Catriona Jeffries

This exhibition presents a survey of work by Canadian artist Kevin Schmidt. It charts key projects over the past decade and brings them together for the first time. Schmidt’s work engages in a critical restaging of spectacle through the reproduction of cultural industry and strategies of displacement, often into “wilderness” or “natural” settings. The reading of his work is tied to the place of its making and exhibition, self-reflexively exposing the conditions of production and display. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages events through the relocation of common features of the urban environment (billboard, block-buster film, rock-show lights) into untouched areas. Through this cross-over Schmidt interrogates notions of the sublime, the idea of varied “publics” and shared bodies of knowledge. The notion of “the commons” has consistently been an underlying focus of Schmidt’s work.

At a time when cultural production has been widely democratized through the Internet, Schmidt’s recent work looks at the congruence between contemporary art and do-it-yourself (DIY) practices in relation to the role of the museum and the notion of shared knowledge. Schmidt’s projects often involve gruelling feats of production and “self-built” construction, suggesting an egalitarian openness to otherwise inaccessible systems of technology or museum display. Schmidt proposes a utopian assertion of the commons, where both the land and culture are publicly available.

Schmidt’s work is ambitious, even epic, as suggested in the title of his 2010 work Epic Journey. In this heroic work, Schmidt filmed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy while projected on a screen mounted in a boat drifting through the industrial and ethereal landscape of Vancouver’s Fraser River. Through the mediation of his camera during an epic 11 hours and 30 minutes, the total length of the trilogy, Schmidt critically disrupts the seamless drama and spectacle of a story that has become woven into the popular imagination. As in earlier works such as Long Beach Led Zep (2002) and Wild Signals (2007), Epic Journey foregrounds the artist’s labour in the work’s production and presentation. Within these explorations are implicit questions about how and in what ways cultural production is valued and consumed.

The exhibition includes Schmidt’s recent video work EDM House, shot near Kamloops. EDM House was produced during the winter of 2013 when the artist lived in a small cabin in the interior of British Columbia for five months. Schmidt uses a medium found frequently on the Internet and in home-ware stores (Christmas lights that are synched with music composed by the artist) to forge a connection between the history of homesteading by early settlers and contemporary digital production. Beginning with Schmidt’s early 1984 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Wagon (2000) photographs and Prospect Point (2007) photograph, this survey exhibition traces the artist’s consistent engagement with significant aspects of the modern condition and the dominant question about how we define “the commons.”

Documentation by SITE Photography.