Kim Kennedy Austin | Booster Club

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Blaine Campbell Photo: Blaine Campbell

Kim Kennedy Austin, “What Price Salvation?,” 2024

paint on ceramic, 45.72 cm x 50.8 cm (courtesythe artist)

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 6 from 7-9 pm. Artist in attendance 

Booster Club centers upon Austin's interests in 20th-century advertising, media and popular culture in myth and meaning-making. The exhibition is made up of three distinct main series, or chapters, featuring a range of references from print advertisements and novels of the 1920s to science fiction films of the 1990s.

Austin, a Vancouver-based artist, employs techniques of drawing and craft to express issues of labor, seriality and automation. With a "make-do" attitude, she pairs readily-found supplies from hobby and dollar stores with source material quoted from across popular 20th-century print periodicals and media. Selected line drawings, illustrations and text are edited, redrawn and blown-up to speak to the changing nature and perception of craft, the applied arts and women’s work over time.

Austin’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, West Vancouver Art Museum, Burnaby Art Gallery and Global Affairs Canada. Austin acknowledges that her work takes place on the unceded, traditional, and current homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Through the extraction and isolation of graphic elements, Booster Club explores topics such as conformity, consumer capitalism, risk and blind faith. Austin’s research into the visual history of business informs her critiques of the methods by which capitalism is itself advertised, and how human labour is exploited for the profit of a few.