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 (2022), 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.
Other recent projects include: a solo presentation titled Blue Monday at Cullinan Richards project space 4COSE in London, UK (2017); It was a strange apartment; full of books…, a collaborative print installation with poet Lisa Robertson, which was shown at Galerie Au 8 rue saint bon in Paris (2013), at Malaspina Printmakers (2012), and the Audain Gallery (2015) in Vancouver. As guest curator of Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016) Slade curated a selection of artists’ publications and wrote a short essay on Lawrence Sterne and John Baldessari.
Slade is Co-director, with Brady Cranfield, of The Music Appreciation Society, a fictitious society that brings visual art and popular music together through panel discussions and listening events, performances, artworks, and publications. Also with Brady Cranfield, she is part of the art band Cranfield and Slade. They have released two LPs on coloured vinyl. These artist record editions are concept albums intended to be considered as both objects and sound carriers. 12 Sun Songs (2009) is a collection of pop song covers about the sun and 10 Riot Songs (2011) is made up of covers of punk songs about rioting.
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 (2022), 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.
Other recent projects include: a solo presentation titled Blue Monday at Cullinan Richards project space 4COSE in London, UK (2017); It was a strange apartment; full of books…, a collaborative print installation with poet Lisa Robertson, which was shown at Galerie Au 8 rue saint bon in Paris (2013), at Malaspina Printmakers (2012), and the Audain Gallery (2015) in Vancouver. As guest curator of Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016) Slade curated a selection of artists’ publications and wrote a short essay on Lawrence Sterne and John Baldessari.
Slade is Co-director, with Brady Cranfield, of The Music Appreciation Society, a fictitious society that brings visual art and popular music together through panel discussions and listening events, performances, artworks, and publications. Also with Brady Cranfield, she is part of the art band Cranfield and Slade. They have released two LPs on coloured vinyl. These artist record editions are concept albums intended to be considered as both objects and sound carriers. 12 Sun Songs (2009) is a collection of pop song covers about the sun and 10 Riot Songs (2011) is made up of covers of punk songs about rioting.
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.
Exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany
Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kathy Slade, Nov. 7, 2020 - February 14, 2021
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
"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.
Link to exhibition booklet, Kunstverein Braunschweig
Link to exhibition booklet, Kunstverein Braunschweig
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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