Famille Rose
Kathy Slade
February 13 鈥� April 30, 2026
The Cabinet | Room 4390 鈥� 天美mv天美 School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Opening reception: Friday, February 13 | 4:30 PM 鈥� 6:00 PM
Famille Rose is the first in a series of Kathy Slade鈥檚 artworks to introduce an autoethnographic gesture on the wider implications of how objects influence us in relation to notions of inheritance鈥揵oth wanted and unwanted. The artist鈥檚 mother, Amalia, grew up in an affluent household filled with art and artifacts that were brought to Europe at the turn of the 20th century by her grandfather who was the captain of a merchant ship that sailed from Trieste to India, China, and Japan. These items were lost to the family in World War II. After immigrating to Canada many years later, Amalia began to collect porcelain.
In Archive Fever and in the essay 鈥淔reud鈥檚 Legacy鈥� from The Post Card, Jacques Derrida characterises the compulsion to collect as an obligation to the future as well as a form of deferred posthumous obedience in relation to an inheritance from the father. For Slade, the task of the inheritor is to study how objects hail us, how they influence us, what stories they hold, and how they impart knowledge. This will enable us to better grapple with how our pasts have shaped our understanding of our contemporary situations, biases, and ways of being.
Famille Rose is the name given to a family of Chinese porcelain glazed in predominantly pink, white, yellow, and green colours. The term, meaning 鈥榦f the pink family,鈥� was introduced by French Jesuits in the mid-seventeenth century. While porcelain had been traded in Europe for centuries, famille rose was the first Chinese porcelain produced expressly for a European market. By displaying her mother鈥檚 private, domestic collection in a public, academic space, Slade effectively turns the Cabinet Gallery into a china cabinet.
Biography
Kathy Slade is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, curator, editor, and publisher. She works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade鈥檚 practice explores reading, writing and art as political language. Inspired by social discourse and the archive, Slade draws together disparate references, often from cult films, punk rock music, philosophy, literary classics and art history, to play with notions of representation, irony and the uncanny. Slade points to moments and events from which to reimagine particular temporalities and texts, to create looping structures, and to produce remakes that play on repetition and the space between original and copy.
Slade鈥檚 solo exhibitions include As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintops, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Wherever You Go, Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2020); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London (2017). Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at The Morris and Hellen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; Kunstverein Braunschweig; and Fluc, Vienna.
Slade was the curator of the 2019 Vancouver Art Book Fair and has curated exhibitions by artists such as Fiona Banner, James Hoff, Garry Neill Kennedy, Lorna Brown, Elspeth Pratt, and Rita McBride. Slade was the Founding Editor of the Emily Carr University Press (2005-2018). Together with Kay Higgins, Slade runs Publication Studio Vancouver. In 2009, Slade was awarded the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at 天美mv天美 and is a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School.