Cathy Busby has been making conceptually-based and politically-minded installations, wall-text paintings, printed matter, and performance for over four decades. Her work amplifies overlooked subject matter and voices through recontextualization and scale, often creating collections such as public apologies. Busby built her practice while as NSCAD (BFA 1984) and went on to research pain and self-help culture, earning an MA in Media Studies and a PhD in Communication (1999). Her bold and witty work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, Beijing, Melbourne, and Berlin. She is grateful to live on the unceded territories known as Vancouver.
My work addresses the politics of local sites particularly as they relate to human rights and ecological issues. I am optimistic about the ability of communities to function outside prescriptive agendas and for the role art can play in contributing to justice-based change.
Since the mid-1980s, I’ve made art that has visceral impact, rational description and a basis in the political world. My installations and printed matter are indebted to conceptual, minimal and feminist art as well as discourse analysis. I find or compile collections, re-organizing and activating them to propose new meanings. For example, I collected public apologies for my SORRY series, first exhibited in 2002, and later focused on the landmark 2008 apologies to Indigenous people in Canada and Australia. In 2010, a documentary, We Are Sorry (26 min), was made about my work including conversations with Aboriginal Australian activists stimulated by my public artwork.
I’ve continued to scale up my projects and use commercial fabrication processes (sign vinyl, offset printing) in order to converse on the scale of mass media. Working in Beijing (Red Gate Residency each Fall, 2007–2010) enabled me to explore these processes further while expanding the content of my work (Beijing Cube, 2009; In Conversation with They Chose China, 2010). In 2012 I produced, Budget Cuts a large public artwork, to create a news event about cuts to programs supporting Canada’s Indigenous population.
Also in 2012, I worked with the institutional portraits to commemorate the 175-year history of Union Theological Seminary in New York, through the Institute of Art, Religion and Social Justice by invitation of its Director, AA Bronson and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. In the process of my five-month residency, I re-valued the physical objects and reclaimed little-known histories of the sitters, 63 in total, including three women and two black sitters. Titled About Face, my installation strategy was one of removal and replacement: I removed the portraits where they were most prominently displayed and replaced each with a flat painted rectangular shape the size of the portrait. A hybrid catalogue/artist book that included photos and details about each sitter accompanied the installation. Absences were addressed in the texts contributed by the institution’s community members talking, for instance, about the portraits being a target during 1960s civil rights uprising at the Seminary. The cuts and damage to many of the portraits spoke to their life within the conflicting values of the institution over time.
Steve’s Vinyl was an installation incorporating my late brother’s record collection that became central for the local commemoration of World AIDS Day 2011. It was a performance-giveaway of the nearly-200 albums, a dance party and community event, hosted by Halifax’s artist-run, Khyber Centre for the Arts. The project’s relevance and community is now expanding through the distribution of the Steve’s Vinyl artist’s book that includes a synopsis of Steve’s life; images of the event; and stories about the albums by their new owners (Emily Carr Press’ Pile Driver Editions and Visual AIDS, New York, 2013. Edition 200). Launches became another place of engagement. At the New York launch, jointly hosted by Printed Matter Inc and Visual AIDS, the audience at Artists Space danced to “Power of Love” at the end of my talk. I’m excited about the prospect of collective voice / collective action becoming scripted into upcoming work.
Increasingly, my work becomes a backdrop within which something can happen that galvanizes community action. My artist books and printed matter are an integral part of my practice. As works in themselves, they describe and expand a project while extending the works' reach through distribution.