Kim Kennedy Austin Dismantles the Desire-Making Machine

Peering down from the second-floor window of Kim Kennedy Austin’s studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, the asphalt yawns wide to reveal a subterranean snarl of halogen lights, hi-vis vests and heavy machinery.

This sunken tableau is a glimpse into the inner workings of the province’s $3 billion Broadway Subway Project, whose public face is typically only visible via tightly managed viewpoints and immaculate photographs of exotic machinery.

For Kim, who graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) in 2001, this sight line — which reveals not only the city’s literal underbelly but arguably also its political, historical, economic and aspirational underpinnings — makes a fitting backdrop for an artist whose work exposes the abyssal realms that animate our sociocultural unconscious.

DESIRE-MAKING MACHINE

A habitual trawler of old and obscure magazines, books and other media, Kim uses a backward-looking gaze to uncover the logic of these archives. Only in retrospect do their overarching themes and ideological aims become visible.

Past exhibitions have included vibrant watercolours depicting 1970s book covers; scratchboard and thermobead compositions bearing text fragments sourced from a twenty-year run of Seventeen magazine; and indigo-flocked illustrations depicting pristine performances of glib domesticity gleaned from midcentury editions of Western Homes and Living.

“A lot of the illustrations are beautiful, but they show a very narrow definition of who is a citizen, who deserves visibility, what it means to be successful, what you should look like to be upwardly mobile and who even gets to have those dreams. These kinds of materials are a desire-making machine.”

THREAD BETWEEN MOMENTS

Her recent solo exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Booster Club, draws on novels by American writer Sinclair Lewis, a 1972 documentary about firebrand Evangelical preacher Marjoe Gortner, and the now-defunct DALLAS magazine, published for decades by the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.

Lewis’ novels satirize “American culture, western expansionism, and the middle-class, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses desire to have a prefab house and a perfect life,” where DALLAS reveals a story about “a city on the rise, a city on the move, a city with oil money and big houses, where making things bigger and increasing the population is progress.”

The show also alludes to pop-culture figures, including the late comedian Sam Kinison, tying his work as a drug-fuelled rage comic to his past as a Pentecostal preacher. By foregrounding the many instances of overlap, rhyme and reflection between her sources, she performs a poetic biopsy of present-day political tensions and cultural preoccupations.

“I keep a lot of notebooks. If something’s interesting, I make a note and do some research and then just wait until I can tie everything together into a kind of thesis statement,” Kim says. “So, Booster Club is a bunch of touch points I’ve had in my mind for a while. Once I realized I could draw a thread between these different moments, I saw how I could bring them together in one show.”

THE POINT

While a solo exhibition in one of the region’s most important public galleries is a landmark moment for any artist, Kim notes her career has taken shape slowly and organically, much as her artworks do.

“You take baby steps, and you make tiny moves forward,” she says, noting she maintains a longtime position at Vancouver Public Library, where she regularly scours the stacks for research material. “Maybe some people shoot into the stratosphere after school, and that’s great. But sometimes it’s good to achieve your goals more slowly.”

She credits her peers and mentors for their encouragement, including ECU faculty such as former instructor Shep Steiner and curator Patrik Andersson, with whom she has shown several times via his Trapp Projects curatorial platform. She says artists, including her studio mate Ryan Quast (BFA 2015) and ECU faculty member Neil Wedman remain perennial sources of inspiration, hinting that for Kim, community is as important as content in the advancement of her practice.

“The more you meet people, the more you want to see their work and support them. And the more you support them, the more they support you,” she says, adding that Booster Club “is a great step, though I don’t know what the next one is. It’s just nice to be surrounded by art and other artists. And isn’t that the point of being an artist?”

Visit Kim’s website and follow her on Instagram to learn more about her work.