All Along The Watchtower, 2015 For the YVR Art Foundation’s upcoming auction
Sonny Assu’s exploration of abstraction and relationships to pop culture is a driving force behind this drum. Composed by Bob Dylan, made famous by Jimi Hendrix, the song "All Along The Watchtower" strikes a particular cord with fans of the popular television series Battlestar Galactica (BSG). The drum's minimal design and colour palette highlights its skin's unique texture, and the central 3D element is meant to invoke motion - in this case, "Faster Than Light" (FTL) travel, which is part of the BSG canon. The pop-culture narrative behind "All Along The Watchtower" is in reference to the series finale of BSG. The character Starbuck needs to engage the ship’s FTL drive to "jump” to seemingly unknown coordinates, which are based on the notes from the song itself. Her leap of faith unknowingly steers the haggard crew to a “pre-historic” Earth, ultimately saving the fate of humanity.
This is the third drum painting in a new series that explores the use of 3D formline elements. First used in Interventions On The Imaginary, the 3D forms used by Assu are meant to invoke the notion of an extraterrestrial visit. This theory was inspired by petroglyphs found near his home village of Cape Mudge. “To me," he says of the petroglyphs, “they look like aliens.”. Assu speculates, through this new painting series, and Interventions On The Imaginary, that the First Peoples were visited by aliens at some point in the past.
"Which, if you’ve seen the final episode of BSG," he says, “will blow your mind a little."