Anspayaxw is an immersive 12-channel sound and photography installation based on recordings made in and around the Native reserve of Kispiox, in northern British Columbia. John Wynne worked with artist Denise Hawrysio and linguist Tyler Peterson to record and photograph speakers of the endangered language, Gitxsanimaax, gathering materials for this installation and for a new community archive housed at the ‘Ksan Museum in Gitxsan territory.
The images and sounds of Wynne’s Anspayaxw hang in the border zones between anthropology and art, drawing attention to the subjective nature of language documentation and photography, and the multiple layers of translation that are central to the documentation and interpretation process. It is Wynne’s navigation of this border space between disciplinary practices that is most unsettling about the work. The sounds and images, the products of ethnographic and linguistic research, are edited and remixed to resist easy interpretation. Reality, Wynne suggests, is never symmetrical. This is a quality that the doubled images are intended to reflect. The imperfect reflections counter the viewer’s desire for symmetry; they disrupt the sense that what is seen and heard can be simply understood. Relations of power are rarely symmetrical either, but there are spaces of negotiation in between.
Kate Hennessy
(excerpt from ‘Asymmetrical Translations: John Wynne’s Anspayaxw‘)
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