Karin Jones is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in jewellery. She received a Diploma in Jewellery Art & Design from Vancouver Community College in 1993, before embarking on a twenty-plus year career as a goldsmith and independent artisan. Since 2007, her work has moved away from traditional jewellery and into sculpture and contemporary art. She received an MFA in Craft from NSCAD University (2018), where she began her most recent work dealing with the ways historical narratives shape our sense of identity. She is an instructor and former department head of Jewellery Art & Design at Vancouver Community College. She was longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award and her work is held in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Metal Museum (Memphis).
b. 1973, St. John, NB
Currently based between Takaronto/Toronto, ON, and Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc/Heffley Creek, BC, Holly Ward is an interdisciplinary artist of settler ancestry working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in social and subjective contexts. More recently, Ward’s practice seeks to develop artistic engagements with non-human entities and ecological systems in a future-oriented practice focused on sustainability and holistic adaptation to rapidly changing natural and cultural contexts.
From 2009-2010 Ward was the Artist in Residence at Langara College, wherein she commenced The Pavilion project, a 22’ geodesic dome serving as a catalyst for artistic experimentation involving artists, writers, designers and Langara College students. Ward has produced solo exhibitions at Artspeak, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Or Gallery, YYZ Gallery, Republic Gallery, Volta 6 Basel, and others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada and internationally. Publications include Planned Peasanthood (Kamloops Art Gallery, 2021), Volumes (Blackwoods Gallery, 2015), Every Force Evolves a Form (Artspeak, 2012), and “For Now, on Holly Ward’s Persistence of Vision”, a critical essay in Jeff Derksen’s After Euphoria (JRP Ringier Press, 2013). Her work has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fogo Island Arts, and Scotiabank. Public Commissions include Cosmic Chandelier (UniverCity at SFU, Burnaby, 2016) Monument to the Vanquished Peasant (Western Front, Vancouver, 2016), and The Wall (CBC and the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, 2011). Holly is an Associate Professor in York University’s Visual Arts program.
As part of the opening celebration for Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital, join artists Karin Jones and Holly Ward for short talks about their practices and works in the exhibition.
Karin Jones’s Precious (2009-10), a series of found agricultural tools made of carbon steel and ash, then inlaid by Jones with 24K gold and fine silver Damascene, was created in response to living on Salt Spring Island, BC. Jones moved there with the intention of gardening and canning. Her experiences and research about agricultural labour and economic realities as well as obfuscated histories of Black farmer communities challenge ideas that have romanticized what it means to live on this popular island destination.
Holly Ward’s installation Monument to the Vanquished Peasants (2016/2024) takes its title from artist Albrecht Dürer’s 1525 proposal about the revolts by peasant workers who, due to the privatization of communal land, no longer had access to hunting, fishing and farming for their subsistence. Ward’s 2016 version, a site-specific installation for an empty lot at 379 East Broadway in Vancouver, includes a banner and posters that draw parallels to our contemporary situation—who has access to land and how it is developed, fair wages and the maintenance of communities.
The evening will start with a welcome and introductions, followed by the artist talks, then join us for the reception!
The talks will be audio-recorded. Email us at belkin.gallery@ubc.ca if you are interested in listening to the recording following the event.
Karin Jones is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in jewellery. She received a Diploma in Jewellery Art & Design from Vancouver Community College in 1993, before embarking on a twenty-plus year career as a goldsmith and independent artisan. Since 2007, her work has moved away from traditional jewellery and into sculpture and contemporary art. She received an MFA in Craft from NSCAD University (2018), where she began her most recent work dealing with the ways historical narratives shape our sense of identity. She is an instructor and former department head of Jewellery Art & Design at Vancouver Community College. She was longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award and her work is held in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Metal Museum (Memphis).
b. 1973, St. John, NB
Currently based between Takaronto/Toronto, ON, and Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc/Heffley Creek, BC, Holly Ward is an interdisciplinary artist of settler ancestry working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in social and subjective contexts. More recently, Ward’s practice seeks to develop artistic engagements with non-human entities and ecological systems in a future-oriented practice focused on sustainability and holistic adaptation to rapidly changing natural and cultural contexts.
From 2009-2010 Ward was the Artist in Residence at Langara College, wherein she commenced The Pavilion project, a 22’ geodesic dome serving as a catalyst for artistic experimentation involving artists, writers, designers and Langara College students. Ward has produced solo exhibitions at Artspeak, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Or Gallery, YYZ Gallery, Republic Gallery, Volta 6 Basel, and others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada and internationally. Publications include Planned Peasanthood (Kamloops Art Gallery, 2021), Volumes (Blackwoods Gallery, 2015), Every Force Evolves a Form (Artspeak, 2012), and “For Now, on Holly Ward’s Persistence of Vision”, a critical essay in Jeff Derksen’s After Euphoria (JRP Ringier Press, 2013). Her work has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fogo Island Arts, and Scotiabank. Public Commissions include Cosmic Chandelier (UniverCity at SFU, Burnaby, 2016) Monument to the Vanquished Peasant (Western Front, Vancouver, 2016), and The Wall (CBC and the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, 2011). Holly is an Associate Professor in York University’s Visual Arts program.
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country. Borders between these two terrains have always morphed and slipped around each other theoretically, politically, economically and socially, yet the narrative of the urban/rural divide persists. Indigenous land dispossession and reclamation, capital accumulation in the form of real-estate assets, labour and technological development are all obscured by this persistent fiction. Town and country narratives similarly obscure questions of class, freedom of movement and resource extraction.
[more]Part of the exhibition Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital, this image is a page from Carel Moiseiwitsch’s 2024 artist book, Codex Extirpation: The Sad Last Days of Homo Sapiens , which she created for the exhibition. The text reads, “COMETS appeared in the heavens and they did fill the humans with great fear and foreboding, for whomever did see their firey trails across the night sky became afraid.”
[more]This reading room offers resources relating to the themes and artists present in the exhibition Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital.
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