Your Job Has Just Begun, Bracken Hanuse Corlett, 2025.
We are excited to share the work of interdisciplinary artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett, made during an artist residency with A/CA partner organization, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. This project was a series of visits with To be Seen, To be Heard: First Nations in Public Spaces 1900–1965 (June 13, 2024–March 30, 2025), an exhibition of large-scale archival photographs, films, and Indigenous regalia curated by Marcia Crosby and Karen Duffek exploring the visibility and agency of First Nations communities in public life throughout the twentieth century.
Bracken reflects on some questions that arose from these encounters in his artist statement:
Who do we dance for when the power goes out? Where do the rules of regalia align with our original lens? Ceremony activated under the colonial gaze is an act of resistance and continuum. The influence of the gaze is persistent. Our ancestors had endurance.
Your Job Has Just Begun is one of several digital drawings Bracken made during the residency. The title is pulled from a 1949 work by artist, author, and teacher George Clutesi exhibited in To be Seen, To be Heard: “Keep up the fight you brave leaders. . . . With your guidance have we broken the surface of the tide that so nearly engulfed us to its entirety. Hang on, fight, your job has just begun.” It is, as Bracken shares, a call to action to “keep working, dreaming, learning, listening and fighting.”
For more information about Bracken's project at the MOA, please visit The Archive/Counter-Archive Project: Visiting with a MOA Exhibition.
To see more of Bracken's work, follow Bracken Hanuse Corlett on Instagram.
Bracken Hanuse Corlett is an interdisciplinary artist from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He started out in theatre and performance and eventually moved towards his current practice that fuses sculpture, painting, and drawing with digital media, audiovisual performance, animation, and narrative. He is a graduate of the En’owkin Centre of Indigenous Art and went to Emily Carr University of Art and Design for Visual Arts. He trained in Northwest Coast Art, carving and design from acclaimed Heiltsuk artists Bradley Hunt and his sons Shawn and Dean. He was the recipient of the 2014 BC Creative Achievement Award in First Nations Art, the 2022 Portfolio Prize, and the 2022 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts. He has exhibited, screened, performed and had his work commissioned publicly on a local to international scale.