Exhibition explores ‘total visual languages’ binding Salish peoples together

Every River Has a Mouth, the newest exhibition at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, plunges deep into connections that flow between Salish artists on the province’s coast and its interior.

Guest-curated by Snuneymuxw artist and storyteller Kwulasultun (Eliot White-Hill), it’s his first collaboration with the acclaimed gallery in “Vancouver.”

“Salish art has its own total visual language, our own shapes,” White-Hill tells IndigiNews. “We use our own grammar.”

Too often, people assume West Coast “native art” is all the well-known northern Indigenous style known as formline, he notes.

“So really,” he says, “every opportunity we have to talk about that and to name it and to honor it in a way that people can learn through — that is really important.”