Kevin Schmidt

This publication comprises the first monographic survey dedicated to Canadian artist Kevin Schmidt. This publication comprises the first monographic survey dedicated to artist Kevin Schmidt. Based in Vancouver, Schmidt is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, photography and installation who has exhibited widely across North America and Europe. He is perhaps best known for performance expeditions and interventions into the natural world, which are documented in photographs, installations and videos, such as his eleven-and-a-half-hour Epic Journey, which documents a marathon nighttime screening of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a small boat as it drifted down the Fraser River, or his Aurora with Roman Candle, which shows him firing roman candles at the Aurora Borealis.

At a time when we might consider cultural production as being democratised through the Internet, Schmidt combines notions of the heroic with the seemingly amateur by using visible reminders of construction and theatrical devicessmoke machines, stage lights and DIY photographic equipment. Through this he proposes a utopian assertion of the commons”, where both land and culture are publicly accessible to all.

Presented in partnership with Kamloops Art Gallery and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, this publication features essays by Charo Neville, Kathleen Ritter and an artist interview with Nigel Prince. The book charts Schmidt’s ongoing body of work addressing the tensions between man and nature, performance and document and indoors and outdoors. These propositions are tackled through references to landscape, the invocation of the sublime at the point of apprehending such wild beauty, and by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements within these environments. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages remarkable events that transfer elements of urban culture into untouched natural contexts. In this way, he simultaneously examines both the seductive elements of contemporary cultural production and the constructions that surround the idea of nature.

Kevin Schmidt’s interdisciplinary work tries, tests and ultimately celebrates traditional notions of the sublime in the Canadian landscape. Through intervention, performance-for-camera, photography, video and installation he blurs boundaries of performance, document and product. Central to Schmidt’s output are performative expeditions and undertakings in which he pits man-made spectacleoften based on trappings of popular culture, mythology or religionagainst Caspar David Friedrichlike visions of nature to play out a humorous, and often absurd, struggle for agency. Schmidt’s 2002 video Long Beach Led Zep brought him to international attention. In it, Schmidt enters the picturesque landscape of Long Beach, BC, starts a generator, dons a guitar, and plays a less than seamless rendition of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven; through the work’s duration, Schmidt vies for attention in direct opposition to his environment. Kevin Schmidt holds a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He has shown extensively in Canada and abroad, including solo shows at Artspeak, Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Presentation House Gallery, Mercer Union and the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal.

Since 2011 Nigel Prince is executive director of Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery. His previous collaborations include, curator of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (UK), working with the Power Plant in Toronto (Canada), in addition to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (Germany); the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (Holland); the Venice Biennale; and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He has launched many Canadian artists on the international scene, including Marcel Dzama, Steven Sherer, and Roy Arden.