The Vancouver Carts

Artist Kelly Wood began photographing the city of Vancouver's "cart culture" in 2004-2005, 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 Mus e des beaux-arts de Montr al; 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.

James Patten: Director/Chief Curator at McIntosh Gallery, Ontario, Canada
Clint Burnham: Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and art writer on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood.
Kirsty Robertson: Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at Western University, Ontario, Canada.
Max Haiven: Max Haiven is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada.