THE COMMONS

Kevin Schmidt

Central Gallery
October 3 to December 31, 2015

Curated by Charo Neville

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.