Artist Kelly Wood began photographing the city of Vancouver’s cart culture” in 20042005, documenting the urban phenomena of repurposed shopping carts used by Vancouver’s homeless population
and enterprising binners” (street workers involved in underground economies such as collecting recyclables). Over the next six years she found and shot more than 100 carts and their
multifarious contents to produce a series of large-scale photographs emblematic of the conjoined realities of homelessness and ongoing gentrification in her home city.
The Vancouver Carts: Photographs by Kelly Wood concentrates on this singular body of work accompanied by several essays that explore issues of property and ownership, the changing
nature of the urban as polarities of wealth increase, material culture and our implication with socio-economic systems via the symbol of the shopping cart. Rooted in the context of the
Vancouver art world,The Vancouver Carts series also highlights the physical and social proximity of the art world to the places and people in the city that are affected by
gentrification, while simultaneously placing the labour of the artist in comparison with that of workers of this underground refuse economy.
Wood belongs to the post-Vancouver School generation of artists, whose work came to prominence in dialogue with that of Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Ken Lum and Rodney Graham. Wood’s work has
been broadly exhibited in Canada at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Art Gallery of Ontario; The Power Plant; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Vancouver Art
Gallery; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. Her work has been shown internationally at the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Fotoinstituut,
Rotterdam; and Artspace in Sydney, Australia.
Published in partnership with McIntosh Gallery.
