Kathy Slade


Kathy Slade is a Canadian artist, author, curator, editor, and publisher born in Montreal, Quebec, and based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is currently the Head of Gallery Communications and Publications and a Sessional Faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Education

Slade graduated with a B.A. from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC in 1990, and received an M.A. from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2018. Slade graduated from SFU with the Helen Pitt Graduate Award.

Work

Slade has worked in a variety of mediums including embroidery, sound, sculpture, books, film, and video. The artist draws upon "sources ranging from cult films and punk rock music to literary classics and recent art history." Slade founded the Emily Carr University Press. In 1999 she developed READ Books, a bookstore located in the Charles H. Scott Gallery, now called the Libby Leshgold Gallery, at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2009, Slade received the VIVA Award, which is awarded by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation "annually to celebrate exemplary achievement by British Columba artists in mid-career".

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

The Art Gallery of Alberta exhibited Slade's work in Charrette Roulette: Language: Kathy Slade, Keith Higgins and Publication Studio Vancouver, which was an "on-going collaborative project posits publication as an art practice, while blurring the line between curatorial and editorial practice. For Edmonton Edition, PSV will print and bind books onsite and will work with local artists to produce new artists’ books."
In 2013 and 2012, the artist exhibited It was a strange apartment; full of books… with Lisa Robertson at the Galerie Au 8 rue saint bon, Paris, France, and at Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver, BC. In 2006, Slade exhibited 52 Transactions, which chronicled the artist's receipts from transactions at the Vancouver Public Library.
I Want it All I Want It Now was exhibited at the Or Gallery in Vancouver in 2003, which included the video installation Please Please Please, which "depicts Slade’s point of view as she strolls through the streets of Vancouver leading from her studio to the Or Gallery as she accompanies herself in song, covering The Smiths’ Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want."
In 2002, the artist exhibited "Embroidered Monochrome Propositions and Other New Work" at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver, which "features a number of monochrome paintings embroidered by machine, repeating a stitch to fill the entire canvas. These works simultaneously draw upon histories of decorative art. Feminism, technology and labour histories, and minimalist/conceptual practices."

Group exhibitions

Slade's work was featured in the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver BC, in 2018. This all female artist exhibition focused on the excess and abundance of the archive, language, and the position of the female reader as an artistic genre. Slade exhibited three artworks in this show, including a floor to ceiling mural in the UBC Walter C. Koerner Library.
In 2016, Slade's work was exhibited in the show titled Yesterday was Once Tomorrow at Artexte in Montreal, QC, and in 2015 at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, MB. The show focused on Canadian art magazines that were begun and terminated in the 1990s, and, "pinpoints, for the first time, a loose network of activity taking place in major parts of Canada." Also in 2016, the artist was featured in the Art Gallery of Alberta's exhibition titled The Blur In Between, which examined the merging of traditional art and design as disciplines.
The artist was included in the exhibition Barroco Nova: Neo Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art at the Museum London in London ON in 2011. The exhibition "presents a vast range of projects by 19 Canadian and international contemporary artists whose approaches rely on intensified appeals to our senses to produce an engaged address to our cultural moment: visions that arguably take up Liebnitzian notions of the fold and possible worlds."
In 2010, the artist exhibited in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall along with 70 other arts organizations presenting examples of their work in an arts festival held in honor of the Tate's 10th birthday, referred to as No Soul For Sale. Also in that year, Slade was one of 70 international artists featured in the Vancouver Art Gallery's CUE: Artists' Video, an "exhibition of video art displayed on the portico of the Robson Street facade. In transforming its exterior into a freely accessible, open-air exhibition space, the Gallery has created an opportunity for the public to experience contemporary experimental film and video in new way."
Slade's work was again exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2009 in the show How Soon is Now, which highlight contemporary BC artists. Also that year, the artist was included in a group exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery entitled Celebrity of the Self along with Tim Lee, Shannon Oksanen, Stephen Shearer, Kathy Slade, Althea Thauberger, and Weekend Leisure. In 2008, Slade exhibited alongside Aaron Carpenter and Steven Hubert in the exhibition titled Hold On at the Or Gallery; her short film "Tugboat" features "a tugboat 'wrapping doughnuts' in Vancouver’s industrial harbour. The 16mm film loop is both playful and melancholic, as it is unclear whether this workhorse of BC’s resource and shipping economies is caught in playful abandon or if the boat is revolving in a momentary lapse of agency."
In 2007 Slade exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of Whitney Live, along with Rita McBride, Discoteca Flaming Star, Jay Batlle, David Gray, Michael Mahalchick, RH Quaytman, Glen Rubsamen, and Kimberly Sexton.

Publications (writing and art projects)

2016: "Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne and John Baldessari" Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture, Black Dog Publishing, London, UK / Vancouver Art Gallery
2015: Artist Book, Kathy Slade: Love Poem, Publication Studio Vancouver, Vancouver BC
2015: Artist Book, The Projects Class, Emily Carr University, Vancouver BC
2014: "If There's a Bustle in Your Hedgerow: The Music Appreciation Society Listens to Led Zeppelin" Myfanwy MacLeod, Black Dog Publishing, London, UK / Vancouver Art Gallery
2013: Dan Graham & Kathy Slade, interview, JRP Journal, Winter 2012/13, Zürich
2011: The Music Appreciation Society interviews Rodney Graham, YA5 Magazine, Vol 1, Issue 2, Portland, Oregon
2011: Artist's Record, Cranfield and Slade: 10 Riot Songs, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver
2009: Artist's Record, Cranfield and Slade: 12 Sun Songs, Or Gallery, Vancouver, Christoph Keller Editions/JRP|Ringier, Zurich
2009: Artist's Record, Sunshine Daydream/Maerdyad Enihsnus by Cranfield and Slade, 7 inch vinyl insert into Fillip 9, Or Gallery, Fillip Magazine, Vancouver, Christoph Keller Editions/JRP|Ringier, Zurich
2009: "White Columns Xerox Print Edition", review, Art on Paper, New York, NY, November–December
2009: "Through the Ruby Glass: Project Rainbow's Search for Ecstatic Truth", brochure, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC
2008: Savage School Window Gallery Print Edition: Kathy Slade, Jeffrey Charles + Henry Peacock, Volker Eichelmann + Roland Rust, Cullinan + Richards, Clunie Reid, Sarah Staton, Jessica Voorsanger, Dallas Seitz, Sarah Jones, John Slyce, Simon Popper, Thomas Kilpper, Arnaud Desjardin, Ester Windsor, Mark McGowan, Brian Reed, Savage School Window Gallery, London, UK
2007: Artist's Book, Kathy Slade: 52 Transactions, Trapp Editions/Sigurdardottir, Vancouver/Los Angeles
2006: Cover, Chicago Review 51:4 & 52:1 Spring, Chicago
2004: Contributed a chapter to Heartways: The Exploits of Genny O, a collaborative novel by Rita McBride, published by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter Inc. and Arsenal Advance
2004: "Contemporary Art is Sex" feature Interview with Rita McBride, C International Magazine, Toronto, Spring
2004: "New Cool Art or Cool New Art?", curatorial essay for Specific Objects catalogue, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver
2002: "Songs For Girls" essay / CD Liner notes, in Althea Thauberger's Songstress CD, Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver
2002: Essay on the work of Robin Arseneault, Postscript #1, Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver
2001: "On the Brink: Daniel Laskarin's Illusion, Catastrophe, Suspense" brochure, Open Space Gallery, Victoria, BC
2001: Review, Rodney Graham at the Presentation House Gallery, C International Magazine, Toronto, Spring 2001
2001: Panel Discussion on The Ladies Afternoon Art Society, Mix Magazine, Toronto, May June 2001
2000: "Myfanwy MacLeod: The Edge of Reason" in Myfanwy Macleod: A Brief Overview of Personology, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver
1997: Cover of Lisa Robertson's book Debbie: an Epic, New Star Books, Vancouver
1997: Fall, Mix Magazine, Toronto, Fall '97 issue
1997: Fall, centerfold of Boo Magazine #10, Vancouver
1990: Currer Bell: Four Paintings from Charlotte Brontë's Villette, FRONT Magazine, Vancouver, Summer issue
1990: Excerpts from Deliberate Transgressions, West Coast Line, 24: 1, Vancouver

Curatorial projects

2016: Mash Up: The Birth of Modern Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
2015: Garry Neill Kennedy: Drawings, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC
2015: Acid Sweat Lodge: Rock and Roll Meeting, Publication Studio Vancouver, Vancouver, BC
2015: Trapp Editions: Love & Ornament, Publication Studio Vancouver, Vancouver, BC
2014: Whole Lotta Love, Publication Studio Vancouver, Vancouver, BC
2014: James Hoff, How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away, Or Gallery, Vancouver, BC
2013: Some Woolly Buzz, Publication Studio Vancouver, Vancouver, BC
2009: Project Rainbow: The Ruby Glass, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC
2008: Elspeth Pratt, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver
2007: READ Edition 1, co-curated with Christoph Keller, ECU Press, Vancouver
2006: The Rhubarb Society, co-curated with John Pilson, Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver
2004: Rita McBride: No Fixed Address, Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver
2002: Specific Objects, Co-curated with Greg Bellerby, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver