Carole Itter: Only When I’m Hauling Water Do I Wonder If I’m Getting Any Stronger

A review of Vancouver-based artist Carole Itter’s recent retrospective at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, highlighting Itter’s artistic research, begun in the 1960s, around the Northwest Coast, critically embodying the dynamic shift of late-capitalist material and ecological conditions in and beyond the Vancouver area. Deploying the totem-like assemblage of consumed materials as a strategy of political resistance, Itter’s works do not simply build a space for pre-capitalist and primitivist ideas of the ritual but rather, through their post-industrial materials and their transformation via the feminine craft of slow weaving, they meticulously sketch the unevenness of plural temporalities in the late-capitalist era.