Camoufleurs

Kathleen RitterSeptember 12 – October 11, 2014
Organized by Beth Stuart

Camoufleurs is an exhibition of new work by Kathleen Ritter that explores forms of encoded communication, camouflage and subterfuge. The project weaves together research into intersecting histories of war, avant- garde movements in art and poetry, the advent of photography and cinema alongside women’s suffrage and feminism in the early half of the twentieth century. From this body of research, Ritter has excavated notable patterns and abstract forms, film footage and auditory cues, and writing systems a century old, to explore the sensory residue of history, bringing forward material from a distant past as potential ciphers for the present.

Kathleen Ritter is an artist based in Vancouver and Paris. She was an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2013. Her art practice broadly explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language and technology. Working across mediums of video, sound and print, Ritter investigates relationships between politics and aesthetics, between specific histories and contemporary experience, and between the space of the museum and the street.

Image credit: Women’s Camouflage Corps At Work (detail), July 13, 1918, Western Newspaper Union Photo Service