Opening reception: Thursday, 7 September 2023 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm with Carole Itter and The Carnival Band

The exhibition Carole Itter: Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger brings together a selection of the artist’s multidisciplinary works and archival materials from the 1960s to the present. Revealing her attention to locality, language and choreography, the title references Itter’s writing and points to her self-reflexive labour as an artist, as a woman and as an inhabitant of shacks, old houses and cooperatives on the West Coast.

Itter’s artistic ethos is evident in her consideration of the places and communities that have framed her life, in her written, drawn and material expression, and in her practice of designing conditions for performance. The artist’s focus on the local was part of a shared sensibility in Vancouver and beyond in the 1960s and has found renewed urgency and wisdom in the context of the climate crisis. Itter’s hand-hewn work reasserts the presence of the body through ecological, feminist and anti-capitalist lenses, and offers insight into how humans see themselves in relation to each other and other beings in the world.

Included in the exhibition are a selection of installations, photographs, sketches, costumes, films and writing that reveal the artist’s multi-valent practice, blurring the lines between art’s traditional containers. Humorously subverting the status quo, Itter’s hanging sculptural “rattles” are assembled from wood detritus collected from alleys, basements and second-hand shops. Made of spindles, spoons, dowels and chair legs, they signal the connection between deforestation, production, consumerism and disposal while offering a performative invitation to an imagined sonic and physical interaction. These works connect to her “spill” installations on floors and water, and lead into later installations such as The Inlet (2011-ongoing) that will be installed for the first time at the Belkin, which includes projection, collage and textile to continue an embodied connection to place.

Posing questions around social and ecological choreography, Itter’s work asks, What are our collective and individual gestures of understanding and being with a place? For the artist, these gestures occur over time, with responsibility, with others (people, birds, water) and in threshold spaces. She inhabits sites, forms and figures with a unique vision and material force that highlights the illusion of permanency. In the film Tarpaulin Pull (2006) she rows a small boat, pulling a field of blue made from disintegrated plastic tarps that rests on the surface of the ocean. She methodically lands the tarp, folds it up and deposits it in a dumpster. Whether performing in or out of costume, she inhabits a singular perspective of understanding that repudiates her refusal of expertise. Itter admits that she’s “an expert at looking at water” and the strength of her work is in how she has carried the load.

Download the handout.

Listen to Kay Slater’s Creative Access audio tour.

This project has been developed in conversation with another solo exhibition on Carole Itter’s work presented at SFU Galleries Audain Gallery (20 January-11 March 2023). Together these exhibitions trace a path backwards in time, from the artist’s most recent to earliest bodies of work.

Carole Itter: Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger is curated by Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.

Image (above): Carole Itter, Tarpaulin Pull (still), 2006