The Tsimshian 6: Corey Moraes on the Next Generation (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/22

The Tsimshian 6: Corey Moraes on the Next Generation (6)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, let us talk today about the developments of the art form, the passing on of that form of art through productions and teaching and some of the people or organizations involved in them.

Cultures are not static. They never have been. Although they certainly have consistent long-term characteristics, all cultures are dynamic and living things. How is the art form of the Tsimshian evolving in recent years and decades compared to the past?

Corey Moraes: For lack of a better term, the artistic Renaissance started in the early ‘60s/’70s with a collection of Native and non-Native people. Some of these were like Duane Pasco. He was heavily involved with learning our cultural practices as far as art.

Bill Holm was another one. He was a scholar at the University of Washington. There were a handful of others as well. Indigenous-wise, a collection emerged from that, which was the Kitanmax School of Northwest Coast Art.

‘Ksan, that is in Hazelton. That was the first, to the best of my knowledge, the only legitimate school of learning the forms, learning the sculpture, of Northwest Coast art. You had some Haidas involved in it, some Nisga’a, some Gitxsan people, some Tsimshian, and some non-Natives that were all instrumental in the resurgence of relearning forms.

That carried on through the ’70s and ‘80s. It started to devolve in the ‘90s. So, that was the only school in Canada. Around that time, Ksan was starting to slow down. Another group of people was trained by Freda Diesing, a female Haida woman who was also part of the ‘60s and ‘70s Renaissance. 

These were people like Stan Bevan, Ken McNeil, and Dempsey Bob. They wanted to continue her legacy because she had passed away. They got involved with the University of Northern BC, UNBC. They were able to cobble together a university-level Northwest Coast program. 

This time, it was not based in a small, sleepy town like Hazelton. It was in Terrace, which has a higher population. Currently, one individual is responsible for kick-starting a jewellery program in Vancouver.

His name is Dan Wallace. He is Kwakwakaʼwakw. He had a vision for an urban education program run through what was then Native Education Centers. Now, it is Native Education College. Those are the three formal programs that have run since the ‘70s. 

‘Ksan is not a functioning school, right? 

Jacobsen: What are some of the issues these institutions, these schools, have in operation and foundation?

Moraes: I need to be privy to more information behind founding Ksan. They worked through a lot of that with Ksan. I did not hear any significant issues with the Frida Diesing school. They ironed out a lot of the kinks. 

It is uncertain if the jewellery program will run for the subsequent semesters year after year. For some reason, it is hit or miss, with the instructors needing more experience with the craft or instructing people. 

Jacobsen: What do you make of the consistency in the art form over several thousand years? That is unusual. Most civilizations only last for a short time. Moreover, most forms of art are lost to time. So, they do not have any resurrection.

So, they either disappear, get watered down, or transmute into another culture. We see this in several places in Western history, where the art forms stayed and were imbued with the characteristics of a conquering culture. 

Moraes: Yes, the art form seems just as relevant when done correctly today as in ancient, historical pieces. It is a template that has not reached its limitations yet. There is so much yet to be explored with this form of art.

I am seeing signs of strain on the legitimacy of the art form with the influence of newer people who need a staunch or strong understanding of the forms. They are putting out a diluted form of formline. 

They can do so because it is increasingly factorized to get your art on the product. At this point, any essential person without genuine talent can put out a subpar product. So, the short answer is that technology is allowing more of the less refined stuff to make it into the market in the art world.

Jacobsen: Is digital technology, which allows people to recreate various art forms in software applications, expediting this process?

Moraes: I refer to the digital platform when I say they can get things out faster. Back when I started, you did not have a digital camera. You would have to take pictures with a film camera. 

You would have to bring a roll of film in to get it developed. Only after you picked it up and looked at things would you know if you were using the right camera. The macro shots of jewellery were all blurry.

Then, these would have to be put into a magazine or an art brochure to be legitimately consumed by people’s eyes. Today, everything ends up on social media almost instantaneously. People can snap as many shots as they want and get digital renderings of things set at lightspeed through the internet in jpeg form. 

I do business with a gallery in Seattle that I have never stepped foot in. You used to have to go into a gallery physically and bring the piece with you. Now, everything is done through transfers and direct deposits. I have been doing business with this gallery for about five years.

I have never been inside. 

Jacobsen: How do you confirm your artwork is in it? 

Moraes: A lot of my stuff ends up in group shows. They will have a preview online before the show opens. They are currently doing virtual art shows, where nobody is allowed. There is an opening night where everybody gathers in the gallery and sees the work with their eyes for the first time. 

Now, they are happening solely online.  

Jacobsen: If you have this dilution through these digital programs, and if you have these educational institutes or schools that function sometimes and do not function other times, how does this drag on the artistic work and the culture itself? 

Moraes: It is similar to what is happening in the music industry. Traditional practices are simplified or oversimplified. One of these young artists attempted to return to paper and pencil for something.

They were lamenting the last time they put pencil to paper because they used Apple Pencil and Apple iPad Pro, which further hurls our art form down to the hall of immediacy. A tactile quality needs to be added. 

Beyond the tactile qualities, the spark of an idea, and the finalization of an idea, early in my career, this was before the influx of this technology. It could take months to see something on a mug or a T-shirt. You could take up to two months. It was back then when we got a print made. 

Today, you can have somebody working on vectorizing their image and sending it off the next day to what they call a dropshipping website. Where this website handles all of the ordering and fulfillment of shipping of every product they can put your artwork on. 

It can happen within 48 hours. When going from 2 months to 48 hours, many things will seep, not cutting the mustard like it used to. Because things took so long, the artist gave more consideration to what they wanted to invest the time in.

When you can bang out design after design, you are not invested in it. Just because you can do it, it does not mean it should be done. 

Jacobsen: How does this drive down the prices of the product? 

Moraes: There is so much out there now of the so-so artwork. It is hard to differentiate yourself outside of the price point. One of the unfortunate things I have seen is that from 4 to 6 Tsimshian artists are putting out subpar designs on non-medical masks because of COVID-19; that sort of thing never would have happened 25/30 years ago. 

It would have cost too much, and the investment would have been much longer. There would have been severe consideration over whether it was worth it. Before getting a product out there, you would have been halfway into the pandemic.

These things happen overnight. Not everything can be a masterpiece. I have work of mine. I have had to make them to buy some time between significant pieces. I have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of jewellery. 

I do not recall making them when they came back around. It comes back to the whole marketplace aspect of retail art today. There was a book written by a UBC student who interviewed me about our art forms, making it onto products like rubber boots, posters, t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, water bottles, pencils, pens, purses, and wallets. It goes on and on and on. 

At a certain point, one has to ask, “How many T-shirts does one need? How many emblazoned mugs do we need?” This falls into the consumerist culture. I have slowly backed away from it now. I do not think it contributes too much deep value [Laughing].

When I started it, I wanted it to be a multi-tiered system of my artwork. If someone could not afford a $1,200 mask, they could buy a $20 mug. However, in the past ten years, the market has grown exponentially.

It reached the point where my publisher – a guy I do not work with anymore – would only have a product like a shower curtain exist online for two or three months and then remove it. He said it would get stale.

When I started to hear words like “stale” regarding cases in my artwork, it put a bad taste in my mouth. 

Jacobsen: What about the next generation? What are you doing? What mentoring and education efforts are being made to prevent the entire art form from being watered down? 

Moraes: I’m personally focusing on our youngest, Corey Jr., and his brother Cameron, who are interested in more refined art areas. They both show an interest in video production, and the youngest likes fine sculpture and 3D rendering. 

Computer animation has a lot of room to modernize historic legends. Our mythology could be interpreted almost synonymously with superhero culture, so there is much room for growth. 

It is a process that requires a lot of investment, refinement, thought process, and history-building to make the characters believable. That direction can be perpetuated in our art form or our culture, which is wide open. 

Jacobsen: Who are the central figures joining you in this effort now?

Moraes: Now, a writer is helping me build the character backstories and story art. I have another Aboriginal friend who went to LaSalle College Vancouver and learned 3D sculpting and all the rest. 

We used my superhero characters as part of the curriculum for a semester. They created a 2-minute short commercial of the potential of storytelling with three or four of my characters. So, they had a class of 30 or 34 students.

They all worked on various aspects of computer animation, including the characters I created, the backgrounds, textures, movement, and more. 

Jacobsen: On a more emotional level, on a more concluding note, what are your hopes? Not only for Tsimshian culture at large but also for the particular style of art form you are producing and advancing for the foreseeable future. 

Moraes: Scholars have always described my art as bringing something historic and reframing it in a contemporary context, thus creating a new discourse. They say that is something scarce. That exists for my art. 

No matter what I do, whether a painting, engraving, carving, airbrushing, whatever it is, watercolour or oil paint, They say that I do it in such a way that it was always meant to be that way. For my artwork, there is no strain on the viewer to connect the past with the present. 

That is the key to growing as an artist and an art form. It is to always understand where it came from, know where you are, and have a strong vision within yourself of what you see the art form as. 

To that extent, I am passing that on to Corey Jr. and my other children, who will be involved in some way or fashion in the future of the technology of Northwest Coast art. 

However, you have to understand the world and your place in it to reflect on something you see in the world. Do you understand? John Lennon did not have any significant offspring. He had Julian Lennon, who had a hit or two in the ‘80s. That was it.

The Rolling Stones had no new rolling stone to carry on the image and iconography. They had nothing to carry on the lineage. Right? I am perplexed by scholarly types or anthropological backgrounds when they ask if I am from a family of artists. 

The nearest I can make a connection is with an uncle who passed away when he was 14 years old from tuberculosis. My mother remembers him always sketching and being a lover of art. Not until I had my children did I see that it can be passed down from generation to generation. 

As I mentioned many times before, Corey Jr. is like a mini-me without all of the trauma. He was born with this staunch attention to detail. Poring over an artwork for a couple of hours is almost terrifying. 

He was making intricate cut-outs in any form he wanted with scissors. He got a hold of the Etch-a-Sketches. You shake them to get rid of the design. He sat with it for a long time and handed it back. 

It was a fully fleshed-out figure. He understands his vision, the limitations of whatever he touches, and how to stretch those limitations. He has learned how to sew and loves to sculpt things.

He learned about sculpting wire that goes under the skeletal portion of a figure. He has even assembled parts of a sculpture that he made using staples, string, and cord. He has things backlit. These are all terrifying because I was not at his level. 

He will be ten this year. I was in my late teens, maybe in my early 20s. He continually devours creation and spews it out in ways we have never thought possible. So, I now get what those other scholars and anthropological thinkers asked when they asked if I came from a family of carvers.

I do not think I came from a family of artists, but I have made one now.

Jacobsen: What a fantastic end to the series, Corey.

Moraes: Yes.

Jacobsen: Thank you.  

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