Salmon Passage
Available with Conservation Framing for $770 | 25″ h x 25″ w x 1″ d
A Tribute to Marvin Oliver
Some designs come from places we do not know or understand necessarily. In its inception there are roots of this work that stem from an idea I had wanted to tribute something to Marvin Oliver and his exploration of color.
In my youth I was judgmental of some of the men who made art when I discovered the difference of regional arts. I had no way to understand their past or their complicated lives that drove them into making art and sharing their time with work as expressions that allowed me to have a platform to stand on.
I have not practiced formline in many years because there was a time it became an association of feeling conquered by something. Reflecting on this now in my years of design I feel a different relationship to it. In passing of some of my mentors I carried a great deal of guilt as I was making major sculptures to embrace a nuance of my grandmother’s generation and before. To ensure Puget Sound Salish people remember the names of Joseph Hillaire and Chief William Shelton and the lesser known Morris Alexander.
Losing a number of significant people in the four year passage.
In 2020 working in isolation with an amount of pressure of a space of real darkness, a place without windows. I was making work that was great and true, but in some ways losing my own voice in some ways entangling with a blurred line of mimicry.
I was told second hand how I let down a young person who was feeling that I had practiced formline as if it were shameful. It reminded me how I had called Marvin out in years of my youth for overlooking Salish art without regard for the time in which he was raised and shaped by with the constrictions of his expression and what the market would accept to make a living.
When I look back on time, the moment I had enough money to travel and study, Bill Holm sent me to the Field Museum for learning. A week in that I spent with the collection was just a scratch of a world and glimpse of a powerful place.
As a grown man, having humility and understanding why we sing songs to be among powerful objects and respect some world taken from us housed away. Conflicted in some way but equally appreciating the lessons that are there for me to learn. An adze mislabeled with Holm’s initials with a question mark next to it that I knew to my core was Puget Sound.
I can feel conflicting of place I am inspired to make such design or I can embrace the many things by which I am called to make something that is non-divisional, unconventional–a day dream where a salmon swims though kelp and plays while chasing an otter in a world of which I only know in glimpse.
-Qwalsius-Shaun Peterson