Saturday Morning Cereal

Corey Bulpitt remakes cartoon characters in Haida style.

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STORIES

Walking home recently, I was thinking about the news that Disney's retail stores are closing across Canada. Might this be a sign that the relentless colonizing of children's imaginations is finally in retreat? Starbucks, too, seems to be shrinking away, based on the outlets it has shuttered over the last year.

As I was imagining a post-Disney world free of Frappuccinos, I happened upon Haida artist Corey Bulpitt’s show at Ceremonial / Art, a new gallery in my neighbourhood. Titled Saturday Morning Cereal, it riffs playfully on colonization by the likes of Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson and the Cookie Monster. Bulpitt is fighting back, taking these cartoon juggernauts and Indigenizing them with traditional formline. His resonant works, mostly on ceremonial drums, prompted more reflection. 

Bulpitt, adaptive and subversive, is part of a new generation of Indigenous artists who have been turning international marketing on its head. Using humour, they point to the soft power of the American entertainment complex, truly a global colonizer. Their strong and growing current of work also seeks to appropriate and critique consumer culture, bringing issues such as land rights and the history of potlatch bans to a wide audience. 

For instance, Kwakwakaʼwakw artist Sonny Assu’s 2006 Breakfast Series remakes garish cereal box designs with messages about fishing rights and broken treaties. His Frosted Treaty Flakes and Salmon Loops – which incorporate Northwest Coast design elements – replace Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops. And lessLIE, a Coast Salish artist from Duncan on Vancouver Island, has targeted both Starbucks and McDonald’s using similar strategies.

All but two works Bulpitt displays in this show are painted ceremonial drums. Bold, colourful and cleanly rendered, they have immediate impact. Kermit the Frog sips daintily from a drinking vessel defined with a U-formline, the gesture typical of Kermit’s nonchalance in the face of adversity. A magnificent Bart is portrayed as a yellow thunderbird devouring an orca. The whale’s tail flaps out of his mouth in a comically inelegant demise.

Then there’s Mickey Mouse. Unsurprisingly, Disney is notorious for protecting its brand. But Bulpitt’s rendering is transformative. Mickey could be a supernatural Haida character, light years away from his early days channeling Al Jolson’s minstrel routines. One look and you know it’s “fair use” that even the slickest corporate lawyer couldn’t take down.


The Cookie Monster also makes an appearance, his eyes askew in monochrome formlines as he munches on bright red and yellow ovoids. This is a nod to Bulpitt’s friend, fellow artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who’s known for his bright ovoids. Given the expression in the Cookie Monster’s eyes, you may suspect he has the munchies.

The only outlier in the show is Bart spray-bombing the words “Land Back!” on a drum, perhaps a nod to Bulpitt’s work as a graffiti artist. It’s a straight-up cartoon without the integration of traditional formline elements. In any case, Bart clearly appears as an ally.

Bulpitt’s Haida name, Ta’kiid Aayaa, means Gifted Carver, and, in addition to the drums, two diminutive argillite carvings are displayed on a central plinth. These are clear riffs on Haida history and storytelling. 

The first carving is a tobacco pipe titled The Odyssey with a po-faced Homer Simpson on the bowl. The work refers to the trading of custom-carved pipes with European and American sailors in the 1800s. At the time, many a sea-faring captain would commission a carved pipe in his own likeness.

The other carving features a grinning Bart sitting, with knees drawn up, atop a tightly closed clamshell. This can be read a few different ways in relation to the Haida tale of the birth of the first people. Is Bart preventing their escape into the world? Or is he an escapee? Clearly, the piece refers to Bill Reid’s sculpture The Raven and the First Men, which, in turn, was inspired by the work of Bulpitt’s great, great grandfather Charles Edenshaw. 

It would be wonderful to see this piece at a grander scale, perhaps near The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe, Bill Reid’s enormous (and enormously popular) sculpture, which sits within spitting distance of a Starbucks outlet at Vancouver’s airport, and always reminds me of the time Starbucks threatened to sue a Haida Gwaii café over the use of the name HaidaBucks. The café hired a lawyer and Starbucks eventually backed off.

This is a fun body of work with multi-pronged intent. It speaks in the lingua franca of commercial entertainment and consumer culture while embracing the ongoing project of First Nations' cultural revival. 

And for the record, although Disney stores and some 300 Starbucks outlets across Canada are closing this spring, you can rest assured that it’s likely only because they’ve found more efficient means of furthering their plans for world domination. But it’s heartening to know that artists like Bulpitt – and others of his generation – are in it for the long haul too. ■  

Corey Bulpitt: Saturday Morning Cereal at Ceremonial / Art from April 17 to May 29, 2021. Open Saturdays 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment.

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Ceremonial / Art

3712 West 10 Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V6R 2G4

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Thurs to Fri 11 am - 5 pm, Sat 11 am - 4 pm or by appointment