Kevin Schmidt High Altitude Balloon Amateur Radio Equipment, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
Join the Canadian Art Foundation and the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver today–Saturday, April 12th–at 5:15 p.m. at the Contemporary Art Gallery for a talk by artist Kevin Schmidt.
Contemporary Art Gallery
555 Nelson Street
5:15 p.m. Talk by artist Kevin Schmidt
Kevin Schmidt has a habit of messing with nature. Whether in the wry lament for popular culture and the romantic idyll of eco-tourism in his career-launching 2002 video work, Long Beach Led Zep, or the extraterrestrial spectacle of a light-show-meets-snow-swept-tundra recorded in his 2007 video Wild Signals, Schmidt has at once de-mystified and re-mystified not only the natural world but also our place in it.
Schmidt’s latest video works—on view at Contemporary Art Gallery and a feature stop on today’s Vancouver Gallery Hop—take this perceptual displacement to even further inner and outer extremes. For his five-month-long project EDM House, Schmidt outfitted an abandoned pioneer cabin in the remote BC interior as a kind of ghost-town electronic dance music nightclub, complete with beat-synched glowing lights and a local FM-transmission radio signal. High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment records the journey of a DIY satellite launched into the upper atmosphere to photograph the Earth below. Both offer a spectacular take on universal isolation and the shifting value of the sublime in contemporary culture.
Visit canadianart.ca/vancouverhop for details on this talk and other Gallery Hop Vancouver events. Plus, you can download a map that will guide you through your Hop day!
