BLUE CABIN SPEAKER SERIES: CAROLE ITTER
Saturday, July 7, 2018, 2 pm, grunt gallery
CAROLE ITTER IN CONVERSATION WITH KRISTA LOMAX
Vancouver artist Carole Itter began spending time at the cabin in the late 1970s when it sat in the cove on the western boundary of Cates Park. Her partner, musician, artist and writer, the late Al Neil, had inhabited the cabin from 1966, when he rented it from McKenzie Barge & Derrick Co. For Carole, the cabin became a place of inspiration and art production.
Itter will present an informal talk about her artwork and writings during her 35-year residency at the Blue Cabin. She will be joined by artist Krista Lomax for a conversation about their times spent at the cabin, and a screening of Lomax’s 11-minute documentary entitled the blue cabin.
Interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and filmmaker Carole Itter has lived in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver since the early 1970s, and as well shared the Blue Cabin with Al Neil. Her works are influenced by the Northwest Coast, and respond to social and political issues drawing on the lived experience of people and place. Itter has had a number of solo exhibitions at galleries in Vancouver, including Vancouver Art Gallery, grunt gallery, Western Front, and Or Gallery, and her work was included in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Itter has produced a number of short stories and prose pieces, and with Daphne Marlatt, compiled and edited an archive of oral history about Vancouver’s East End as part of the Sound Heritage Series for the British Columbia Provincial Archives.
Carole Itter studied at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver School of Art, and at L’Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Her work is included in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Vancouver Public Library, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is the recipient of the VIVA Award (1989), and the 2017 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.
Krista Lomax is a Vancouver multimedia artist, animator, and editor who worked alongside Carole Itter on the films Tarpaulin Pull and Inlet. She has created various video pieces based on the Blue Cabin and Al Neil and Carole Itter’s work from 2005-2015. Much of this work was featured at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, grunt gallery, and in Vancouver Art in the Sixties.
This event is free of charge and open to the public. The Blue Cabin Speaker Series is supported by the Hamber Foundation.
Image: Jeremy Borsos & Sus Borsos
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ABOUT THE BLUE CABIN PROJECT
The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency brings forward a desire and need for alternate modes of living and working and expands our understanding of what constitutes public space.
Representing the last vestiges of a cultural tradition of artists and others living in squatters’ shacks along the foreshores of this region’s waterways, Al Neil and Carole Itter’s Blue Cabin was one of many structures that dotted the shores of the Burrard Inlet. When the adjacent land occupied by MacKenzie Barge and Shipbuilding for 100 years was sold to Polygon Homes for redevelopment, the cabin’s demolition seemed imminent. Working collaboratively and with the support of many, Other Sights, grunt gallery and C3 moved the cabin to a nearby storage site and then on to Maplewood Farms where, in the sheep pasture, it underwent extensive repair by artist team Sus and Jeremy Borsos.
The organizations’ vision for the cabin is to outfit it as an artist studio and to mount it to a floating platform alongside a tiny house, to serve as a vital, off the grid, multi-disciplinary floating artist residency. The idea to set the cabin adrift from ownership or permanent location speaks to its history and occupation of the foreshore as a generative space. The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency is unique to this region while global in its reach.