Kathy Slade | As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop

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Kathy Slade, "Study for Sinking in the West," 2022

Photo: Alejo Duque.

For over three decades, Kathy Slade has produced conceptually driven work that engages techniques of copying, repetition and reenactment, often coalescing in materially sumptuous objects. In her wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice, Slade inhabits sources from literature, art history, philosophy, and popular culture, weaving her references into absurd and frequently playful loops and voids.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Slade presents As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop, a new body of work rooted in a research trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent the majority of his summers during the decade he wrote his most enduring works. There, Slade retraced the philosopher’s steps along the shore of Lake Silvaplana, where upon encountering a large, pyramid-shaped rock he arrived at what he called “my truly abyssal thought”: eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circulation of all things.” In the exhibition, Slade reimagines Nietzsche’s encounter in two depictions: an enormous tapestry representing the rock to scale, and a series of graphite rubbings that maps the entirety of the rock’s surface over twenty monochromes.

Kathy Slade (b. 1966, Montreal) is an artist, writer, curator, editor, and publisher. She works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade’s solo exhibitions include Wherever You Go, Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2020); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London (2017). Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Fluc, Vienna; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. In 2009, Slade was awarded the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.