image of this ghost puppet. And then at nighttime, the light projection would come on, and it would transform the lintel and the pillars into the crossbeams of the big house. And I was really looking at some of our concepts in regards to day and night and how we perceive of the world itself, interior and exterior spaces. And I was trying to overlay this symbol of contemporary art and colonial legal jurisprudence, with our law, and our way of being in the world, our ontology, I guess, our cosmology, and trying to uphold that. And that's really been the gist of my contemporary practice: to show that I could use contemporary mediums to express ancient ideas. And in that way, keep those ancient ideas vivid, alive, and well. Because what I saw happening, say in Gastown with the sale of our masks and stuff was the opposite. It was actually assimilating our material culture, into a colonial Western idea of what art is. So I was trying to push back and use that kind of an exhibition in order to create these statements and address these histories.

Am Johal  12:58
A number of your pieces are in public outside of the gallery system, I'm thinking about , or another one that you did in collaboration, I believe with another artist [John Livingston] at the Surrey Central SkyTrain station, I think there are some embassies as well. I'm wondering if you could speak to some of your works that exist or are exhibited outside the gallery system and how you approached that work. I'm thinking about art students right now who might be listening to this about how you approach those projects, and invitations, in terms of embedding your own practice inside of them.

Marianne Nicolson  13:35
One of the things that I'm really conscientious about is space. And it's funny, because my was all about space, and how space is conceived of through Kwakʼwala and how different that is from the idea of space in the English language. And it's a funny thing, because there seems to be this idea that space is neutral. And what I found is that it's far from neutral. So when I'm considering an artwork, I'm very much interested in the space and the history of that space. And the interior of a gallery very much attempts to kind of eradicate context. When we think about the white walls, right, and so there's this falsification that occurs that attempts to not make visible the understructure of what that space really is. And so I've been drawn to public spaces because the conceptual understructure of those spaces is much more overt and challenging, extraordinarily challenging, but more overt than interior gallery spaces. So completely different approach to both spaces, I still do gallery based work as well. But my number one approach that I'm highly highly conscious of space. And I'm highly highly conscious of space, because of my background, being First Nations. You know, I partly grew up in a community that was highly contested space. And I grew up with two different definitions of what that space was. On one hand,  when I was growing up, my uncle was constantly making sure that I understood that this was Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw space, and that our history of that space extended all the way back to the beginning of time. Then going to university and I remember my sister telling me, you know, we just live on a reserve, and that reserve is considered Crown Land, and it belongs to the Queen and I'm like, What the hell are you talking about? So this had this huge impact on me. And what I was realizing was that really, space is highly defined. And it depends on what your conceptual framework is, that kind of positions what you see and how you interpret. It's very interesting that in the last so many years, maybe the last 10 years, people have started to acknowledge Indigenous presence in space. And that's fairly recent because before that, the whole concept of colonial space was to more or less erase that history. So a lot of the work I do is about presence and speaking to Indigenous presence within specific spaces. 

The work that I did with the Surrey SkyTrain station, I really looked at the populations that were living and occupying that space currently, and in relationship to an Indigenous history. And what I was working on was this kind of series of reverse portraiture, what I consider to be reverse portraiture. So the colonial gaze floaded to the land and then saw all these Indigenous people and portrayed them in a certain way. And what I was interested in was the reverse portraiture—what did we see when colonial peoples floated to our lands? And so I created two works, one of them's called , and that's the one that's in the Surrey SkyTrain station. And the other one is called The Chief Factor, which is referring to the Hudson's Bay Company. But The Sea Captain is a portrait of exactly that. A sea captain coming to shore. And it's a complex portraiture, it's done in Northwest Coast style. And it's influenced from an old piece that I believe is held in a collection in Boston. But it really is about the power of the viewer, and wanting to position Indigenous people as the viewer, and our experience of that colonial interface, to privilege that and show that. And I also was wanting to address this idea of immigration. And there's a contemporary immigration that is happening to what people refer to as Canada. And when that immigration happens, there's an indoctrination into what Canada is, this idea of what Canada is. And so there's a pointing out that if you are to immigrate to this country, then there's a certain way that you have to or should behave, and integrate. And so the sea captain is tongue in cheek in that it's almost indicating Wait a minute, the very people who are defining how contemporary immigrants should occupy this space, according to their terms, are the ones who were coming to shore 150 years ago, 200 years ago. So I was aware of my audience at the Surrey SkyTrain station. And so this colonial portrait of this very, very much white man, emboldened with the authority of a uniform and a hat, and the whole outfit, who is pointing the way. He's telling us how we're going to live. And the original design was that this person was pointing, and then it was changed. Because there was critique, I suppose, from some of the funding body, that it was too aggressive. And so I changed it to his arms were outstretched instead. And so you have this gesture of either coming to give or coming to take, which kind of added this complexity to the portrait, but basically, the portrait is non complimentary. It's very seductive. He's a very good looking man, the uniform is very appealing, but fundamentally, it's a damning portrait of colonization.

Am Johal  19:21
Marianne, of course, all of your artwork relates back to the political situation of your own community in many ways. And in terms of putting that out into public visibility. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the contemporary political situation, obviously the Canadian colonial state and the context to put a set of conditions around it, but the ways in which it operates and tries to maintain control or presence maybe shifts and changes. And so the strategies of responding kind of, are required to as well. Wondering if you can speak to some of the immediate concerns and things that are happening right now in terms of forming a resistance to the situation.

Marianne Nicolson  20:10
There's a certain amount of frustration I have felt. The reality of our lived lives versus the political attempts around what people now call reconciliation. I have watched and observed and been hopeful, but mostly disappointed in the actual actions that have been taken. And in regards to when we look at power dynamics, and I guess it's like kind of go back to space. Because the delineation of space does not change. You know, the words change and sometimes the strategies change, but really, what I found is that the colonial powers that be simply seek to recreate themselves in order to maintain their power. There is no real power sharing that happens. It's like a trick pony show or something. That's the way I've have experienced it, but very sophisticated in its ability to appropriate and transform a critique of it into something acceptable. And really, what I've observed is that the project of assimilation has never changed. It's still the same people don't say it anymore. They're not as overt about it anymore as they were in the Indian Act, but the actual actions are the same. The real idea, and it really bothers me, is that Indigenous peoples become Canadianized, and absorbed, especially economically. So our positions on land and stewardship are tremendously challenged currently, because we are not being encouraged to uphold our tradition of stewardship. Our stewardship instead is being transformed back to us mirrored back to us as economic benefit. And then we're being told this is stewardship. 

So I'll give an example. So there's old growth forests within the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw territories. And we have a choice that we could assert very strongly just to protect those 100%. But what we're encouraged to do at the negotiation table, is we're told, "If you sign these agreements, and make this certain amount of money from these agreements, then you can preserve, say, 8% of that old growth." I'm just throwing that number out, but that's the trick pony show, right? What do we ended up giving up in those negotiations? You get some money, you're told you're saving old growth forest, but in reality, you're giving permission, you're granting permission for the remaining old growth forest to be logged for a certain amount of money, but you're being told that this is now stewardship. So this is the tactic now of the colonial approach, through industry and government to Indigenous negotiation tables. And I just find it it's a shapeshifter. The colonial agenda is a shapeshifter. And if we are not sophisticated and in front of it enough, it shifts itself into the forms that we think are the ones that are aligned with our traditions, when in fact, they're not. And this is happening everywhere. And how I know this through experience is that I've seen this happen in the arts. I've seen it happening in the arts, I still see it happening in the arts. Even that relationship to the Vancouver Art Gallery, right, we're gonna throw our doors open, and then we're going to show Indigenous artists now within our space. However, the control of that space, the definition of that space, and the history of that space is still colonial. So we're welcome to come in and partake, but we're not welcome to recreate the structure. And the same thing with Canada, right. So Indigenous people are now being welcomed to come in and partake. But Indigenous people are not being welcomed to come in and alter the structure of what the Canadian nation is. Those are the challenges that I think we're really facing as Indigenous people in this country.

Am Johal  24:01
Beyond the state there's the challenges of say, for example, the fish farm industry, but also the environmental movement, and conservation movements are also negotiating protection of lands, etc, sometimes in collaboration with Indigenous nations, but not always, and so wondering if you could speak a little bit to tensions that exist with industry be it fish farms, but I'm sure there are others, but also in terms of the possibilities of allyship with the environmental movement, but also the tensions that arise because of different ways of working, and the extent to which consultation happens or not.

Marianne Nicolson  24:39
Yeah, you know when I was talking about space, and how, say in a gallery space that attempts to render itself invisible, the understructures of that space? It's the same with what the current frameworks are around Indigenous engaged negotiations with industry. One of the things that is invisible, is neoliberal capitalism, and how that upholds all of this, and how it's the antithesis of Indigeneity. And its premise is really individualism and profit over community and relationship. And so when we're trying to navigate or negotiate under that framework, without recognizing that that is the framework, that's the table that we're sitting at. How can we uphold our traditions, when we're not even highly conscious of the very fact that the table we're sitting at, like its legs, and its top is formed from neoliberal capitalism? Right. And I just feel for us as a people, I really do feel for us as a people because the message that's given to us is the way out of your poverty, the way out of your situation is to come and join us at this table. And I guess that's why I struggle with negotiation. You know, how can we negotiate when no one wants to talk about the economic trajectory that we are on globally in the last 40 years? Those are things I want to talk about. But there are also things that people struggle with, you know, like, if we join in this, some people call it late stage capitalism, because there are a growing body of people who understand that this whole thing has created climate change. And it's disastrous for us globally, it's created this massive gap between the wealthy and the poor. And I see it within our territories, I find it heartbreaking actually. Because we're being told that through Indigenous tourism, and the creation of resorts within our territories, that this is a way out of poverty, and that we can use these mechanisms to become healthy. And I'm thinking, What? 

You know, we this summer went to a resort within our territory, and all I saw were multimillion dollar homes, and we show up in our boats, and we don't belong, even though that's our territory, and we belong there more than anybody, but because we do not have the material wealth to show it. And then there's this idea that if we sell enough of ourselves, we will have the material wealth, and I just think, well, how much has that helped the rest of the world? Whereas I really think our wealth, our true wealth lies in our relationship to one another, and our relationship to our lands. And so it is a real struggle to try and make sure or ensure or encourage our leadership to say no to the seduction and agenda of neoliberal capitalism. And for the most part, most people don't even know what that is. It's like an invisible person. When we're free, and they're asking us to go inside the prison with them—that's how I feel about it. 

Am Johal  27:56
Marianne, I'm wondering if you could speak to any projects, whether they're in the art world or otherwise, that you're particularly excited about that you're working on now?

Marianne Nicolson  28:05
Well, I think in the art world, I was really excited about , I think it was 2019, where we used that space in a way that was defined and beneficial to my own community, you know, so it was transforming that blank gallery space into a site of political activism. And it was community based, it wasn't all about one person. It was about a history. I really valued the risks that were taken curatorially in that exhibit. And it's a direction that I wish other institutions would attempt to push their boundaries on. So I was really pleased with that. And I think that there are other attempts that I'm working on, in regards to kind of contemporary art practice and gallery and museum spaces. But mostly what I'm invested in is the return of our homelands as our centre, because we've actually been culturally a site of extraction. So much of our production has been exported, not because we created to export but because external forces kind of created a situation where desperation exported much of our cultural production. And now we face a situation too, where our artists are brought up in a situation where they're encouraged to sell, to be producers for the market, rather than producers for spiritual practice. And that's not their fault. That's the system that's been facing us. So I'm trying to create an alternative, I'm trying to invest my energy at home in my home community so that we can uphold our traditional way of creating works for ourselves. People will find this very upsetting. But for me, I keep going back to it. I wanted to make these T-shirts that just said, "Don't dance for white people." People will be very offended by that. But the point of it is we have to dance for ourselves. We have to create things for ourselves. Our human expression, which is what I see art as—human expression—needs to be for us in the way that it was in the past. And we need to find a way to shift away from the belief that our value lies in how much the external world wants to pay us to see what we do, and to buy what we create. And that's a pretty tough position to work against. But I think the only way I even know that the alternative to that exists is because my family, my uncle, my grandparents, my community worked really hard themselves to maintain the alternative. They wanted us to dance for ourselves and not just become you  know, the servants, or the exhibition of the colonial gaze. I'm attempting to do that with my own home community at this point. It's not easy. It's a real struggle because the messaging to us as a community for many generations now is that our value lies in exhibiting ourselves.

Am Johal  31:10
Thank you so much for speaking with us and being on Below the Radar and look forward to seeing where your work and activism goes next and thank you so much.

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Debbie C.  31:28
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Marianne Nicolson! Head to the show notes to learn more about Marianne’s artworks and other resources mentioned in the episode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.

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