The Burnaby Art Gallery is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Kim Kennedy Austin, titled Booster Club, running from February 7 to April 20, 2025.
Booster Club centers upon Austin's interests in 20th-century advertising, media and popular culture in myth and meaning-making. The exhibition is made up of three distinct main series, or chapters, featuring a range of references from print advertisements and novels of the 1920s to science fiction films of the 1990s.
Austin, a Vancouver-based artist, employs techniques of drawing and craft to express issues of labor, seriality and automation. With a "make-do" attitude, she pairs readily-found supplies from hobby and dollar stores with source material quoted from across popular 20th-century print periodicals and media. Selected line drawings, illustrations and text are edited, redrawn and blown-up to speak to the changing nature and perception of craft, the applied arts and women’s work over time.
Austin’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, West Vancouver Art Museum, Burnaby Art Gallery and Global Affairs Canada. Austin acknowledges that her work takes place on the unceded, traditional, and current homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
Through the extraction and isolation of graphic elements, Booster Club explores topics such as conformity, consumer capitalism, risk and blind faith. Austin’s research into the visual history of business informs her critiques of the methods by which capitalism is itself advertised, and how human labour is exploited for the profit of a few.
Opening reception
Thursday, February 6 from 7-9 pm.
Artist in attendance. Free, no registration required.
Learn More: Kim Kennedy Austin
Images: High resolution promotional images
RELATED PROGRAMS
Booster Club Fireside Chat
Sunday, April 13 from 2-3:30 pm
Burnaby Art Gallery
Join us to celebrate the launch of the publication for the current exhibition Booster Club, in a relaxing afternoon of discussion with artist Kim Kennedy Austin and exhibition curators Jennifer Cane and Emily Dundas Oke. Light refreshments will be served.
Register by phoning 604-297-4422. Limited spaces available.
To learn more about these and other public programs related to the exhibition, visit us online at burnabyartgallery.ca.
BURNABY ART GALLERY
Since 1967, the Burnaby Art Gallery has been dedicated to collecting, preserving and presenting a contemporary and historical visual art program by local, national and internationally recognized artists. As the only public art museum in Canada dedicated to works of art on paper, the Burnaby Art Gallery endeavours to represent a variety of techniques and practices from artists of diverse backgrounds. The Burnaby Art Gallery cares for and manages more than 7,000 works of art in the City of Burnaby’s Permanent Art Collection, as well as the City of Burnaby Public Art Collection.