Beau Dick

Born in the community of Yalis (Alert Bay), British Columbia, Beau Dick, known as Walas Gwa’yam (Big Whale) is widely acknowledged for his importance as both an artist and activist. His artworks have contributed to the ceremonial life of his community, and have expanded the popular conception of Northwest Coast art and imagery among collectors and fellow artists.

Many of Dick’s creations take on a haunting or otherworldly aspect mediated by the artist’s integration of a colour palette and style incorporating imagery from Japanese and Western pop culture.

The present artwork is inscribed in the interior “Book-woos / Wild Man of the Woods” and depicts the ghost-like Bukwus spirit, a dangerous supernatural being regarded by the Kwakwaka’wakw and neighboring peoples as a ghostly figure who dwells in the forest amidst the souls of the drowned. Bukwus masks are part of an extended family of wild-man and wild-woman imagery that includes the cannibalistic Dzunukwa spirit, who is sometimes said to be the keeper of lost souls, returning the souls of drowned whalers to their villages during their memorials.

Historical Bukwus masks exhibit many minutely different regional variations that are little understood and inadequately differentiated at the present time. Beau Dick seems to have delighted in his depictions of the many variations. The present mask, with its prowlike curvilinear mouth, shaggy eyebrows, and reddish complexion may be partially informed by a family of Nuu-chah-nulth masks of reddish colour, broadly identified by Detroit Art Institute Curator David Penney as “Red-Faced Wild Man.”[1]

[1] David W. Penney, “The Nootka ‘Wild Man’ Masquerade and the Forest Spirit Tradition of the Southern Northwest Coast.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 1 (1981): 95-109. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20166659.