Henry Tsang | video installation "Tansy Point"
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Surrey Art Gallery 13750 88 Ave, Surrey, British Columbia V3W 3L1
Henry Tsang, Tansy Point, 2019, double projection installation documentation
Tansy Point presents a visceral indictment of the role that legislation (in many cases drafted a century or more ago) and languages (many rarely ever spoken in our time) play in the everyday lives of current-day North Americans.
This video 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. It was here in present-day Oregon that the Anson Dart Treaties were signed in 1851 between the Indigenous Chinook peoples and the US government. These agreements were never ratified by 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 nineteenth 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. When a viewer walks in front of the projections, their shadow reveals an English translation of the text. To this day, the Chinook people are still fighting for recognition.
“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. In Plain Sight continues Henry Tsang’s long-running interest in memory, history, and language.
The opening reception on September 17 will also celebrate Surrey Art Gallery’s other fall exhibits: video-based artwork in Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020 and Zachery Cameron Longboy: Guardian of Sleep; variety of media in Concealed Cultures: The Black Vernacular and I see; I breathe; I am! both curated by the Black Arts Centre; the colourful vinyl murals Echoes by Atheana Picha and It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see by Sandeep Johal; paintings in Fraser Valley Chapter Presents: Fresh Paint! and mixed media in Surrey Art Teachers Association: Connect.
Exhibition curator Jordan Strom will lead a two-part tour and conversation with Henry Tsang and guest curator Tom Konyves of Poets with a Video Camera on Saturday, November 26 from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
About Henry Tsang
Henry Tsang is an artist and occasional curator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. His projects explore the spatial politics of history, language, community, food, and cultural translation in relationship to place. These take the form of gallery exhibitions, pop-up street food offerings, 360 video walking tours, curated dinners, ephemeral and permanent public art, employing video, photography, language, interactive media, food, and convivial events. Projects include 360 Riot Walk, a 360 degree video walking tour of the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver, Canada, and Welcome to the Land of Light, a public artwork along Vancouver's seawall that underscores the nineteenth-century trade language Chinook Jargon and the English that replaced it. Tsang teaches at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. henrytsang.ca