Born in Abbotsford, just outside of Vancouver where he lived and worked, Rodney Graham (1949-2022) is one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Canadian art. His work traverses a wide and diverse area of knowledge from psychoanalysis to music, from the poetics of Mallarme to contemporary cinema. His art is known for its rigorous conceptual architecture and dazzling interior logic. Among his recurring concerns are the camera and modern technologies of picture-making and notions of historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists—including Ken Lum, Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, some of whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5—who established the city’s reputation for photo-conceptualism. Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia from 1968 to 1971 and at Simon Fraser University from 1978 to 1979. He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis (2006) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts (2011). Graham’s work is held internationally, including in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate London, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art. Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.
Tania Willard (b. 1977) is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan/Syilx, b. 1957) is a Vancouver-based visual artist and activist of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent. Born in Kamloops, BC, he attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School as a child, but spent most of his adolescence in the Vancouver area. He documents and promotes change in contemporary Indigenous history through his paintings using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements and the western landscape tradition. His work explores political, environmental and cultural issues and his own personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Yuxweluptun has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows, including the Museum of Anthropology’s Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (2016), the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahán: International Indigenous Art (2013), and the Services Culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights: Virtual Reality Paintings and Drawings (1993). Yuxweluptun has received numerous awards, including the Vancouver Institute of the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award in 1998 and the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Fellowship in 2013. His paintings are held in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, GC), the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the National Gallery of Canada.
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.
Art has played a defining role in the narrative. This group exhibition, which focuses on histories and practices in so-called British Columbia, approaches the political, economic and representational systems at play in our long-mythologized conceptions of this binary of place, through the work of contemporary artists. The narrative’s total erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and other communal approaches to land — systems and protocols that governed (and continue to govern) unceded lands and preceded notions of western property — has had a profound impact. Tania Willard’s Secwepemcúl’ecw (2009) reclaims the City of Kamloops’s logo and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s declarative text painting You Are On Indian Land (2024) emphatically situates the exhibition in territory beyond the limited perspective of town and country.
Bourgeois migration from the industrial city to the country idyll — seen in the British Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and the most recent pandemic exodus — cycles repeatedly. This conception of “retreat to the country” wherein the country is seen as an unoccupied space of health and freedom continually under threat from its hungry, industrial urban counterpoint, in both instances, hinges on conditions of colonialism, land ownership and physical labour. As the city increasingly becomes a place of parked capital (in the form of real estate investment) resulting in an urban housing crisis, the country becomes an attractive alternative for many. But the country is not simply a place where artists can enjoy larger studios for a lower cost, it is a place of diverse cultural production and economic imperatives of its own. Obscuring this repeats violent economic cycles of private property and its displacement in a dopplegänger effect. Works by Rodney Graham and Tiziana La Melia invoke these dopplegängers through the tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, the aesthete and the rube, to directly problematize these characterizations. Alex Morrison’s drawings and sculpture examine the ongoing relevance of William Morris’s socialist activism around labour and housing, itself expressed through a romanticized rural aesthetic.
The ongoing colonial land grab and conceptions of property ownership as economic security follow an unsustainable commodity logic. Past and current land use policy continually entrenches the conversion of housing and territory into “assets.” Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s sculptural works from her Four Effigies for the End of Property series (2017) consider how stolen land becomes (and remains) colonial property through legal frameworks such as preemption and highest and best use. Architects Against Housing Alienation, with their Not For Sale (2023) project presented at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, point to achievable policy alternatives and ways of reframing that could ameliorate the current critical housing crisis across Canada.
The perceived separation of urban from rural, country from city has, in addition to fueling land dispossession and privatization, hidden the mass exploitation of human capital. Holly Ward’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants (2016) points us back in time to the feudal shift from land as a public commons to private enclosures and its impact on peasant labourers and economies. In her installation Points of Entry (2021), Janet Wang considers histories of Chinese workers in British Columbia, as the railway necessary to open up the province for further extraction and exploitation was built through their indentured labour. Karin Jones’s sculptural installation aestheticizes the farming implements of rural labour as tools of both complicity and resistance.
The rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe may render moot any distinction between city and country, as floods and fires destabilize established systems of property and value. Carel Moiseiwitsch relocated from the city to the country, only to be forced back to the city as a result of a devastating wildfire in Lytton, BC, that destroyed her home and her life’s work. Her fire paintings capture the violent endgame of ongoing capital accumulation.
The works in this exhibition subvert rural and urban binaries to offer gestures of refusal and resistance. Through the inextricable entanglement of town and country’s histories, nostalgias and futures, the exhibition reflects on a critical reframing of conceptions of “land use” across disciplines. Our moment requires a radical rethinking of property, territory, occupation and ownership, and these artists and activists can help do this.
The Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery sites offer a dialogue between the binaries of town and country as well as on the structures of settler colonialism on unceded Indigenous territory that define our institutions.
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital is co-organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, curated by Caitlin Jones, Charo Neville and Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, the Hamber Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Belkin Curator’s Forum members.
Born in Abbotsford, just outside of Vancouver where he lived and worked, Rodney Graham (1949-2022) is one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Canadian art. His work traverses a wide and diverse area of knowledge from psychoanalysis to music, from the poetics of Mallarme to contemporary cinema. His art is known for its rigorous conceptual architecture and dazzling interior logic. Among his recurring concerns are the camera and modern technologies of picture-making and notions of historical modes of self-representation. Graham is part of a generation of Vancouver artists—including Ken Lum, Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall, some of whom he played with in the punk band U-J3RK5—who established the city’s reputation for photo-conceptualism. Graham studied art history at the University of British Columbia from 1968 to 1971 and at Simon Fraser University from 1978 to 1979. He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis (2006) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts (2011). Graham’s work is held internationally, including in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate London, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art. Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art.
Tania Willard (b. 1977) is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan/Syilx, b. 1957) is a Vancouver-based visual artist and activist of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent. Born in Kamloops, BC, he attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School as a child, but spent most of his adolescence in the Vancouver area. He documents and promotes change in contemporary Indigenous history through his paintings using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements and the western landscape tradition. His work explores political, environmental and cultural issues and his own personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Yuxweluptun has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows, including the Museum of Anthropology’s Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (2016), the National Gallery of Canada’s Sakahán: International Indigenous Art (2013), and the Services Culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights: Virtual Reality Paintings and Drawings (1993). Yuxweluptun has received numerous awards, including the Vancouver Institute of the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award in 1998 and the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Fellowship in 2013. His paintings are held in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, GC), the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the National Gallery of Canada.