FELT exhibitions
Provisions: A Millennial Project
A contemporary art installation by Kathryn Walter
Mercer Union: Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto, 1999
This installation is a humorous and critical take on the Y2K fervour at the turn of the second millennium. The gallery was turned into an environment that appeared as a cross between a bunker and a laboratory where the artist appeared from time to time to assemble "survival kits" (or samplers) made up of felt insoles and candles bound by reflector ribbon. Each viewer was invited to take one away with them.
Impending millennial celebrations are forecast on a film projection of fireworks...Viewers are urged to pick up a " provision" which on the surface seems free. Actually, these end-of-the-world souvenirs are embedded with a reciprocal obligation to consider issues of production and nationalism. As people move through the space, the supply of kits is depleted in a production and consumption countdown...Kathryn Walter's "kits" send up a certain tourist trap fatalism. Her "provisions" are fully loaded with the warm fuzzy felt of Canadiana...Armed with this Y2K survival kit, we will march to the end when the chariots thunder down into our eternal darkness of doomed technology.
Judith Doyle, text accompanying exhibition, 1999Here Walter continues her investigations into social history and her interest in creating situations which engage the viewer at the level of their own complicity. We are drawn into her fictions which exploit our fears and desires as members of a culture connected through interdependent technologies.
Caroline Langill, review in PARACHUTE magazine, 2000
