Kathy Slade
CV
Slade is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada, who works across disciplines in a variety of media including textiles, sculpture, sound, performance, film, video, print, and publication. Through her practice, Slade points to moments and events in literature, art history, and popular culture from which to reimagine particular temporalities and existing texts, to create looping structures, and to produce remakes that play on repetition and the doublet of original and copy.
Kathy Slade has a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), and upcoming shows at The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2023), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.
Aside from her own artists’ publications such as the records and her artists’ books 52 Transactions and Love Poem, Slade publishes the work of other artists and writers. She is the Founding Editor of Emily Carr University Press where she’s published artists’ books, monographs, music projects, and selected writing by UJ3RK5, Rodney Graham, Elspeth Pratt, Dan Graham, Jeff Derksen, and Rita McBride. She is also Associate Editor for JRP|Ringier in Zürich. With her partner Kay Higgins, Slade is Editor and Publisher of Publication Studio Vancouver where she has published books with artists such as Dan Graham, Myfanwy MacLeod, James Hoff, Mina Totino, and poet/EGS student Allison Grimaldi Donahue.
Slade is the founder of READ Books at Libby Leshgold Gallery where she holds the position of Head of Publication and Communication. She teaches studio courses and seminars on topics such as art and text, artists’ books and art writing. She is an Adjunct Professor at both.
Slade is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada, who works across disciplines in a variety of media including textiles, sculpture, sound, performance, film, video, print, and publication. Through her practice, Slade points to moments and events in literature, art history, and popular culture from which to reimagine particular temporalities and existing texts, to create looping structures, and to produce remakes that play on repetition and the doublet of original and copy.
Kathy Slade has a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), and upcoming shows at The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2023), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.
Aside from her own artists’ publications such as the records and her artists’ books 52 Transactions and Love Poem, Slade publishes the work of other artists and writers. She is the Founding Editor of Emily Carr University Press where she’s published artists’ books, monographs, music projects, and selected writing by UJ3RK5, Rodney Graham, Elspeth Pratt, Dan Graham, Jeff Derksen, and Rita McBride. She is also Associate Editor for JRP|Ringier in Zürich. With her partner Kay Higgins, Slade is Editor and Publisher of Publication Studio Vancouver where she has published books with artists such as Dan Graham, Myfanwy MacLeod, James Hoff, Mina Totino, and poet/EGS student Allison Grimaldi Donahue.
Slade is the founder of READ Books at Libby Leshgold Gallery where she holds the position of Head of Publication and Communication. She teaches studio courses and seminars on topics such as art and text, artists’ books and art writing. She is an Adjunct Professor at both.
2023
Alejo Duque and Kathy Slade "6,000 feet beyond man and time"
March 16 - April 8, 2023
2895 W 33rd Avenue Vancouver, BC
Mackenzie Heights
2895 W 33rd Avenue Vancouver, BC
Mackenzie Heights
I shall now tell the story of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, the thought of eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained—belongs to the August of the year 1881: it was jotted down on a piece of paper with the inscription: “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” I was that day walking through the woods beside the lake of Silvaplana; I stopped beside a mighty pyramidal block of stone which reared itself up not far from Surlei. Then this idea came to me.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo
In June of 2022 Duque and Slade travelled to Sils Maria, a village in the Swiss Alps where Friedrich Nietzsche spent most summers during the 1880s. Accompanied by the esteemed philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Avital Ronell, and the emerging artist/artist’s assistant Vitória Monteiro, the group journeyed to study the philosopher’s time spent in Sils Maria. In particular, the artists focussed on the pyramidal shaped boulder that Nietzsche claimed inspired his thought of eternal recurrence of the same—the idea that everything, all events, all thoughts, would repeat in a cycle or loop for eternity.
“6,000 feet beyond man and time,” features large black and white photographs of the Nietzsche boulder by Duque and frottage drawings by Slade made in graphite, charcoal, and wax pastel. In addition to images of the of the rock, Slade is presenting rubbings the floor of Nietzsche’s room in the Nietzsche Haus where he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist.
Alejo Duque is an artist based in Bogotá, Colombia. Duque’s individual practice is primarily based in analog photography and sound art. He also works collaboratively on participatory art projects that focus on crossing the boundaries of new, old, and unstable media. Duque works in network-based art and amateur radio, operating under the call sign -HK4ADJ-. He is the founding member of networks such as Bricolabs, dorkbot, labSurlab, un\loquer and Pnode. He is currently active on Radiolibre and Coomunarte. Duque has participated in exhibitions and festivals throughout Colombia including at Museo de Antioquia, Centro Cultural Moravia, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. He is the director of the CK:\WEB audiovisual experimental station at the Bogota Planetarium.
Slade’s exhibition As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, continues at the Contemporary Art Gallery until May 7th.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo
In June of 2022 Duque and Slade travelled to Sils Maria, a village in the Swiss Alps where Friedrich Nietzsche spent most summers during the 1880s. Accompanied by the esteemed philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Avital Ronell, and the emerging artist/artist’s assistant Vitória Monteiro, the group journeyed to study the philosopher’s time spent in Sils Maria. In particular, the artists focussed on the pyramidal shaped boulder that Nietzsche claimed inspired his thought of eternal recurrence of the same—the idea that everything, all events, all thoughts, would repeat in a cycle or loop for eternity.
“6,000 feet beyond man and time,” features large black and white photographs of the Nietzsche boulder by Duque and frottage drawings by Slade made in graphite, charcoal, and wax pastel. In addition to images of the of the rock, Slade is presenting rubbings the floor of Nietzsche’s room in the Nietzsche Haus where he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist.
Alejo Duque is an artist based in Bogotá, Colombia. Duque’s individual practice is primarily based in analog photography and sound art. He also works collaboratively on participatory art projects that focus on crossing the boundaries of new, old, and unstable media. Duque works in network-based art and amateur radio, operating under the call sign -HK4ADJ-. He is the founding member of networks such as Bricolabs, dorkbot, labSurlab, un\loquer and Pnode. He is currently active on Radiolibre and Coomunarte. Duque has participated in exhibitions and festivals throughout Colombia including at Museo de Antioquia, Centro Cultural Moravia, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. He is the director of the CK:\WEB audiovisual experimental station at the Bogota Planetarium.
Slade’s exhibition As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, continues at the Contemporary Art Gallery until May 7th.
Alejo Duque, Rock 1, 2022, inkjet print on cotton rag paper, 37 x 37 in.
Institutional Exhibition
Kathy Slade - As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop
Contemporary Art Gallery
27 Jan until 7 May, 2023
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
For over three decades, Kathy Slade has produced conceptually driven work that engages techniques of copying, repetition and reenactment, often coalescing in materially sumptuous objects. In her wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice, Slade inhabits sources from literature, art history, philosophy, and popular culture, weaving her references into absurd and frequently playful loops and voids.
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Slade presents As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, a new body of work rooted in a research trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent the majority of his summers during the decade he wrote his most enduring works. There, Slade retraced the philosopher’s steps along the shore of Lake Silvaplana, where upon encountering a large, pyramid-shaped rock he arrived at what he called “my truly abyssal thought”: eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circulation of all things.” In the exhibition, Slade reimagines Nietzsche’s encounter in two depictions: an enormous tapestry representing the rock to scale, and a series of graphite rubbings that maps the entirety of the rock’s surface over twenty monochromes.
Contemporary Art Gallery
27 Jan until 7 May, 2023
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
For over three decades, Kathy Slade has produced conceptually driven work that engages techniques of copying, repetition and reenactment, often coalescing in materially sumptuous objects. In her wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice, Slade inhabits sources from literature, art history, philosophy, and popular culture, weaving her references into absurd and frequently playful loops and voids.
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Slade presents As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, a new body of work rooted in a research trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent the majority of his summers during the decade he wrote his most enduring works. There, Slade retraced the philosopher’s steps along the shore of Lake Silvaplana, where upon encountering a large, pyramid-shaped rock he arrived at what he called “my truly abyssal thought”: eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circulation of all things.” In the exhibition, Slade reimagines Nietzsche’s encounter in two depictions: an enormous tapestry representing the rock to scale, and a series of graphite rubbings that maps the entirety of the rock’s surface over twenty monochromes.
In Conversation
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Exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany
Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kathy Slade
Nov. 7, 2020 - June 2021
Interview with Kathy Slade | Kunstverein Braunschweig | Film by Stark & Shakupa Kunstverein Braunschweig
The exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig brings together works by three artists from different parts of Canada: Nadia Belerique explores the relationship between object and (photographic) representation, while Jeneen Frei Njootli’s interdisciplinary practice is shaped by her cultural background as a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin Nation, and Kathy Slade focuses in her artistic practice on reading and publishing, offering meditations on the role of the artist as maker, publisher, and teacher.
The exhibition is part of the culture program related to Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair and is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.
The exhibition is part of the culture program related to Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair and is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.
Exhibition view | Kathy Slade | After Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man | 2020
right: Kathy Slade | After Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferra | 2020 | Photo: Stefan Stark
right: Kathy Slade | After Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferra | 2020 | Photo: Stefan Stark
"Textere", the Latin root of text, means to join, to construct, to build or quite literally to weave. It is this relationship, between art and text, text and textile that is central to Cana- dian artist Kathy Slade’s practice and deftly present in the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. Through the use of textile, printed matter and video, the works consider and query the notion of books, reading and publishing, and offer meditations on the role of the artist, publisher and teacher. Taking up strategies of copy and repetition, Slade looks to moments or events in history and popular culture from which she extracts ideas, visual content and language. As curator Jordan Storm aptly describes, “Foregoing gestures of her own hand, the artist chooses instead to illuminate existing imagery.”1
Slade often draws on particular moments of convergence between art and literature, and in After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of a Young Man (2020) and After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of Laura Battiferra (2020) she points to poet and painter, Agnolo Bronzino, who between 1527 and 1569 was known to repeatedly paint portraits which depicted a figure gesturing to a book. The two large-scale woven tapestries recreate fragmented portions of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530), in which a finger is suggestively slipped between the pages of a book, and Portrait of Laura Battiferra (c. 1560), where her fingers point to two sonnets in Francesco Petrarch’s book of poems, Il Canzoniere.This signaling of the hands in relation to books evoke a manicule: a punctuation device that first appeared in books in the 12th century as a small illustration of a pointing handto draw a reader’s attention to particular texts. In describing this device, author and scholar Whitney Anne Trettien states that “the manicule forces us to ride the rim between reading and writing, between textual consumption and textural production.”2 It is at this threshold moment that the reader becomes a maker of meaning.
1 Jordan Strom in Kathy Slade: This is a chord. This is another., 2018 Surrey Art Gallery. p. 11.
2 Whitney Anne Trettien, 2009. http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/ 2009/03/more-cut-ups-hands-in-early-printed.html
Slade often draws on particular moments of convergence between art and literature, and in After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of a Young Man (2020) and After Agnolo Bronzino Portrait of Laura Battiferra (2020) she points to poet and painter, Agnolo Bronzino, who between 1527 and 1569 was known to repeatedly paint portraits which depicted a figure gesturing to a book. The two large-scale woven tapestries recreate fragmented portions of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530), in which a finger is suggestively slipped between the pages of a book, and Portrait of Laura Battiferra (c. 1560), where her fingers point to two sonnets in Francesco Petrarch’s book of poems, Il Canzoniere.This signaling of the hands in relation to books evoke a manicule: a punctuation device that first appeared in books in the 12th century as a small illustration of a pointing handto draw a reader’s attention to particular texts. In describing this device, author and scholar Whitney Anne Trettien states that “the manicule forces us to ride the rim between reading and writing, between textual consumption and textural production.”2 It is at this threshold moment that the reader becomes a maker of meaning.
1 Jordan Strom in Kathy Slade: This is a chord. This is another., 2018 Surrey Art Gallery. p. 11.
2 Whitney Anne Trettien, 2009. http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/ 2009/03/more-cut-ups-hands-in-early-printed.html
Exhibition view | Kathy Slade | Alas, poor YORICK! | 2002 | Photo: Stefan Stark
Alas, poor YORICK! (2002) – a recreation of the black page in Laurence Sterne’s epic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – brings the viewer’s attention to another moment in literature. In the novel, the death of Yorick (a fictionalised self-portrait of the author) is announced by means of Sterne’s citation of the famous utterance from Hamlet. On the following page (recto and verso) rather than readable text, the reader finds the type rendered as a swathe of
black ink. In Slade’s rendition, the page is instead embroidered; setting the histories of gendered labours in textile arts against the male-dominated history of the monochromein art.
black ink. In Slade’s rendition, the page is instead embroidered; setting the histories of gendered labours in textile arts against the male-dominated history of the monochromein art.
The top floor of the Villa Salve Hospes, intimately gathersa selection of artists’ books and records by Slade as well as publications she has authored, edited and published. The variety and expansiveness of these objects offer a moment to reconsider how we understand the notion of a book: the literary book, the book object, the artist book. Alongside the books, a series of jacquard-woven blankets – For the Readers (2018) – on the furniture and walls. With simplified line drawings or texts, the four blankets, each with a duplicate in the same room, bear reference to literature or books. As the name suggests, the blankets are for the viewers, the readers, both to regard and to make use of. This dual function insists on upending the relationship between viewer and reader, domestic and gallery space, utility and aesthetics.
Projects Class (2015) marks a moment in Slade’s career where her teaching practice began to merge with her art practice. This work is a recreation of David Askevold’s Project Class, which was held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design beginning in 1969. In both projects, the instructors (Askevold and Slade) asked twelve artists to send a text – instructions, proposals or projects – for their students to enact, make or interpret. Projects Class became a semester-long experimental artwork that was made in collaboration with the invited artists, the students and their professor, radically changing how students and the institution engaged with education. Through Projects Class teaching and learning became art making and the class itself became artwork.
Kathy Slade | Ulises Carrión: The New Art of Making Books | 2015 | Photo: Stefan Stark
Closing the exhibition – a sort of precis of Slade’s practice – is Ulises Carrión: The New Art of Making Books (2015). Across three screens, Slade’s former students orate con- ceptual artist Ulises Carrión’s 1975 text of the same title, resurfacing it in a new, contemporary context. Through this act of repetition, re-presentation and re-imagination, Slade creates doublets, excavating and activating unlikely histories, to generate new meanings and ways of understanding.
Text by Julia Lamare for the exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig
Link to exhibition booklet, Kunstverein Braunschweig
Text by Julia Lamare for the exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig
Link to exhibition booklet, Kunstverein Braunschweig
Past Exhibition at MRG
A Dream and a Drive: Circles, Dots, Os and Zerosis
a two-person exhibition of the work of Amber Frid-Jimenez and Kathy Slade | 2019
The artists present new works including video and embroidery that draw on sources ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary(1856) to Ekstase, a 1933 film starring Hedy Lamarr and directed by Gustav Machatý. Both historical works were deemed obscene by the censors of their time. Emma Bovary’s scandalous conduct, her desire, adulterous liaisons, and suicide, led Flaubert to trial where he was charged with offenses against public and religious morals; while Lamarr’s performance of Eva Hermann’s sexual desire—notoriously, the first portrayal of a female orgasm in the history of film—led to charges of indecency from various countries in Europe and North America that amounted to years of delay for the release of Ekstase.
The exhibition focuses on the circle or typographic figure O. The O manifests in a new series of embroidered monochromes by Slade. It is present in Hedy Lamarr’s embodiment of ecstasy in Frid-Jimenez’s remake of an excerpt of Ekstaseand exists within a fictitious journey around the streets of Rouen as imagined by Flaubert.
This exhibition marks the beginning of a new collaborative project for Frid-Jimenez and Slade that will study how images are read through persuasive texts and technologies and how meaning is formed through modes of reimagining, repetition, and reenactment.
The exhibition focuses on the circle or typographic figure O. The O manifests in a new series of embroidered monochromes by Slade. It is present in Hedy Lamarr’s embodiment of ecstasy in Frid-Jimenez’s remake of an excerpt of Ekstaseand exists within a fictitious journey around the streets of Rouen as imagined by Flaubert.
This exhibition marks the beginning of a new collaborative project for Frid-Jimenez and Slade that will study how images are read through persuasive texts and technologies and how meaning is formed through modes of reimagining, repetition, and reenactment.
Wherever you go, you will be a city | Billboard Project | Kathy Slade
June 27 - July 31, 2020
Billboard at Princess and East Hastings Streets, Vancouver, BC.
Mónica Reyes Gallery is pleased to present Wherever you go, you will be a city., a billboard project by Kathy Slade. The billboard depicts a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds that are partially framed by various shades from the green foliage of treetops. While Slade’s billboard is site-specific, the image it depicts could be from anywhere in the city, a suburb, or the countryside. It is a cinematic-like scene that suggests daydreaming, of looking up at the sky on a summer’s day.
The sentence “Wherever you go, you will be a city” is presented like a subtitle for an English translation of a foreign film. While not from a film, the text here is a translation that stems from Hannah Arendt’s reading of Thucydides and the Classical Greek idea of πόλις, the polis. In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt writes, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people acting and living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” Arendt’s hope is to return to this older notion of the polis not as a traditionalist but to critically re-present this idea from the past for the sake of a better future.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard adjacent to the Mónica Reyes Gallery on Princess Avenue just south of East Hastings Street in the historic and diverse neighbourhood of Strathcona.
The sentence “Wherever you go, you will be a city” is presented like a subtitle for an English translation of a foreign film. While not from a film, the text here is a translation that stems from Hannah Arendt’s reading of Thucydides and the Classical Greek idea of πόλις, the polis. In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt writes, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people acting and living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” Arendt’s hope is to return to this older notion of the polis not as a traditionalist but to critically re-present this idea from the past for the sake of a better future.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard adjacent to the Mónica Reyes Gallery on Princess Avenue just south of East Hastings Street in the historic and diverse neighbourhood of Strathcona.
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KATHY SLADE
shares this exerpt of the video "Please Please Please" presenting an empty Vancouver street coupled with this melancholy song, as her response to the gallery’s request to artists for their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation. The video “Please Please Please” (dvd projection, 11 minutes, 2003), which depicts a point of view shot as the artist walks from her studio to the Or Gallery (where the work was originally shown). For the soundtrack, Slade performs a cover of The Smiths’ “Please Please Please,” accompanied by Dan Bejar @destroyer_band on guitar and piano. March 27, 2020 |
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BOOKS
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Kathy Slade
This is a chord. This is another. Kathy Slade: This is a Chord. This is Another. accompanies the artist's 2018 solo exhibition at Surrey Art Gallery. The text includes an overview of each work in the exhibition by curator Jordan Strom, an analysis of Slade's work in the context of music and art historical culture by artist and musician Brady Cranfield, and a discussion of the performative nature of Slade's work by Austrian writer Lina Morawetz. The catalogue features high resolution installation views and images of each artwork in the exhibition, along with beautiful typesetting and design by The Future. ISBN 978-1-926573-52-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-926573-53-3 (digital) |