Thursday, January 9
Opening at 5 pm with artist talks by Karin Jones and Holly Ward, followed by a reception from 6 to 8 pm
FREE admission
Everyone welcome
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
January 10 to April 13, 2025
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country. Borders between these two terrains have morphed and slipped around each other theoretically, politically, economically and socially, yet the narrative of the urban/rural divide persists. Indigenous land dispossession and reclamation, capital accumulation in the form of real-estate assets, labour and technological development are all obscured by this persistent fiction. Town and country narratives similarly obscure questions of class, freedom of movement and resource extraction.
Art has played a defining role in the narrative. This group exhibition, with work by artists whose histories and practices are focused in so-called British Columbia including Architects Against Housing Alienation, Rodney Graham, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Karin Jones, Tiziana La Melia, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Alex Morrison, Debra, Aleen and Isaiah Sparrow, Janet Wang, Holly Ward, Tania Willard and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, approaches the political, economic and representational systems at play in our long-mythologized conceptions of this binary of place. The works in this exhibition subvert rural and urban binaries to offer gestures of refusal and resistance.
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital is co-organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, curated by Caitlin Jones, Charo Neville, and Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, the Hamber Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, the City of Kamloops, and the Belkin Curator’s Forum members. Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital is part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
Carel Moiseiwitsch, Juniper Tree (detail), 2024. Image courtesy of the Artist