Henry Tsang's Tansy Point explores language, land, and legislation, now open at Surrey Art Gallery
Video installation employs Chinook Jargon and a location that was key to Indigenous-U.S. territory negotiations in 1851
Post Sponsored by Surrey Art Gallery
Henry Tsang, Tansy Point, 2019, double projection installation documentation at Surrey Art Gallery.
Henry Tsang’s timely video installation Tansy Point is opening at Surrey Art Gallery from September 17 to December 11. Admission is free.
The installation consists of two projections that overlap to create a single image of the landscape surrounding Tansy Point, located near the mouth of the Columbia River where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. The place in Oregon is significant because it’s where the Anson Dart Treaties were signed in 1851 between the Indigenous Chinook peoples and the American government. These agreements were never ratified by the U.S. Congress, even though the federally defined land and rights of the Chinook were subsequently taken away.
A voiceover in Chinook Jargon—the trade language common along the West Coast in the 19th century and used for the negotiations—recounts two perspectives on the impact of the treaties. One is by James Swan, an early white settler who witnessed failed attempts at treaty making, and the other by Tony Johnson, chair of the Chinook Nation, who speaks about the impact of the contract honoured by his people but disregarded by the government. To this day, the Chinook people are still fighting for recognition.
When visitors walk in front of the projections, their shadow reveals an English translation of the text.
Overall, Tansy Point presents a visceral indictment of the role that legislation and languages play in the everyday lives of current-day North Americans.
“Tsang’s video installation encourages visitors to consider how important language and written documents from the distant past shape and structure our colonial present,” says Jordan Strom, Surrey Art Gallery Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. “By situating the viewer’s body, by way of their shadow, within the video image, the artwork encourages people to consider their own embeddedness in the colonial legislation of their respective territories.”
Tansy Point is the second installment of a two-part exhibition entitled In Plain Sight. The first part was Hastings Park, presented at Surrey Art Gallery in the summer of 2021.
Strom will lead a two-part tour and conversation with Tsang and guest curator Tom Konyves of Poets with a Video Camera on November 26 from 2 pm to 3:30 pm.
Post sponsored by Surrey Art Gallery