Curator & Collector

Pierre Karlik’s 1980 work “Struggle for Survival: 9 Low Relief Sculptures of Games on Tooth”

While in the Northern House pavilion during the recent 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, I spotted this sculpture by First Nations artist Pierre Karlik. It proved to be one of the more popular artworks in Northern House, and all sorts of people stopped to admire and be intrigued by this sculpture in “ivory, granite, antler, wood, sinew.” Struggle for Survival seems, to me, to be a monumental work, perhaps a smaller, Northern equivalent to Bill Reid’s Spirit of Haida Gwaii–though perhaps with a more emphatic sense of humour.

Certainly, I was intrigued by it, and I wanted to spend much more time than I was able to take it in. (Part of me worries that I may have even given its title incorrectly.) In any case, the work depicts a hunter with a spear, opposite at close quarters a bear with a paw on an animal that this West Coast urban-dweller thinks may be a sea lion. The bear is smiling broadly. The human figure has a more ambiguous look on his face. Between them is a very tall cone on which many scenes are carved. I’m sorry that I had only a few minutes in Northern House to take in this work, and I’m sorrier still that there appears to be no information or reflection on this work at all on the internet. Perhaps this blog post can go a very short way towards rectifying this end.

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Note: I finally figured out how to change WordPress’s default “medium” size setting for pictures. I’ll probably use 500 pixels as the maximum dimension now, rather than 300.