Sonny Assu

Biography

Painter, sculpture/installation and mixed media artist Regarded as a ‘ Vanguard’ for his piece in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibit, How Soon Is Now?, Sonny Assu continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art by challenging the perception of Aboriginal art. A multi disciplinary artist, Assu merges Northwest Coast Aboriginal iconography with the aesthetics of popular culture to challenge social and historical values that we as a society face on a daily basis. His work is an exploration of his mixed ancestry and creates a discourse on we use items of consumer and popular culture to define our personal lineage. His current body of work examines how we use everyday consumer items and icons of pop culture to define our personal lineage, discussing the use of branding, brand loyalty and technology in conjunction to the ideals of totemic representation and helps educate people on the issues that the First People of North America face.
Sonny grew up in North Delta, a suburb of of Canada’s third largest city and many kilometres away from his ancestral home of Campbell River. It wasn’t until he was eight years old that he discovered his mixed heritage in a rather unique way. It was during a grade three history lesson about a particular group of BC ‘Indians’, the Kwakwaka’wakw. He ran home that day to tell his mom about the lesson, about how he was drawn to the culture and the art: she simply looked at him and said “Well, that is who you are”. After completing high school in 1994, Sonny set out to find his placement in the world. Three years went by, and Sonny started to yearn for something more than working in a shoe store in a mall. His late teens and early 20’s brought him into an exploration of his dramatic flair, performing in many theatre productions with companies such as the Theatre Under the Stars and the Fraser Valley Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Although he loved performing on stage, he would soon discover that visual arts were his true calling.
His scholastic art exploration began in 1997 at the Kwantlen University College. He gained his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Emily Carr Institute in May of 2002, majoring in Print Making and a minor in just about everything else that piqued his creative curiosity. Assu’s work has been featured in several group shows over the past years, notably How Soon is Now? at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Comic Relief at the National Gallery of Canada and Changing Hands: Art With Reservation Part 2 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Sonny’s first solo exhibit, Sonny Assu: As Defined Within the Indian Act, was held at the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver, in April 2006. It garnered him considerable attention and landed him a partnership with the Equinox Gallery in the fall of 2006. Assu’s work has been accepted into the National Gallery in Ottawa (Breakfast Series and Death Blanket), the Seattle Art Museum (Breakfast Series), the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Coke Salish) and in various other public and private collections across Canada and the United States.
His successful art practice has netted exposure on a variety of media platforms and he has received grants from Canada Council, the BC Art Council and in 2007, he was honoured with the Emily Award, from the Emily Carr University, for his devotion and success on his path as an artist. His ideas, thoughts and processes are fluidic and ever changing. Ask Sonny what he’s working on and he might give you the step by step, or he might keep tightlipped in hopes of creating the element of surprise in his work. Either way, his work and personality will draw you in. Sonny Assu is Liquitach (Kwakwaka’wakw) of the Weka’yi First Nation (Cape Mudge), the artist has lived in Vancouver since 1999.