Kathy Slade: Wherever you go, you are a city
Launch: Saturday, June 27, 1:00 鈥� 4:00 PM
Billboard at Princess and Hastings Streets, Vancouver
Please join us for the launch of SCA instructor Kathy Slade's new public artwork, Wherever you go, you are a city.
is pleased to present Wherever you go, you are 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 day.
The sentence 鈥淲herever you go, you are a city鈥� 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鈥檚 reading of Thucydides and the Classical Greek idea of 蟺蠈位喂蟼, the polis. In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt writes, 鈥淭he 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.鈥� Arendt鈥檚 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.
Biography
Kathy Slade works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade has upcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), 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鈥檚 work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It鈥檚 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 丁香园AV and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.