CAFKA:

...is an annual thematic exhibition of contemporary art projects centered in an around Kitchener City Hall. This year there were 20 projects from as far a field as Vancouver, New York, Germany, the UK, as well as many from the region itself.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the Waterloo Region, we chose a theme that relates to landscape and modes of looking at the land. Our theme this year came from a phrase by Northrop Frye: "The sense of probing into the distance, of fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that Canadian sensibility has inherited from the voyageurs." Artists were asked to consider landscape, mapping, borders, and ways in which we parcel and understand the very ground that sustains us, that provides us with our home.

The expansion of area suburbs and the encroachment of development upon the region's borders have encouraged people and governments alike to consider the sustainability of the rapid growth of the Grand River Basin. Many of the projects dealt specifically with these issues while others could be termed more as exploration using these ideas as aesthetic starting points.

Andrew Wright, Artistic Co-ordinator, CAFKA.

 

Fur Offset Staff:

This site-specific installation by Marianne Corless employed a pre-existing 26 foot pillar in City Hall, transforming it into a historical surveying tool. The pillar was wrapped with alternating segments of black and white recycled fur to comment on the history of the fur trade within the Kitchener-Waterloo region, as well as the land surveys that eventually carved up the wilderness to form the townships that we know today. Alongside Fur Offset Staff, a portrait hung of our monarch Queen Elizabeth the II, made entirely of fur, entirely of "the spoils of the colonies".

pictures

CAFKA website