Every River Has a Mouth: The Visual Languages That Connect Us
Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Vancouver, BC - To Feb 14, 2027
Tanned salmon skins that tumble down in the shape of a river, fluid waves and zigzags of wool weavings in vivid shades of egg-yolk yellow and teal blue, and the bound curves of tule reeds winding an endless circular path: these are some of the materials featured in Every River Has a Mouth, at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. The exhibition pulls together 11 Salish artists from both the Coast and the Interior of British Columbia to highlight how the connections of culture, language and art flow through these communities.
It juxtaposes newer artists such as Snaw-Naw-As painter Grace Edwards, whose oil and acrylic painting And It Was This Big is featured alongside the work of established icons like Musqueam artist Susan Point, whose 2005 maple monoprint
Discover is also displayed. Coast and Interior Salish art is rarely seen together, so guest curator and artist Kwulasultun Eliot White-Hill considers it an honour to connect them in one show.
Líl̓wat artist Sydney Pascal tanned over 50 fish skins to create her piece t̓iq i sts̓úqwaoz̓a | the salmon have arrived, which pays homage to her recollections of an extraordinary salmon run she experienced at a fish camp in líl̓watǝmx with her family last summer. “I’m kind of trying to replicate the memory in a way. So there’s all these tanned fish skins attached together that create this waterfall,” she explains.
White-Hill says that while viewing Pascal’s art at an Emily Carr University of Art + Design exhibition in 2023, he was struck by the similarity of the song being performed to one his great-grandmother used to sing, though Pascal is from an Interior Salish culture and he is Coast Salish. It made him think about the ways their culture and art flow along the Stó:lō (Fraser River) that connects them: “There is so much that’s shared. You know, even way up the Fraser River, there’s so many things that we have in common, and so we’re really trying to honour that and celebrate that.”
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