ARTIST FEATURE

MINIATURES

OF THE WEST COAST

Spirits of the West Coast Art Gallery presents

an exhibition and sale of Pacific Northwest Coast miniature masterworks by some of the most accomplished contemporary Indigenous artists working today. From exquisitely inlaid argillite carvings to monumental miniatures in cedar, gold, silver, and copper, this exhibition will surprise and delight. Everyone is welcome to enjoy these wonderful miniature masterpieces.

The artists selected for the show are known for their detail-oriented creations that showcase the beauty and complexity of Northwest Coast art on a miniature scale. These creations although small in size, are rich in power, myth, and meaning.

For the Haida, storytelling in stone, and carving the black shale known as argillite, is a rich tradition stretching back over 200 years. We are excited to also showcase a selection of sculptures and model totem poles carved in argillite, including an incredible 24-inch Mother Bear Pole by Haida artist Henry White—truly a monumental miniature.

Beautiful and intricately carved and inlaid works by Haida artist Darrell White are another exhibition highlight. Along with pendants inspired by Haida myths and legends, White has created a marvellous orca sculpture in argillite, representing the Haida legend of Raven Fin. This amazing carving embodies the power and majesty of the Killer Whale and is reminiscent of Bill Reid’s monumental Chief of the Undersea World sculpture, showcased in bronze at the Vancouver Aquarium.

Haida mythology is also represented in the artistry and fine knife work of Ron Russ. Russ is another highly accomplished carver who often uses a combination of precious metals, argillite abalone, mother of pearl, as well as many different types of wood to create beautifully detailed amulets, sculptures, carvings, and jewelry.

Acclaimed Kwakwaka’wakw carvers Kevin Daniel Cranmer and Cole Speck’s cedar miniatures shine with colour, charisma, and ornamentation, and provide a small glimpse into the complex ceremonialism and richness of Kwakwaka’wakw culture today.

Exquisite repoussé bracelets and pendants in gold, silver, copper, and abalone crafted by Haida jeweler Derek White add glitter and gold to the mix of fine pieces on show. Derek is renowned for using a repoussé and chased metalworking technique to create beautiful three-dimensional pieces of art that depict Haida myths, crests, and supernatural beings.

From the most monumental to the most miniature, Haida artist Leon Ridley’s tiny canoe and replica totem poles in yellow cedar and yew wood are joyously detailed. These delightful tiny totem poles will be instantly recognisable to those familiar with the coastal villages of Haida Gwaii.

Today’s contemporary Northwest Coast artists are working in a tradition long-established by generations of artists and carvers before them. Miniature and model versions of monumental art have been created since the very beginning and used for a variety of purposes. These early works have left a powerful legacy of artistic styles, iconography, and cultural knowledge for the artists who came after them.

The great 19th century Haida artist and Chief Charles Edenshaw created some of the most beautiful carvings, model argillite poles, and jewelry ever made. These pieces are collected by some of the world’s greatest museums from Vancouver to New York, to London, and Berlin. For Edenshaw, these carvings were a way of earning a living, but also a way of transferring knowledge by recording Haida oral histories during a turbulent period of epidemics, missionary activity, cultural suppression, and social upheaval on the Northwest Coast. Edenshaw’s artistic legacy has inspired generations of Northwest Coast artists and contributed to a major revival of Northwest Coast art over the past seventy-five years.

One of the key figures in this revival was Edenshaw’s greatgreat-nephew Bill Reid. Reid was instrumental in reviving the Haida art form and would go on to become one of Canada’s most celebrated artists and cultural icons. As part of his artistic process, Bill Reid would carve miniature sculptures depicting supernatural Haida beings and legends. These exquisite small carvings were then scaled up into maquettes that were used to create his monumental sculptures – his iconic ‘Chief of the Undersea World’, and ‘Raven and the First Men’ sculptures were both carved in boxwood as miniatures.

Creating miniature works in wood and in stone also enables artists to innovate and experiment using different materials before scaling up. Sculptors must be especially careful and anticipate all aspects of the form before casting, carving, or constructing their works.

Haida artist Fred Davis was another master miniaturist who excelled at creating small masterpieces. Davis carved for over thirty years working in a variety of media, including gold, silver, mastodon ivory, wood, and argillite. His exceptional creative vision and technical ability made him one of the most significant artists of his generation. Today, unfortunately, most of Fred Davis’ masterpieces are hidden away in private collections. This helps to explain why his phenomenal work is only known by a select few collectors, gallery owners and museums, or by his fellow artists.

Walter Stolting, co-owner of Spirits of the West Coast Gallery, has fond memories of Fred Davis. “On my yearly visits to Haida Gwaii, I always visit many of the local carvers. Before Fred passed away in 2014, I often visited him, to watch him carve and listen to the stories that inspired his carvings. I would get goose bumps just looking at his pieces. Fred Davis was one of the most talented contemporary Northwest Coast artists of the last 100 years, whose works have yet to be appropriately recognized and celebrated. We are delighted to feature one of his elegant and powerful sculptures in the exhibition.”

The miniature form is perhaps best exemplified in contemporary Northwest Coast jewelry that incorporates intricately embellished details in gold, silver, ivory, and abalone. This cultural and ceremonial form of adornment has long been used to display wealth and high standing. Hand-carved and inlaid pendants, amulets, brooches, and carved gold and silver bracelets were often gifted at potlatches and cultural celebrations. Today these miniature treasures can be enjoyed and worn as beautiful, wearable works of art.

Admission is free, and we encourage everyone to bring a non-perishable food donation for our Fall Comox Valley Food Bank Drive and be entered into our draw for a $250 gift bag.

Ron Russ Dogfish Transformation Woman

Kevin Daniel Cranmer Sea Serpent and Raven Pole

Miniatures of the Northwest Coast is available in both physical and virtual format. The exhibition and sale is open until on December 31, 2021. Visit www.spiritsofthewestcoast.com for exhibition details. Follow us on Facebook @spiritsofthewestcoast, Instagram @spiritsofthewestcoast and Twitter @spiritsgallery for the latest news, artist talks, and exhibition features.

Cole Speck

Canoe www.spiritsofthewestcoast.com

BEING HUMAN

MAKE IT SO

JAMES L. ANDERSON

There is a New Human World calling us today.

And through the multitudes of dark ages ages behind us long ago in the past, the storied Human Dream that all of us are is once again imperceptibly forcing us to now find another new way to live on earth “Being Human”, again. What lies ahead of us all threatens to destroy us and all that we love, forever. You and I can no longer continue on the way things are now. We must either evolve or die. It is an unavoidable truth in this disintegrating modern world today that our own separate, “Solitary One”, primitive lives of I..ME and “self” and our modern sanctuary of logic, symbols, fact, law, Science and technology are simply not enough to make our Human Dream come true. We desperately need something more, or we cannot survive.

The truth is that just like the secret, rustling, murmuring wonder of Creation that carried us all into this vibrant mystery of Human “Life” (where the 2 somehow magnificently and miraculously became 1) there is a journey and a path yet undiscovered that somehow must be dreamed to the surface of our awakening minds for any of us to have a future on this earth. That secret wonder that has created life and universe itself speaks to us all beneath the cacophonic chaos threatening to overwhelm us... whispering from the yet dreamland of Creation, hope, faith, love and belief that beyond this madness, ignorance and mortal fear today there lies a promise of the way home for us all. Something hidden. Go and find it.

Each of us live our own separate lives alone. This is the root of everything today. This is the secret source of all the stark fear that is destroying our civilization in our modern disintegrating world...now.

And the back story beneath this dark fear is that long and long ago in the silence of deep time our magnificent prehistoric ancestors somehow impossibly survived “becoming aware” in one of the ages of endless torment, horror and stark catastrophe where they were all brought to their knees, hanging by a thread on the edge of the blackness of oblivion and extinction for perhaps centuries. In that cauldron of terror and an endless morgue of death all around them an extraordinary, epochal and astounding epiphany within their primitive minds took place. They internally grasped the stark, wretched concept that “they themselves would die”.

This happened. That dark and incendiary epiphany detonated in their fragile, primitive minds and sent them storming and raging through bleak and bestial

ages. It was simply an unimaginable and impossible period in all of our past. But somehow they survived the birth of Mortal Fear in an age buried forever in our forgotten past. None of us now appreciate how magnificent and courageous our incredible prehistoric ancestors were back then, and how you and I owe them everything now.

It was an impossible time that is now marked deep, deep within us with only a forgotten, genetic memory that the Human Dream somehow survived absolute horror. But it happened.

And since that monstrous epiphany, you and I deep within our beings, hidden beneath everything we now live through today...we all simply know that we will die. This is the truth why all of us yet un- evolved and still primitive creatures seem to be running for our lives today. That beast of horror and monstrous primal FEAR is showing its hideous memory and STILL HAUNTS HUMANKIND today. It would appear our Human Life Force once again is at such a monstrous Rubicon today. That horror lies dead ahead of us all now...once again.

We as a species have formulated the outrageous web of logic, order and the platform of symbolic differentiation where all universe simply mirrors and reflects the yet primitive and isolated,“solitary one” identity each of us separately still Live. Alone. That astounding giant leap forward of linear, logical, rational and symbolic thought allowed us to escape for perhaps the past 10 to a 100 thousand years. But it is not enough to grant us passage through to the future, now. The stark truth floating in the air all around us in this terrified and raging world today is that we have not truly escaped that Primal Fear. Somehow it still lives, and we need to again courageously and impossibly discover another Outrageous Giant Leap Forward....something more than we could perhaps yet even imagine...for all that we love to survive.

That prehistoric Primal Fear has escaped. It still haunts us in our minds. And it is once again threatening to destroy the Human Dream we all are.

It is why we are being tortured to spend the gift of our lives being bled, conquered and enslaved. It is why we live in an age of Global Fools that are certain that we can be controlled...and “owned”. It is why “They” splendour in the grand illusion that they are not also monstrously ignorant and can somehow escape into the fatally twisted savage delusion of grandeur of becoming alien Gods of “SELF” that can easily craft a planet of Empire and abominably mind control the gifted wonder Human Spirit and our awakening Human Minds within us with the alien power of supreme inhuman technology that has bewitched us all.

And it is why together we can not find the way home. There is unimaginable and Outrageous work to be done, and an impossible evolution to create...awakening from the safe, comfortable sleep we have enjoyed for ages and ages. All of us are still catastrophically ignorant and can not see and divine the way through the FEAR in this mindless, lost world today. All of us are locked in a prison that is closing in on our embattled “solitary one” lives and we can no longer escape and yet fail because we are simply captured in a not yet fully evolved infantile mindscape--though Lord knows we desperately try to reach, know and LIVE beyond our lives, to at last finally be set free. But if all that we love today and all our children’s children are to walk this Earth in the future we must gather together around the fire for a New Human world on Earth.

There is another magnificent path into the future being secretly whispered to us in this raucous world today, if only we could really dare to listen. Our incredible, astounding and courageous long lost ancestors outrageously did the impossible in those dark shadows of deep time. Somehow you and I must do the same today. We must all set sail into the dark unknown and discover a staggering new path and a new journey awaiting us all. We are part of a Human Dream that will not die. That astounding and impossible path must be illuminated and lit ahead for all of us to voyage into the future beyond FEAR. We must find the sublime and sacred faith that our magnificent ancient ancestors discovered to set us free long ago and believe that together we can do the impossible... somehow... one more time. For all the wonder mass of Humanity waiting to be born and be Created on this world to come, you and I will somehow find the way through.

Believe in it, and make it so.

© James L. Anderson, September 2021 www.james-l-anderson.com