Wanx’id: to hide, to be hidden

The series of boxes I created for this installation, Wanx’id: to hide, to be hidden, reflects on notions of access, the public and the private, the sacred and the ordinary, and the tensions that exist between different cultures’ relationships to objects and artifacts.

The highest point of tension exists when the definitions and understandings of these ideas are challenged. My work seeks to disrupt the general viewing experience of Western-European-based museums by rendering certain portions of the objects inaccessible or apparently "hidden."

I saw a bentwood box in the Portland Art Museum in May, 2009: it was painted on the interior and bare on the outside. I am still deeply intrigued by this box. When I first saw it I considered it to be a piece that challenged the boundaries of our understanding of Pacific Northwest Coast works. I suspect the reason for the interior painting had to do with the purpose of the box and the intended content. I wonder about the purpose of this, and the metaphorical analogies that could be applied in a contemporary context.

Recently I travelled with my cousins Mike Willie and Ryan Nicolson to New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. We entered the archives through heavy security. We pulled open drawers and opened boxes to view masks and regalia. We reviewed letters and manuscripts, studying Boas and Hunt's writing system in order to be able to understand what they had collected. We were engaged in a dance of discovery and display, the pursuit and elusiveness of our cultural history. I saw this act as a metaphor for the box. Both poetic and human, if likened to the body, and social and political, if likened to the museum or even to the "boxes" that hold our culture.

The glass boxes are blackened on the outside, mediating or prohibiting immediate visual access. The box designs are carved into the interior surfaces. If lit properly, the interior images faintly emerge on the outside of the box, like shadows or ghosts. On initial viewing the designs are only accessible if people lean over and peer into the space. This disrupts the traditional vertical viewing experience of work in galleries, where the viewer stands upright and looks with a horizontal gaze at work. It requests a more physical engagement of the body.

I created the eight glass boxes to reference the display of Northwest Coast painted cedar boxes in the Great Hall of the Museum of Anthropology, where the bentwood containers are set. The display would, in a sense, mimic this display and parody the attempt to renegotiate spaces, museum displays, and cultural relationships. What to show, what to hold back, renegotiating how we learn, the revelation of life (creativity and construction) and the negation of death (deterioration and disappearance): all up together on a platform for exhibition. My boxes also mimic the glass exterior of this museum and other gallery-type spaces that exhibit Pacific Northwest Coast works. As a whole, the installation begins to reference a series of buildings or even the urban landscape, highlighting yet another contemporary tension in the Indigenous experience.

I struggled to come up with the visual photographic images to place inside each box. In the end I chose photos that had deep meaning for me. I thought about who my audience was—and outside all of the politics around producing Aboriginal art I thought of my family, and what our experience is like to enter a museum such as MOA and see ourselves reflected everywhere...and yet nowhere. I felt then what it would be like for my family and relatives to look inside the boxes and see ourselves, our history, our land, our art...all as one piece... as one expression.

The photographic images reflect the Dzawada’enuxw people and their homeland of Kingcome Inlet (Gwa’yi). Each of the people pictured represents the living knowledge that today we seek from institutions. In the past, without colonialism, we would have learned this information about ourselves directly from our ancestors. Our ancestors pictured here in the 1930s embodied “living museums of information.” A tenuous link: I knew many of the children pictured here only as elders. Today, only a few remain. What they inherently knew is now reflected in the glass cases and archives of museums across North America and Europe. All of it is fragmented and disparate. My generation is attempting to bring these things together to make them whole again—perhaps to make ourselves whole again.

My original idea for the glass boxes came out of a global conceptual contemporary critique. But the photographs moved the work beyond that framework and made it "about us" as well as "for us." For "me", really.

- Marianne Nicolson