Carole Itter: Please Meet the Geese Who Have Lived Here Forever - Tote Bag

A limited-edition tote bag, with an image by Emerson Gray, who is 10 years old.

Tote bag and colouring book sold separately.

There is a matching colouring book for Carole Itter's exhibition as well.

About the Exhibition:

Rooted in the collaborative and interdisciplinary energy that burgeoned on the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Carole Itter’s artistic practice has embraced performance, installation, voice improvisations, video and photography, recordings of oral histories, assemblage, collage, poetry, and prose. The palpable connection between these different expressions is the artist’s concern for our social and ecological futures, her insistent humour, and her commitment to community. The focus of this solo exhibition is Itter’s most recent major filmic work, Please Meet the Geese Who Have Lived Here Forever. A fable of sorts, this single-channel video meditates on the consequences of resource extraction, marine pollution, and ecological extinction. It is narrated by a family of wild geese who seek refuge along the foreshore of Burrard Inlet (səl̓ilw̓ət), a place the artist has observed closely for many years.

Audiences familiar with Itter’s performance and sculpture practice —particularly her assemblages of found objects — will recognize similar approaches present in Please Meet the Geese Who Have Lived Here Forever. The set is in itself a large-scale assemblage, built entirely from materials salvaged from second-hand shops, alleyways, and backyards from the artist’s East Vancouver neighbourhood. As in much of Itter’s work, the intentional awkwardness of the film’s repurposed and hand-made elements operates as a signal of her irreverence toward conventional “high art” value systems and her repudiation of settler culture’s rapacious overconsumption. Her own role in the film as lead goose, performed in an ungainly papier mâché body, suggests just how out of step contemporary human existence is with the natural world. But these material strategies also speak to Itter’s profound understanding of the power of shared imagination — particularly evident in how children work together — to transform even the most underwhelming conditions into something magical. It is another way too, perhaps, in which Itter reminds her audiences that we need not feel alone. In fact when asked why geese have been such an enduring subject of interest to her, Itter has simply stated, “they understand what it means to be a community.”