Portrait of Carol Condé + Karl Beveridge, 2022

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Carol Condé + Karl Beveridge are the 2022 winners of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Directed by Tyler Tekatch.

A co-production of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ty Tekatch Films. A presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.

The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."

For more information, visit: https://en.ggarts.ca

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Transcript:

K: You know, I think the old work is good for what it was. It’s just that we’re at a point now where it’s no longer…

C: But we can’t just keep on doing the same work. I mean, it becomes really meaningless and redundant.

K: What are we going to do?

C: I don't know, we’re one of the most privileged groups of people around.

K: You know, we can sit and speculate about a so-called revolutionary society, some kind of social transformation. But what can we actually do about it? What issues can we talk about?

K: Initially, I wanted to be a trumpet player, which was kind of curious, but then I realized I was tone deaf, so I had to give that up. In my teens, I started painting a bit and then I went to Ontario College of Art, and then I met Carole, and everything changed at that point.

C: I grew up in Hamilton. I’ve always assumed I was going to be doing art. So I came to Toronto and lived in the YWCA from 16 till I was 18 or so. And then I was at OCA for those years. And then I met Karl.

K: I mean, when we started out as artists in the 1960s, we really believed in this kind of a liberal premise that the art world was inherently progressive, anti-Vietnam War stuff was going on, and so we were political in that sense. But it wasn’t part of our art practice at that time. That changed when we went to New York.

C: We were existing on a small amount of money and living right in the centre of SoHo amongst all the different artists who were being critical of the world. It wasn’t just the art world, but making art about criticism of how the world was being organized.

K: It’s interesting that what we ended up participating in was the shift from modernism to postmodernism… was that change.

C: So after being an activist in New York, we then each of us went back to our communities and created organizations within the city that you were living in.

K: When we came back to Toronto, we very quickly connected in with not only a political community here, but that kind of end of, you might say, the left end of the art world. The local press just trashed us. ‘This isn’t art. Keep politics out of art’ and all that sort of stuff. But it did reach an audience here, and it did kind of signal something. I mean, one of the things that drives us in terms of working with the union movement and community groups and whatnot is to make culture accessible beyond the art world itself.

C: A union is the collective voice of working people. And that collective voice then has a space to be able to be shown and heard and to hear the story that they’re telling. You’re giving a voice to that issue that they’re expressing.

K: We very carefully construct the images to tell a story.

C: And because we work together, we sit here and yap and argue with each other for weeks on end before we even begin to think about going up into the studio. He will have an idea in mind, and I will have an idea in mind. And then you try to melt it together, and that structuring is how we do our work. So it’s not like one person thinks about it, and then the other person goes up and does it.

K: As Carole describes our working process, we argue.

C: Yeah, yeah.


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