C A N N O P Y
Art is True North
A MOCA Retrospective
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, "Daalkaatlii Diaries", installation view, MOCA Toronto
INTERVIEW — As a trio of fall exhibits wrap up, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas reflects on the powers of hybridity
Words by Brya Sheridan | Portrait Illustration by Dane Thibeault
ISSUE 14 | TORONTO | SPACES
Venturing into a gallery can be quite the smorgasbord of symbols, colours, sculptures, and short films─it’s often difficult to know exactly what you’re looking at. But, as I find myself head-on with a humanoid kick-flipping Bart Simpson, I’m left with nothing less than artistic enlightenment. As the elevator ascends to the second floor of Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the doors fling open to a room suffused with muted red light dancing across a mustardy carpet. Alex Da Corte’s “Ear Worm” is a mixology of pop culture, sexuality, violence, cinema, children’s literature, art and design history. His series of short films (Rubber Pencil Devil) and “Mouse Museum” invites the viewer into a nostalgic fever dream that includes such scenes as Bugs Bunny reclining on a crescent moon while Frank Ocean’s sultry “Moon River” croons over and over and over. “Mouse Museum” is a life size plywood tunnel that doubles as a cabinet of curiosity offering frivolous glimpses into Da Corte’s collection of small toys and sculptures that vary from a deflated rubber sphere to Harry Potter’s magic wand. Elsewhere, another screen exhibits Da Corte morphed into Dopey — one of the seven dwarves — holding a fluorescent blue candle as he saunters up a never ending staircase.
From the Alex Da Corte Exhibit
For twenty years, MOCA has persisted as a space for Canadians to both capture and wade against the cultural current. And “Interface Remix” by Tishan Hsu is another exhibition that fuels the allure of this outlet. Blobs of flesh, flaps, limbs, teeth, mouths and bones are at the centre of Hsu’s work. Using a mixture of non-traditional materials such as vinyl cement, silicone, X-rays, and UV printing, Hsu’s visionary blends the influence of new technologies and our bodies. At the entrance of the exhibit, there’s a pair of beige, bathroom-esque windows strapped together—mirrored “screens” of the lungs, as if from the point of view of a surgical camera. Techy patterns and holes are also integrated within his artwork. Truly, this installation is nothing other than a trypophobic’s nightmare. Yet, it’s the “Mammal-Screen” sculpture that evokes the most in my internal dialogue, one of which being: what in the blob is that? One of Hsu’s most recent sculptures, it gets its name from the four hoof-esque wheels that make contact with the floor. While Hsu’s piece doesn’t roar “bison” or “big cat” at initial glance, it's an artform that toggles between organic and inorganic. Ultimately, it's described as a glitch in the matrix—and that's exactly what it looks like.
From the Tishan Hsu Exhibit
On the main floor of MOCA, a wave of rainbow visuals is suspended from the ceiling like an accordion. This installation is a part of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' "Diaries After a Flood”. Spinning above visitors is “Swim … Fly, Flesh Tones”, which includes painted imagery of hands, eyes, mouths, fish, an arrow tip, faces, and teeth. Similarly integrating elements of flesh like Hsu’s “Interface Remix”, Yahgulanaas uses a less grotesque approach to storytelling. His vivid colourwork and integration of bold ovoid shapes are often based on Yahgulanaas’ memories from his Haida Gwaii ancestry. These tales passed on by his elders, they illustrate perseverance in the face of floods, fuel spills, displacement, and war. During his youth, Yahgulanaas had a knack for comic books, which is evident in his installation “RED”—a multi-panel Haida-manga tragedy about siblings. Its comic-like essence features bold onomatopoeic commentary such as “woosh”, “thunk”, and “crash,” bringing motion to his work.
As MOCA recognizes the value of reflecting on the continuing impacts of colonization in a hyper-diverse city and world, Yahgulanaas’ exhibit poses the necessary questions about environmentalism, identity, and possibility while embracing connection.
CANNOPY x Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Daalkaalii Diaries
CAN | Word is this piece began as a book, what was the thematic inspiration for that book?
MY ─ This series began as a graphic investigation across the connected pages of an accordion sketchbook. Accordion binding eliminates much of the separation between pages, so the idea was to explore how individual panes fit together: do they animate over distance? What is the thread? Do the graphic relationships between individual sketches demand a cohesive narrative? How do differences coexist when borders are blurred and finally erased. Is it a riff on the theory of the “Canadian Mosaic”?
Like a wave that flattens over space without additional energetic inputs and inferences, how do classic iconography (in this case Haida iconography), line, mass, and implicit narrative function when forced to relate to a neighbouring element that both has and must share its own physical sovereignty. The themes and narratives arose from these graphic explorations.
CAN | This piece is uniquely designed for the space that MOCA inhabits─what was your approach to this hyper-customization?
MY ─ The MOCA space is deliciously challenging. The physical potency of the evenly-spaced pillars cannot be ignored. They echo grand forests of ancient tree trunks… play among the trunks but do little to disturb them. I still want to work with those surfaces but for now I must remain content to dance around their quiet grandeur.
CAN | Interestingly this piece is shaped like an accordion, a shape that illustrates the idea of a spectrum between two poles, both visually and aurally. What do you hope to inspire in terms of how viewers will interact with the continuum of the piece as a whole and the individual panels that constitute it?
MY ─ Stories are dances: blending and changing and, even when shared amongst many dancers, each of us moves differently and makes unique choices. Observation is a contribution to a whole. It is possible to pause next to any single canvas. One can catch, focus on, and peer into a single image. However, the neighbouring canvas is ever present, curving and calling and inevitably capturing the still eye, like a foot anticipating its next landing yet remembering its recent departure.
Move along the undulating line and experience the changes in perspectives: horizons will slowly reveal the difference ahead and if you look back along the curve, the distance travelled will not reappear. It will have changed. The overall form of the support structure follows a classic Haida iconographic rule: a line never ends but there is movement in expansion and contraction.
Hybridity As A Third Space
CAN | The concept of “the spaces in between" is one that's woven throughout your work. It’s especially notable that Haida Manga is a hybrid of an Indigenous aesthetic and a non-Western aesthetic. What do you find most compelling about how the third spaces created through this hybrid can foster an understanding of Indigeneity that doesn't centre the Western settler gaze?
MY ─ That third space is where we are going, in fact it is where we all live. Dividing the world into binary forces is a theoretical exercise that is often presented as a static rule. At best it is a handy reference to locate oneself in a shifting, deeply inflected, nuanced, and complex world. Colonialism, for example, demands a villain and a hero, a victim and a predator. Much is true about this function of colonialism but remaining in that binary world prevents us from arriving at the more important question, “Now what?”
In this time of political, social and ecological challenges, it seems important to use where we are as a wayfinding tool to travel to where we wish to be. Haida manga wrestles with the idea of wayfinding.
The Flight Of The Hummingbird
CAN | Opera is the ultimate hybrid art and with your opera The Flight Of The Hummingbird, you traverse visual, textual, and musical media. What was your journey towards translating the book you wrote into the opera that it's become? And what do you enjoy the most about the in-between spaces that opera can create?
MY — The development of an opera cannot be a solo experience. It requires collaboration and a merger of the talents of its many participants.
It is believed by some, and incorrectly I assert, that opera is a cultural sanctuary of European ancestry. For Indigenous People along the northeastern shores of the Pacific, theater and song are foundations of an ancient identity. For the timid-minded, it will be difficult to understand how cultural vitality is not a prisoner of ethnicity and its political demarcations. Meanwhile, for many, The Flight of the Hummingbird continues to be an exploration of applied hybridity at a moment in Canada where we long for practical examples of how creativity boldly defies cultural cleavages.
Further to your question about the “in-between spaces that opera can create,” there is an important line in the opera that some audience members find provocative or challenging: “Nothing done is something undone.”
In the world, the impact of doing nothing has very real consequences, and in our opera, it is expressed as a very real thing. That ‘something’ is no less than the potential destruction of home and self. ‘Nothing’ has a real impact. It has a presence.
“Nothing done is something undone” challenges the idea that inaction is an emptiness that cannot conceal any activity or potential agency. Traditionally, “nothing” is perceived as an emptiness, like a vacuum. In reality, a vacuum is not empty. According to physicists, space is filled with mass, energy, and quantum fluctuations. “Nothing” is actually a rich tapestry of unseen processes. Our opera interrogates inaction: in other words, doing nothing undoes many other specific states or possibilities of something while allowing other less desirable possibilities to continue. This is one of those magic in-between spaces we explore in the Hummingbird opera.