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.

This reading room offers resources relating to the themes and artists present in this exhibition.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thematic Texts

 

Aesop. Aesop’s Fables: The Town Mouse the Country Mouse. Avenel Books, 1988.
This popular fable has inspired many interpretations since it was first credited to Greek fabulist Aesop. In this story, the dynamic of town and country is examined long before industrialization and gives a departure point for the binaries that emerge of the town and country as industrialization and colonization begin to strengthen the divide. The town mouse visits the country mouse only to feel unsatisfied with the simplicity of country life. In accepting the town mouse’s invitation, the country mouse visits the town only to hastily return to the simple security of country life. The fable tackles the binaries of town and country, situating the country as a place of retreat in which the simplicities of life are paramount to the complexities and fears the town poses.

Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Bhandar presents understandings of property as intentionally connected to ideas of colonial dispossession, wherein the racialized is made so in anticipation of the othering that disconnects them from their land and frames the land as “unoccupied.” Property and the economies that sustain it are maintained through land dispossession and the narrative necessary for capital accumulation. Thinking through what she’s termed “racial regimes of power,” Bhandar explores this ongoing reality of the legal parameters of property.

Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004.
In examining dominant understandings of property, Blomley examines Vancouver, specifically the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, as a location of political intersections that challenge colonial ownership and urban geography. Unsettling the City addresses urban economies and the forces that enable them, how property and the lives of people in the city are affected by a need to claim space/property and the histories that hold it towards capitalist gain.

Decter, Leah and Tania Willard. “Directions to BUSH Gallery” C Magazine, December 15, 2021. https://cmagazine.com/articles/directions-to-bush-gallery.
This text and artist intervention is an invitation not as we know it, but rather as a call to look critically at one’s positionality. It holds Indigenous guest and host relations as a critical framework for understanding Indigenous sovereignty in Canada. The directions that refuse colonial mapping and naming traditions offer not only a typical set of directions, but at the same time hold space between contemporary inquiry and historical documents to challenge how we understand land and borders and assert a distinctly Indigenous relationality.

Duffek, Karen, Bill McLennan and Jordan Wilson. Where the Power Is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art. Vancouver: Figure 1, 2021.
Where the Power Is documents the ongoing relationships possible with historical artworks to members of the communities they have been separated from. This project connected over eighty Indigenous artists and community members to historical Northwest Coast artworks by bringing them to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The project invited participants to connect with the artworks as a way of connecting to their ancestors and their teachings, while simultaneously offering contemporary commentary on their relationship to the work in the present. The historical and contemporary images and the written reflections show the connection of the Northwest Coast people to their land, history, stories and future.

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting The World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press / Kairos, 2018.
Federici’s feminist analysis speaks to the possibilities of the commons while tackling a historical and social understanding of the commons that has emerged from her research and personal experiences. Using diverse feminist approaches from across the globe, she poses the commons as a point of resistance to the capitalist systems of power and control that disrupt social life and social spaces, even while these spaces continue to exist and resist. She engages with the personal as integral to the commons through the unrecognized labour women have continuously and historically provided.

Jeffreys, Tom. “Is the Countryside the Future of the Art World?” Frieze, November 13, 2019. https://www.frieze.com/article/countryside-future-art-world.
As many artists move to more rural communities for the space and possibilities they afford, Jeffereys reports on institutions that have come out of this move and the overall shift in thinking about the possibilities of contemporary art outside the city. These artists and the work they propose on the rural is a call to shift the often rigid structures of the art world to something more communal and accessible. The countryside is situated as a hope for a reimagined art world that engages a broader community of people in its pursuits.

Lefebvre, Henri. On the Rural. Translated by Robert Bononno. Chicago: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
On the Rural contains recently translated writing by Lefebvre on a political and social understanding of rural life. Capitalism and its impact on rural life frame the various essays, from issues of labour and extraction to the dispossession of land. Lefebvre’s thoughts on the history of peasant communities and the social relations that govern their relationship to land ownership complicate the rural and urban divide. The critics of capitalism that emerge from examining the extraction from the rural also hold space for the possible shift from these locations.

Reynolds, Jim. From Wardship to Rights: The Guerin Case and Aboriginal Law. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020.
As one of several legal councils to Musqueam during the Guerin case, Jim Reynolds summarizes the historical and legal ramifications of the case and the legal precedent it set for Aboriginal title and land rights struggles across Canada. The Guerin Decision created a new relationship under Canadian law for the recognition of Indigenous land and the parameters that dictated government use and control of land. This book offers an understanding of the legal significance while highlighting Musqueam’s struggle for land rights that complicated the Canadian states’ understanding of land and its ownership.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Chicago: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Simpson frames resistance from the settler colonial state as a necessary part of the Indigenous political resurgence. Embracing Indigenous modes of knowledge production acts as a radical practice in refusing assimilation and refuses colonial hetero-patriarchal ideas of being. This book acts as a guide towards living alternatively and organizing outside of colonial systems by engaging the already exsisting cultural frameworks and theories of Indigneous communities.

University of British Columbia Library. “xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam)” X̱wi7x̱wa Research Guides. https://guides.library.ubc.ca/Musqueam/home.
This is a guide on Musqueam created by the X̱wi7x̱wa library at UBC. It documents the origin story of the Musqueam people, their relationship to UBC, important historical information and the location of language learning resources. They have put together community research and initiatives across campus that centre on Musqueam. The resources direct people to multiple aspects of history and programs situating the university on the lands of the Musqueam people and providing the necessary information for guests to situate themselves on the land appropriately.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Williams examines the division of the country and city and how they have been conceptualized. Through a survey that unfolds from his experiences living between and across both spaces, he unpacks the dangers of this division in enforcing social class dynamics that aid the imperialist notions of land ownership. Using English culture and its imperialist history, he examines the labour that sustains cities toward capitalist growth and how it works toward larger capitalist ideas in extracting not only resources but also disrupting the relationship people have to nature and land.

 

Artist Texts

 

Architects Against Housing Alienation

Architects Against Housing Alienation. “TO END HOUSING ALIENATION IN c\a\n\a\d\a WE DEMAND…” https://aaha.ca/en.
The official website of Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA), AAHA is a collective of architects committed to creating “new housing systems.” Its founding members are Adrian Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart and Tijana Vujosevic.Their website includes ten demands to end housing alienation, a manifesto on housing in Canada and information on the collective and their efforts.

Soules, Matthew for Architects Against Housing Alienation. “Not for Sale!: Architects Against Housing Alienation. A conversation on the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023”. Interview by Federica Zambeletti. KoozArch, September 11, 2023. https://www.koozarch.com/interviews/not-for-sale-architects-against-housing-alienation.
This interview with Soules on behalf of Architects Against Housing Alienation offers a glimpse into their process for the Canadian Pavilion at Biennale Architettura 2023 with the theme “The Laboratory of the Future.” The collective addresses Canada’s housing crisis and the economic and political forces that enable it. AAHA took over the pavilion with their Not for Sale! campaign, emphasizing their demands through political organizing and rallying using the pavilion as a space for envisioning better housing systems that disrupt what is expended in capitalist understandings of property.

 

Rodney Graham

Milroy, Sarah. “A little bit city, a little bit country—all Rodney Graham,” The Globe and Mail. April 3, 2004. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/a-little-bit-city-a-little-bit-country—-all-rodney-graham/article1332405/.

Using City Self/Country Self (2000) as a departure, Milroy explores Rodney Graham’s career, noting his exploration of unwieldy characters through his work. Staging and reworking images and stories in unexpected ways, Graham’s characters are ironical and move between the familiar and unfamiliar. City Self/Country Self is an example of how Graham impersonates characters towards larger cultural revelation. What questions does the city self kicking the country self pose about life in the town versus the country, and what power relations are embedded in this thought?

Steiner, Shep. “Rodney Graham: Au Dela Des Principes De La Blague” Last Call 1, no. 1 (2001). https://belkin.ubc.ca/_archived/lastcall/past/pages1/rodney.html.

Steiner’s text approaches the irony in Graham’s work, offering an opportunity to look for the larger societal critiques that emerge from the work. Graham’s use of various personas is where Steiner locates the point of irony that asks us to look at ourselves instead. In City Self/Country Self (2000) the writer sees their mistake of perceiving the exhibition of the work as a clothing store as a way to engage with the work within the realm of irony where the “joke is always on the viewer” and the message of class issues embeds itself in this contradiction.

 

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Hill, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle. “From Four Effigies for the End of Property: Preempt, Improve, The Highest and Best Use, Be Long: Place and displacement,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 35 (2018): 26- 31. https://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/3181.
In this short reflection, Hill describes the inspiration behind her work Four Effigies for the End of Property (2017). She queries the structures of settler colonization, how land was stolen and the “idea or mechanism through which the land was turned into private property.” Reorienting the use of the world effigies towards a critic of settler colonization, she questions the colonial understandings of land as property, calling into question who can own and possess land within economies of power and colonization.

Willard, Tania. “I will read you a story” Mercer Union, November 19, 2024. https://kirby.mercerunion.org/media/pages/exhibitions/lhirondelle-hill-m/cd94e97ab9-1720887259/hill_2024_web-1.pdf
Willard uses the language of the natural world to frame the work of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill shown in Hill’s solo exhibition M*****. Examining her investment in economies of care and community as integral to the visual language of their work, the text highlights Hill’s dedication to reorienting how we understand film by linking it to a communal understanding that rejects the economies that are expected of the medium. Willard weaves words to welcome new possibilities in how we understand the artist’s life as intertwined with the work and the collective Indigenous relationship that shows itself through the work.

 

Karin Jones

Cane, Jennifer and Cecily Nicholson. Karin Jones: Ornament and Instrument. Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 2024.
Karin Jones: Ornament and Instrument documents the 2023 exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, a survey of the artist’s work from Damascus inlay farm tools to a dress made from braiding hair extensions. Jones’s work continues to address “the complexity of African identity shaped by colonial displacement” in Canada. The book covers her solo exhibition, contextualizing her work within a canon of Black Canadian contemporary artists that continues to assert the history of Black artists in Canada’s cultural landscape.

Yodanis, Carrie. “Are Some Ideas Too Big For Jewelry? The Art of Karin Jones” Art Jewelry Forum, September 20, 2021. https://artjewelryforum.org/articles/are-some-ideas-too-big-for-jewelry/

Jones’s practice is inquisitive of the possibilities of jewellery and the methods it affords as a site of inquiry for personal and historical stories. Yodanis details many of the ways Jones has used her work and knowledge from jewellery making to explore her personal experiences and collective Black Canadian experiences. The article highlights the artist’s journey to making jewellery as a contemporary art practice and creating their own methods for challenging people’s understanding of jewellery as contemporary art.

 

Tiziana La Melia

La Melia, Tiziana. lettuce lettuce please go bad. Vancouver: Talonbooks. 2024
This book of poetry takes inspiration from La Melia’s life and history. Moving between poetry, illustrations and inquiries into the life of non-human objects, readers are invited to consider value and the larger histories that everyday objects can hold. Using “a poetics of rural embodied language,” La Melia offers a reading that resists the histories imposed on us. Framed as an “incantation and a plea for transformation,” this book allows memory and personal knowledge to transform and guide the readers towards a rethinking of an urban/rural divide.

Plested, Lee. “Creature Comforts,” Damien & The Love Guru, 2023. https://damienandtheloveguru.com/exhibitions/confessions-on-sparkling-hill.
In his accompanying text to Alison Yip and Tiziana La Melia’s confessions on sparkling hill (2023), curator Plested introduces us to the poetic world of both artists as they create a storied reality out of their economic conditions. Through their work’s pop cultural references and the artists’ relationship, the exhibition traces an embrace of bucolic living that links to La Melia’s Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster, 2020.

 

Carel Moiseiwitsch

Casey, RJ. “’I’m An Outsider Person’: The Carel Moiseiwitsch Interview,” The Comics Journal. April 12, 2017. https://www.tcj.com/im-an-outsider-person-the-carel-moiseiwitsch-interview/.
Moiseiwitsch’s work emerges from a place of rebellion. In this interview, she highlights the activist work that is intertwined with the making of her comics. Her work and style have been a vehicle for her activism, seeing form itself as important in addressing dire realities. Carel Moiseiwitsch’s career and life across multiple continents continue to influence her practice. From the punk rock movements of the 1980s to the quickly rising environmental issues that have caused her latest unexpected relocation, her work is timely, honest and inquisitive.

Laurence, Robin. “Carel Moiseiwitsch: O Canada Our Home And Native Land” A Catalogue of Artworks from the Surrey Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection. Surrey Art Gallery, 2004. https://www.surrey.ca/sites/default/files/media/documents/CarelMoiseiwitsch_2.pdf
The use of art as a tool of protest and political address frames the artworks of Moiseiwitsch. In this essay, Laurence points out that Moiseiwitsch created many of her most critical works through her own experiences being critical of the Canadian state, visiting other countries in crisis and experiencing environmental devastation. Laurence gives a generous overview of her career framed around her work O Canada Our Home And Native Land (1985), in which she highlights the historical, devastating and long-lasting impacts of Japanese Canadian internment.

 

Alex Morrison

Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, “Alex Morrison: Nooks and Corners.” Vimeo. March 29, 2022. https://vimeo.com/693704052.
In this video interview, Morrison discusses his work in the exhibition Nooks and Corners (2022). The roles of domestic and public space are integral to his work as he examines memory and how behavioural expectations shift depending on one’s location indoors or not. His paintings and sculptures in the video inquire into the relationships we build architecturally and the socio-revolutionary possibilities of space and objects. “The aesthetic choices show what we believe in or embody,” and how this has larger political implications. Morrison looks into how we have lived and will live as possible of being a political and radical position to investigate.

Laurence, Robin. “Alex Morrison’s Phantoms of a Utopian Will a complex undertaking” The Georgia Straight. September 15, 2015. https://www.straight.com/arts/530541/alex-morrisons-phantoms-utopian-will-complex-undertaking.
Morrison’s Phantoms of a Utopian Will/Like Most Follies, More Than a Joke and More Than a Whim (2015) was a joint exhibition between the Burnaby Art Gallery and SFU Galleries. Laurence reflects on the significants of place, history and architecture in these exhibitions, calling up Morrison’s interest in countercultural narratives and the histories they embed in place and time. In this review the work of the exhibition is held up to the history of place, calling in the experience of the artist and his commitment to the narratives that a place or institution can hold.

 

Debra Sparrow

Vancouver Mural Festival, “Weaving the Path- Documentary,” YouTube, August 10, 2021. https://youtu.be/jT36bdtGawQ?si=5Sr12Nt4kgtEugzx

This short documentary addresses Coast Salish weaving practices through the life and work of Musqueam master weaver Debra Sparrow. Created in association with the Vancouver Mural Festival, it highlights her project Blanketing the City (2018-), where she works with other Coast Salish artists to translate weaving patterns to semi-permanent murals on buildings around the city. After over 80 years of Coast Salish weaving practices remaining dormant, Sparrow and other weavers have revived this practice that remains important culturally and spiritually. Through the Blanketing the Cityproject, they have put Coast Salish art in direct conversation with the urban cityscape of Vancouver.

Sparrow, Debra and Sue Rowley. “In Conversation: Sue Rowley Speaks with Debra Sparrow.”  Museum of Anthropology, UBC, June 12, 2020. https://moa.ubc.ca/2020/06/in-conversation-sue-rowley-speaks-with-debra-sparrow/.
In a conversation with Debra Sparrow during the COVID-19 lockdown, the artist discusses her work on Blanketing the City (2018-) and her participation in the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) exhibition, The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving (2017–18). Sparrow emphasizes the significance of blanketing the city of Vancouver and how essential this public work is in situating people on Coast Salish lands. In reference to her contributions to The Fabric of Our Landexhibition at MOA, she describes her live-weaving process, which was inspired by a Coast Salish blanket returned from the National Museum of Finland. This work situates both the blanket and the knowledge of Coast Salish weavers in the present moment.

 

Janet Wang

Gurney, Michael. “Mixed media show at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre examines art of belonging” Coast Reporter, Febuarary 21, 2023. https://www.coastreporter.net/local-arts/mixed-media-show-at-the-sunshine-coast-arts-centre-examines-art-of-belonging-6574231.
In Gurney’s review of Wang’s Ports of Entry (2018-21) at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, the text centres on Wang’s point of departure for this multi-year project: the gold rush that brought many Chinese workers to BC in the 1800s. In the review, Wang’s commitment to research and experimentation with form is highlighted as a way she connects the historical departure to the present moment, thinking about the impacts of the exploitation of the labour of Chinese people and how it gestures to larger critiques of capitalism.

New West Museum Archives, “Irving House Artists in Residence Talk (Janet Wang and Holly Schmidt),” YouTube, June 14, 2024. https://youtu.be/KpolsXf0awA?si=mCMxvqGfSUZYczzl.

As part of a recorded artist talk for her time in residence at Irving House, managed through New West Museum and Archives, Wang presents her thoughts on heritage and how it can be reoriented towards a decolonial process. Thinking through her Chinese ancestry, she undertakes extensive research about the larger systems of labour and exploitation of Chinese people in Canada. She speaks on her work Ports of Entry (2018-21) and how it addresses Chinese history in Canada and the ways this history of capitalist exploitation manifests in the present, addressing Chinese Canadian life through a historical framework.

 

Holly Ward

Apperley, Bree. “An essay response to Holly Ward’s Humynatur3,” The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. https://www.alternatorcentre.com/essay/bree-apperley-holly-ward.
In response to Ward’s Humynatur3 (2017-18), Apperley considers the ways in which Ward’s work is concerned with “utopian idealism.” The text approaches how science fiction narratives of utopia help to reflect on the uncertainty of life lived under capitalism and offers the dissent necessary for fantastical and alternative thinking. Apperley addresses many of Ward’s previous exhibitions and works, noting Ward’s investment in framing life lived under end-stage capitalism, with all its demands to conform, forming a clear statement of her interest in what material form can do to address this.

 Jones, Caitlin. Infrastructures of Power and Resistance: Holly Ward and Fluid State. Kelowna: Kelowna Art Gallery, 2022. https://kelownaartgallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Infrastructures-of-Power-and-Resistance-Holly-Ward-and-Fluid-States.pdf.
The infrastructure of capitalism and its ongoing aftermath frame Holly Ward’s practice. As a catalogue to the exhibition Fluid States (2022) at the Kelowna Art Gallery, Jones critically situates the artist’s work within its economic and historical research and interests. It details the works in the exhibition as a critique of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project (TMX) and, in turn, the larger climate questions. The text describes the framework around Fluid States and Ward’s interest in challenging institutions of capitalism that allow for catastrophe as well as for control.

 

Tania Willard

Bose, Chris and Jordan Storm. Tania Willard: Claiming Space. Kamloops Art Gallery, 2009. https://kag.bc.ca/pub/tania-willard-claiming-space.
This catalogue was released on the occasion of the solo exhibition Tania Willard: Claiming Space (2009) at the Kamloops Art Gallery. Inspired by Indigenous activist practices and culture, Willard’s work explores diversity in how Indigenous art can be shown and contextualized, and she includes territorial stone markers as art to situate art also as a marker for space and tradition. The catalogue highlights Willard’s understanding of art as a marker of land and people and as a holder of important histories.

Owais, Zarah. “Tania Willard Uses Her Creative Spirit to Rewrite Indigenous Connections to Land and Themselves,” Arts Help, 2023. https://www.artshelp.com/tania-willard-uses-her-creative-spirit-to-rewrite-indigenous-connections-to-land-and-themselves/.
Owais’s article highlights how Willard’s work is critical of institutions such as anthropology and strives to rewrite the broken connection Indigenous people have to land and their practice. Contextualizing her practice focused on land and Indigenous history, the article points to Willard’s work as important in revealing ecological and political challenges that result from settler colonization. Highlighting the colonial influences invested in the theft of Indigenous land as an ongoing tool for extracting resources at the disadvantage of Indigenous communities, Willard’s work, such as Vestige and Carrying Memories of the Land, is intimate with Secwépemc culture and Willard’s personal experience.

 

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Alcalay, Ammiel. “Interview: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun” BOMB. July 15, 2016. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2016/07/15/lawrence-paul-yuxweluptun/.
In this interview, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun speaks to his commitment to being a modernist Indigenous painter who has found his own language for critiquing whiteness in Canada and beyond. He contextualizes his work as emerging from the oppressive histories of settler colonization, making work that holds the language of history as well as the future.

Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, Scott Watson, Robert Linsley, Vern Bolton and Loretta Todd. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995.
This exhibition catalogue for Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations (1995) was for the inaugural exhibition of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and included a selection of paintings and their sketches. Challenging the institution and the larger government of Canada, the artist foregrounds the realities of being Indigenous and the violence enabled by the Indian Act. The catalogue texts approach his work and belief in art to intervene in the violence of settler colonization.

 

Image (above): Installation view of Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital, Kamloops Art Gallery, showing work by Alex Morrison. Photo: Teresa Donck-Matlock.