Shawn Hunt, "Transformation Mask," mixed media (2017, photograph by Microsoft Vancouver, courtesy Audain Art Museum)

WHISTLER, British Columbia — In an exhibition closing today at the Audain Fine art Museum in Whistler, Canada, visitors encounter a sleek black robotic Raven mask, its plastic 3D-printed beak and head highlighted with strips of bright LEDs. Its eyes are phone screens, animated with emotive red pupils as if the trickster-effigy Raven has taken on the guise of an 80s-era Terminator.

The sculptural and "mixed reality" piece, a collaboration betwixt Hunt and the Microsoft Garage studio, is part of Shawn Hunt: Transformation, a bear witness past Heiltsuk artist Shawn Hunt that responds to strong international interest in the theme of transformation in Indigenous art. Hunt demonstrates the transformative possibilities of Northwest Coast art today by expanding traditional forms and experimenting with new media and painting.

A transformation mask designed past the Nuxalk artist Marven Tallio at National Gallery of Canada (via Flickr user bella_velo)

The form of the mask is based on historic Northwest Coast transformation masks, formalism regalia used in dances by many tribes upwardly and down the coast. In the gallery, Hunt's mask has been juxtaposed with "Eagle Transformation Mask" (1990) by famed Haida artist Robert Davidson, to demonstrate Chase's departure from more canonical and traditionalist approaches to mask-making. But the meliorate comparing to capture the spirit of the transformation mask is downstairs, where the museum's dimly lit collection of celebrated Northwest Coast masks includes "Raven Transformation Mask" (c.1860-fourscore) by an unknown Nuxalk creative person. Such masks captured the imagination of Euro-American artists and anthropologists with their ingenious structure: by pulling a series of describe-strings, the wearer can pull the pecker autonomously to theatrically reveal some other face hidden inside.

In the case of Chase's "Transformation Mask," the drama unfolds every bit the viewer steps within the mask, transforming the sculpture into man-raven cyborg. Motors whirr to bring the mask to life as information technology opens its beak, revealing the wearer inside, face lit with a red glow, looking through the glass of the augmented reality technology HoloLens. A short video begins to play, visible only to the mask-wearer, equally a digital rendering of a fire crackles on the existent plinth several steps in front of the mask. From the flames emerge the lambent forms of a raven, whale, and eagle, depicted in the elementary flowing lines of Northwest Coast formline pattern, drawn by Chase using a 3D cartoon tool.

Shawn Hunt, "Transformation Mask," mixed media (2017, photograph by Microsoft Vancouver, courtesy Audain Art Museum)

"Transformation Mask" does not simulate a specific Indigenous anniversary, just its digital transformation of the gallery is meant to emulate the feel of dancing and wearing a transformation mask. "The mask is most bridging, and my intent really was to bring the not-Indigenous viewer into that cultural world," Hunt told Hyperallergic. "When you go await at our masks you are generally going to a gallery or museum, and in that context the masks are not masks but rather sculptures, not something you can wear or interact with."

The Audain Museum calls "Transformation Mask" a "hybrid between the physicality of a transformation mask and the imperceptible feel of being part of the transformation." Merely the installation, and transformation masks in general, might ameliorate be understood as an interface. "They are an interface with the unseen, whether it exist the spirit globe or the internet," Chase said. Through his cosmos, the viewer briefly inhabits another experience, some other world and civilization.

The museum likewise presents Hunt's large, portrait-like renditions of mythical archetypes and legends, whose faces burst into lurid planes of carved masks and formline elements. These "Mask-Faces," as Chase calls them, fold the baroque drama of the transformation mask into two dimensions. In "Woods Spirit/Raven Wolf Mask Face" (2017), the eyes of the bright dark-green Mask-Face belong to two intertwined wolf and raven heads, depicted naturalistically with wooden features yet likewise man hair and an ear. In "Remembering the Flood/Raven Frog Mask" (2017), an orange figure in a canoe seems ready to crest the wave-like blue forehead of a face, which is as well a raven and a frog. Hunt has long been interested in the idea of the face up as a kind of mask; these paintings seem to fluctuate betwixt a confront and a mask at the same time.

Shawn Hunt, "Forest Spirit/Raven Wolf Mask Face up," acrylic on canvas, 182.9 ten 129.5 cm (2017, courtesy of artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Fine art)

The influence of Euro-American modernism is articulate in these paintings — the fragmented planes and projecting volumes of the faces seem Cubist, while the naturalism combined with mythical archetypes and dream-like figures recalls Surrealism. Many Surrealists took a keen interest in Northwest Declension Native art. "Modernists looked towards Indigenous fine art to begin to fracture the confront and human trunk and create something new," Hunt said. "They took our art and incorporated information technology into their work to evolve what we know equally art. So I find it interesting to take information technology back, total circle."

Hunt has explored the boundaries of formline design for much of his career. Also in the exhibition are two grisaille paintings from 2016, which show sinuous ghostly figures who seem to be themselves mid-transformation, every bit homo and animal faces emerge at different points of their torsos. Hunt describes these works as "neo-formline." The current exhibition also overlooks a gallery in the permanent collection that houses 2 of Chase's before paintings, "Traditional Evolution. Raven Steals My Light" and "Supermarket Hawkeye" (both 2013). The result could exist considered a popular-upwards retrospective of Chase'southward contempo oeuvre.

Installation view of Shawn Hunt: Transformationat Audain Art Museum

Hunt subverts discussions of actuality and tradition by hurtling past them, in a wide variety of media. His work gives united states a digitally-enhanced, sidelong glimpse of an Indigenous ceremonial earth and experience. There remains a potential critique of works like "Transformation Mask." Many Ethnic artists and activists advocate for a politics of refusal, which withholds sensitive ritual textile from non-Indigenous voyeurs, in order to avoid the fetishizing of Indigenous culture — and information technology is possible that the audition of "Transformation Mask" might seem voyeuristic and desiring. Yet by avoiding specific stories and rituals, and offer up a simulation every bit a site for empathy, this exhibition seems to sidestep that critique. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in The Manner of the Masks that "a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what information technology chooses not to represent." In the work of Shawn Hunt, the mask, painted or robotic, does not but correspond transformation only is the site of it, the interface to some other earth.

Shawn Hunt, "Transformation Mask," mixed media (2017, photograph by Microsoft Vancouver, courtesy Audain Art Museum)

Shawn Hunt: Transformation is on view at Audain Fine art Museum (4350 Blackcomb Manner, Whistler, Canada) until April 9.

Christopher Light-green is a educatee in the Ph.D. program in Fine art History at the CUNY Graduate Middle and a Graduate Teaching Swain at Baruch Higher. His writing has appeared in ARTMargins, The... More than by Christopher Green