Who's Gonna Run This Town, 2011

Kate Sansom - Vancouver, Canada

Photo Installation

Who's Gonna Run This Town is a series of photographic stills, part of a body of performances which reference existentialist moments of power struggle in speculative popular culture.
 
The installation nods to the Lord Humungus character from the second of the Mad Max trilogy, The Road Warrior. In the performance, the artist mounts a 1970s lawn tractor in attempts at fear mongering behind a silver mask. Installed in the foyer windows of the Scotiabank Plaza, these stills imagine an alternative reality to the hegemony of the site - what typically becomes a post-5 pm ghost-town. It activates the temporarily abandoned site as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where martial law, and anarchistic behaviour determines sovereignty.
 
This work is the result of a recent interest in science fiction, and speculative popular culture, of particular relevance during an epoch of global economic and environmental crises. The existentialist moments being borrowed from the speculative genre are often sardonic and absurd, but just as the predictions of science fiction are cynical and nihilistic, so are they pertinent and insightful of the milieu. Formally, the stills are reportage-style documents that have a critical proximity to the experience of contemporary information media.

Kate Sansom is currently a Vancouver-based artist. Since graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 2005, she has exhibited across Canada, most recently at the Or Gallery, and the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, her work has been noted in international publications such as Artforum and Canadian Art.

In 2009, Kate received her Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where her research was endowed by the SSHRC Masters Research Scholarship.

Suitable for all ages

Thank you to:
Brock, Shelley, Della and Reginald Sansom.