Carole Itter's Table of Contents is one of the first assemblage works undertaken by the artist using found objects. Utilizing a boxed framework, the wall-hung assemblage of collected and affixed objects includes numbers, hardware, tools, curio and other objects. Referencing the work of American artists Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson, particularly Nevelson's large-scale wooden totem-like wall works, Itter connects to a legacy of feminist practice, anti-capitalism and an interest in "natural" materiality.
Carole Itter, Table of Contents, 1977-1978, mixed media assemblage. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2015.
Title
Table of Contents
Artist
Carole Itter
Year
1977
Medium
Mixed media assemblage
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Donor
Gift of the artist
Year Acquired
2015
Artists
An interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and filmmaker, Carole Itter was born in Vancouver and has lived on the West Coast for most of her life. She began her studies at the University of British Columbia (1958, 1963), and continued at the Vancouver School of Art (1959 – 1963), where she learned from Don Jarvis, Bruce Boyd, and, most notably for Itter, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka. She studied theatre design and drawing at Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome (1964). Throughout her studies, Itter supported herself by working in Vancouver’s only professional theatrical scene shop for several months of each year. This experience made a permanent impression on her artistic practice.
Itter has held solo exhibitions at Western Front (1984), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1991), Or Gallery (1995), grunt gallery (2000, 2007), and the Georgia Art Studio (2022). Her work has been presented in many group exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2008, which exhibited photographic enlargements from her publication The Log’s Log (1973).
Itter collaborated with poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt to compile Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End: Strathcona (1979), an archive of oral history of Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood, where Itter and Marlatt continue to live and work. She has also produced a book of short stories, Whistle Daughter Whistle (1982); and three artist books: The Log’s Log(1973); Location: Shack (1986); and Western Blue Rampage (1990). Itter’s films include The Float (1993) with cinematographers Trudy Rubenfeld and Luke Blackstone; A Fish Film (2003), with cinematographer and co-director Bo Myers; Tarpaulin Pull (2006), with cinematographer Krista Lomax; Inlet (2009), with editor Krista Lomax; Please Meet the Geese Who Have Lived Here Forever (2019), with cinematographer and editor Allison Hrabluik; and 400 Miniature Geese on a Moving Inlet (2022), with emerging cinematographer Esther Rausenberg and additional support from Allison Hrabluik. Itter collaborated extensively with composer, pianist, and multi-media artist Al Neil from 1979 until he was in his 80s. Neil died in 2017 at age 93.
Itter was honoured with the VIVA Award in 1989 and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2017.