Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
Known for their passionate work rooted in personal experience, artist Manuel Axel Strain embraces and exalts the Coast Salish longhouse to confront the oppressive, racist colonial context surrounding them. Titled xʷən̓iwən ce:p kʷθəθ nəw̓eyəł ((((Remember your teachings)))), their major multi-media exhibition—including paintings, sculptures, family photographs, video, and installation—transforms the Gallery with a dynamic mix of new and recent artworks rendered in their boldly unique style.
The shed-roof longhouses of Coast Salish peoples are central to community life. Traditionally built from planks of red cedar, these structures vary in scale, stretching up to several hundred feet in length. Capable of housing multiple and extended families, they serve as gathering places for culturally and spiritually significant events such as naming ceremonies, marriages, and potlatches. Before their attempted erasure by colonial powers, rows of these houses lined the coast. However, the vital cultural and ceremonial structures and values embodied by the longhouse continue to flourish today.
Of Musqueam, Simpcw, and Syilx descent, Strain celebrates the cedar longhouse not only as an enduring architectural form but also an important spiritual, philosophical, and cultural framework profoundly embedded with the relational, collectivist values of their family members and communities—past, present, and future. At the same time, Strain encourages visitors to the Gallery to critically consider the structures—be they architectural, social, cultural, or otherwise—that are predominantly upheld in contemporary Canadian society. What colonialist and capitalist values are embedded in these structures? And what can we learn from the longhouse, not only as an architectural typology that continues to inspire contemporary Indigenous architects today, but as a dynamic model for living, working, and learning together?
Richmond Art Gallery warmly thanks the artist, and acknowledges the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia for their generous loan of the artwork what do you know? (2023).
Narrated in English By Zoë Chan Narrated in Mandarin by Rebecca Wang
