Carole Itter: Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger

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Carole Itter, "Tarpaulin Pull (detail)," 2006/2010

Courtesy of the Artist.

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 7 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm

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 multi-disciplinary 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.

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 (2009) 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.