UH-HUH / SORRY (2026)

UH-HUH / SORRY, works by Cathy Busby and Garry Neill Kennedy, includes a selection of prints from Busby's SORRY Series (2005-2014), her WE ARE SORRY Fragments (2013), and her ATRIUM prints (2011). Central to Kennedy's work are eight large-scale working drawings (1992-2009) mapping his floor-to-ceiling wall paintings, including I DON'T WANT TO PAY THE FULL PRICE (Centre A, Vancouver, 2009). In addition, is one of his SEIZED prints from EXECUTIVE SUITE (suite of nine, 1991), along with 18 preparatory drawings.

Busby and Kennedy worked in parallel over the 20 years of their relationship. They compared notes, and occasionally exhibited their work side-by-side and yet their practices remained separate and distinct. Kennedy found his art chops through the late-1950s and 60s; while Busby’s art formation took place through the 1980s and 90s. They shared conceptual art roots and an overall concern with the political, both inside and outside art institutions. This is the first time Busby has put forward her work and, posthumously, Kennedy’s. 

ATRIUM

UH-HUH/SORRY includes four of Busby’s ATRIUM (2011) prints, silhouettes of the shapes of artworks that were on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) 2010-11 while Busby was artist-in-residence. She made these prints as a permanent record of her temporary wall paintings.

ATRIUM began as an installation of 17 painted silhouettes reproducing the shape of artworks found in different exhibits at the AGNS (Halifax) in Fall 2010. They encircled the walls of the Gallery’s atrium, an architectural feature. The silhouettes were the colours of the gallery walls where the actual artworks were displayed. Each silhouette stood in for an artwork made by an Indigenous artist, or it included subject matter or a title which referred to Indigenous cultures or languages. The selection was drawn from works outside those on display in the First Nations gallery located directly above the atrium.

A folder accompanied the work, providing a legend to the painted silhouettes and will also is on display as part of UH-HUH / SORRY. The work’s title, ATRIUM, refers both to the architectural ‘heart’ of the building that the silhouettes encircled, and suggests that since these collections connect to living histories, the relationships between Indigenous artists and gallery collections are at the ‘heart of the matter'. 

SORRY / WE ARE SORRY FRAGMENTS

SORRY (Stephen Harper), SORRY (Mike Harris), and SORRY (Gordon Campbell) are selected from Busby’s SORRY SERIES (suite of 30, edition of 5, 2005-2014) for this exhibition. They are a response to the plethora of public apology news stories by politicians, CEOs, and sports stars. Her SORRY artist book (2008) accompanies the prints.

WE ARE SORRY (2009) was an installation made up of two large sign-vinyl panels (each 25’ x 45’) with excerpts from the 2008 landmark apologies to Indigenous peoples made by Prime Ministers Stephen Harper (Canada) and Kevin Rudd (Australia). Done by invitation of Melbourne’s Laneway Commissions, the panels were installed side-by-side on the façade of the Citipower substation in Melbourne. The installation remained on the building for over three years, at which time, UBC’s Belkin Art Gallery invited Busby to show a version of it in the Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools exhibition (2013). 

Since the time of these apologies (2008-2013), there had been many contradictory actions taken by the Canadian and Australian federal governments. In Canada, major federal budget cuts were made to many Indigenous organizations. Busby wanted to acknowledge these breaches in a new version of WE ARE SORRY, so rather than showing them verbatim again, she exhibited a large fragment of the Canadian apology, filling the available wall, thus rendering the apology partial and incomplete. In addition, she cut the remaining panels into over a thousand fragments for visitors - a symbolic way of remembering the promise of the now disgraced apology. 

WE ARE SORRY FRAGMENTS

During their years-long outdoor installation in Melbourne, the pinks of the panels, which represented the apologizers complexions, had baked in the sun, been drenched in the rain, and had faded in the process. In UH-HUH / SORRY, Busby signals the weathering by painting the balcony-facade and the upper and lower back walls of the gallery in the muted tones of the Fragments. 

In Witnesses, Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, the Fragments were accompanied by a folder, explaining their origin, and providing a lengthy list of news stories documenting and demanding accountability for the federal government’s continued contradictory actions toward Indigenous rights. In UH-HUH / SORRY, 13 years later, Fragments are elevated to the balcony facade and once again accompanied by this information-rich folder. 

Over the years, fragments have been dispersed into homes, institutions, and delivered to the front steps of the federal Parliament buildings in Ottawa, by the late artist and hereditary Chief Beau Dick and accompanying collaborators, in Awalaskenis II Journey of Truth and Unity (2014). Busby appreciates that as the Fragments of WE ARE SORRY are dispersed into new hands, and different locations, there’s a symbolic sharing of the collective memory of these apologies. 

UH-HUH / SORRY offers an opportunity for close reading and acquisition of Kennedy and Busby’s conceptual, rational, intuitive, and sometimes funny, politically-engaged work.