Heather Passmore

My practice generally incorporates quotidian and discarded materials with painting, drawing and photography. I work across a variety of media as needed. My projects frequently intersect social justice and environmental issues using materials which bear histories of taste and accumulations of labour. These include illegal milk from community supported agriculture, linoleum from demolished Vancouver real estate, used t-shirts, old mattresses, yarn, spray-paint, and art-world form letters. I seek to connect viewers to ascribed hierarchies of value through the use of various socio-historically laden materials.

Discomfort with the nexus of art, power, and knowledge leaves me keen to undermine art as a sphere remote from those without the requisite privileges for access. My artwork often displays concern with its own assumption of cultural value. As a prestigious realm of knowledge and culture, I see art functioning in part to legitimate and perpetuate uneven distributions of cultural power and authority. I am especially interested in the gender dimension to these politics.

My work often registers the potential for critical autonomy outside the realm of elite art. Here I investigate how leisurely modes of insight outside bourgeois categories of competence, and value may harbour disalienating potential through a general will to knowledge, self-representation, and creativity. I strive to nuance my considerations rather than reassert a dichotomy between high and the low taste. Many of my projects extend the notion of art as an everyday category of experience and popular practice in radical disalignment with consumer culture. I often re-valuate media in order to highlight certain quotidian experiences and practices as potential sites of consciousness-raising, if only as a reconfiguration of unwanted material bearing the broken utopian promise of the commodity.