Suspended and spinning in the Price Family Community Gallery and the Lindy Green Forum are newly commissioned works by Vancouver-based artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who created and popularized the graphic style of Haida manga. The style incorporates a mixture of North Pacific Indigenous narratives, frame lines, and Japanese cartooning. Posing timely and necessary questions about culture, identity, and histories past and present, the works in this exhibition avoid simple categorization and instead, to quote Yahgulanaas, take as their subject “the spaces in between.”
Commissioned by MOCA for the Ground Floor, Yahgulanaas has created Daalkaatlii Diaries – a work that began as a book is newly reimagined as 26 large-scale panels in the form of an accordion, and has been designed with consideration of MOCA’s unique and historic space. As visitors enter Daalkaatlii Diaries, they are greeted by Flesh Tones, a pair of new experimental kinetic sculptures.
Centred in the North End Gallery is Red, a multi-panel Haida-manga tragedy about a sibling duo. Daalkaatlii Diaries and Red both invite viewers to explore new ways of reading and experiencing the artist’s unique style of storytelling.
Also on display are Yahgulanaas’ wall sculptures created from the hoods of cars. These symbols of privilege in contemporary North American society have been treated with copper leaf, referencing a sign of wealth among the Haida and other Pacific societies.
About the Artist
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an award-winning visual contemporary artist, author, and creative spark plug. His visual practice encompasses a variety of different art forms, including large-scale public art projects, mixed media sculptures, painting, ink drawings, ceramics, and illustrated publications. Exploring themes of cultural identity, ecology, and the barriers and openings in the human condition, he uses art and speaking opportunities to communicate a world view that while particular to Haida Gwaii – his ancestral North Pacific archipelago – is also relevant to a contemporary and internationally-engaged audience. Influenced by both the tradition of Haida iconography and contemporary Asian visual culture, Yahgulanaas has created a practice that is celebrated for its vitality, relevancy, and originality.
Yahgulanaas’ work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Humboldt Forum (Berlin), British Museum (London), Seattle Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery among several others.
