Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Ill Wind. Collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Image Courtesy of the artists
Exhibitions
Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge: Working Culture
Dates:
Art Gallery of Windsor
21 February - 29 April 2009
Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario
13 March - 2 May 2010
This overview of the extraordinary art practice of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge features a selection of major photographic projects spanning their thirty year career of active engagement with organised labour and a spate of issues emerging in the wake of globalising economies. The show begins with their artistic breakthrough of 1975, with the "It's still privileged art" drawings, when the artists - under the influence of Art and Language and the nascent conceptual art movement - turned from formalist art-making to social engagement, and from solo expression to committed artistic collaboration, to set a prescient and exemplary course of investigation of social aesthetics. Condé and Beveridge's formulation of left-perspective discourses and their innovations in artistic form reflect current practices in which art-making is understood as a symbolic articulation of conditions, and, perhaps more importantly, as a tool of community formation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page monograph published with NSCAD University Press documenting key photographic projects and including essays by leading writers and critics, an artist's biography and project chronology. Class Works, edited by Bruce Barber, with contributions by Jan Allen, D'Arcy Martin, Declan McGonagle, Clive Robertson, Allan Sekula, Dot Tuer, and Karl Beveridge and Carole Condé.
Jan Allen