A wall is covered with a grid of framed artworks, each featuring a diagram of guitar chords. The diagrams consist of a series of horizontal lines and dots, arranged in a uniform pattern across a bright white background. The frames are simple and light-colored, and the overall presentation emphasizes a minimalist aesthetic.

Kathy Slade, Chart, 2006, embroidery on canvas. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2021. 

Scott Massey
A wall is covered with a grid of framed artworks, each featuring a diagram of guitar chords. The diagrams consist of a series of horizontal lines and dots, arranged in a uniform pattern across a bright white background. The frames are simple and light-colored, and the overall presentation emphasizes a minimalist aesthetic.

Title

Chart

Artist

Kathy Slade

Year

2006

Medium

Embroidery on canvas

Collection

SFU Art Collection

Donor

Gift of the Artist

Year Acquired

2021

Chart is a gridded display of 105 guitar chords—depicted through tablature notation, or instrument fingering—that are machine-embroidered on canvas. For Slade, the guitar tab represents a utilitarian device for do-it-yourself learning and is connected toembroidery because, as the artist states, both are "about strings, the hand, and where to put one’s fingers.” Chart presents a minimalist grid display of an overwhelming number of chords, particularly less commonly used minor, augmented and diminished cords, in a kind of “gluttonous tab sampler.” 

Artists

Kathy Slade is based in Vancouver and works across disciplines in a variety of media including textiles, sculpture, sound, performance, film, video, print, and publication. Her work points to moments and events in literature, art history and popular culture from which to reimagine temporalities and existing texts, to create looping structures and to produce remakes that play on repetition and the doublet of original and copy. Her work has been shown at Kunstverein Braunschschweig (Braunschweig, Germany); Surrey Art Gallery; Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver); Fluc (Vienna); Cullinan Richards project space 4COSE (London, UK); Galerie Au 8 rue saint bon (Paris); and Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver).