Working Culture
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
http://www.aeac.ca
This overview of the extraordinary art practice of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge features a selection of major photographic projects spanning their thirty-year career working with organized labour and a spate of issues emerging in the wake of globalising economies. The show begins with their artistic breakthrough of 1975, with the “It’s still privileged art” drawings, when the artists – under the influence of Art and Language and the nascent conceptual art movement – turned from formalist art-making to social engagement, and from solo expression to committed artistic collaboration, to set a prescient and exemplary course of investigation of social aesthetics. Condé and Beveridge’s formulation of left-perspective discourses and their innovations in artistic form reflect current practices in which art-making is understood as a symbolic articulation of conditions, and, perhaps more importantly, as a tool of community formation.
Working Culture includes a short documentary video on the artists’ working methods by filmmakers Roz Owen and Jim Miller.
On Saturday 8 March at 2 pm, the exhibition opens with a panel featuring Kirsty Robertson, Clive Robertson and Dot Tuer in discussion with the artists, moderated by Pat Sullivan, and followed by
a reception.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Class Works is being published with NSCAD University Press: this monograph documents Condé and Beveridge’s key photographic projects, and includes an annotated project chronology. The book, edited by Bruce Barber with contributions by Jan Allen, D’Arcy Martin, Declan McGonagle, Clive Robertson, Allan Sekula, Dot Tuer, and the artists, is scheduled for release in August 2008.
This exhibition is represented with the support of the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, Canada Council for the Arts, Kingston Arts Council and City of Kingston.
For further information, please contact Matthew Hills at 613-533-2190.
Image above:
The Fall of Water, 2007
For more information go to: http://www.aeac.ca