I'm in this World, Doing: Vivian Smith

I’M IN THIS WORLD, DOING VIVIAN SMITH

CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to say, “I’m in this world, doing”?

The phrase carries a quiet insistence. It resists invisibility. It names presence. It suggests action without spectacle – labour that unfolds in kitchens, hallways, bedrooms, and in the in-between spaces of daily life. Vivian Smith’s exhibition begins here: not with grand gestures, but with repetition, maintenance, and care.

Across sculpture, installation, and image-based works, Smith turns toward the forms of labour that structure our lives yet remain structurally undervalued: cleaning, cooking, caregiving, organizing, sustaining. These actions are neither exceptional nor rare; they are constant. They are cyclical. They are expected. And because they are expected – particularly of women – they are rarely recognized as labour within economic systems that privilege wage-based productivity above all else.

In the 1970s, the international feminist campaign Wages for Housework emerged as a radical demand. Spearheaded by activists such as Silvia Federici, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the movement argued that domestic labour was not a private expression of love or moral duty, but essential work that sustained capitalism itself. Cooking meals, raising children, cleaning homes – these tasks reproduced the labour force. Yet because they were unpaid and feminized, they were rendered economically invisible. The campaign did not simply seek a paycheque; it sought recognition. It insisted that what happens in the home is not outside the economy but foundational to it.

Smith’s exhibition resonates strongly with this lineage. Rather than illustrating theory, she embodies it. Using her own daily routines as source material, she photographs herself engaged in acts of domestic labour and caregiving. These images reappear throughout the exhibition, printed onto chiffon, satin, velveteen, linen; textiles long associated with intimacy, softness, and femininity. Coated in beeswax and integrated into sculptural structures, they become at once tender and resistant, fragile and enduring. Beeswax carries its own symbolic charge. Produced by female worker bees, it is a material generated through collective, gendered labour, a quiet but potent reminder that systems of care and production are deeply intertwined. In Smith’s hands, it seals and preserves images of labour that would otherwise disappear into the blur of routine. The material insists that these moments matter.

The exhibition unfolds as a series of environments and encounters. In A Place for Relaxation, an installation of a domestic sitting area is transformed through subtle interventions. Upholstered surfaces and drapery carry repeated images of the artist cleaning, collapsing the boundary between comfort and effort. A place of supposed rest becomes layered with evidence of maintenance. The room feels familiar – even inviting –yet something is unsettled. The labour that makes comfort possible refuses to remain hidden.

Elsewhere, figures are suspended, multiplied, and arranged in circular formations. Their gestures –scrubbing, lifting, bending – repeat rhythmically across space. The repetition suggests both choreography and exhaustion. Time collapses: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Domestic work does not resolve; it renews

itself. Smith also embeds her imagery into rigid materials such as plexiglass and resin, trapping moments of labour inside clear architectural structures and solid blocks. These works evoke containment, transparency, and accumulation. Labour becomes visible yet still confined, on display but not necessarily liberated. The tension between exposure and enclosure mirrors the broader paradox of domestic work: we know it exists, we rely upon it, and yet our economic structures continue to marginalize it.

Financial symbolism threads through the exhibition in subtle ways. Gold bullion imagery impressed upon textiles. Building blocks incorporate scenes of caregiving within forms associated with capital and accumulation. The juxtaposition is sharp but not didactic. Smith does not offer easy moral binaries. Instead, she reveals entanglement: how intimate life intersects with global systems of manufacturing, consumption, and value production. The home is not separate from capitalism; it is one of its engines.

Importantly, Smith’s work resists portraying domestic labour solely as victimhood. There is agency in the repetition. There is presence in the declaration: I’m in this world, doing. The works assert that labour performed out of love, obligation, or necessity still constitutes work. They challenge the persistent cultural framing of care as instinctual or natural rather than skilled and sustaining. Today, conversations around Universal Basic Income echo earlier feminist critiques. As automation, precarity, and global instability reshape labour markets, we are again confronted with the question: what counts as productive contribution? Who gets compensated, and who does not? Smith’s exhibition does not function as policy proposal, but it does open space for reflection. By making visible the labour that quietly undergirds social life, she asks us to reconsider the frameworks through which we assign worth.

There is something profoundly contemporary in this gesture. In an era obsessed with visibility – with metrics, productivity apps, wearable technology, and self-optimization – the most essential work often remains unquantified. Care cannot be easily measured. Maintenance does not trend. Yet without it, everything else collapses. Within the gallery, these works accumulate into a kind of chorus. Small figures appear near baseboards and corners, easy to overlook at first glance. Larger installations occupy space more forcefully. Drawings trace movement across paper, mapping the body in action. Together, they create an ecosystem of labour – intimate, cyclical, unrelenting, and necessary.

I’m in this World, Doing ultimately invites us to slow down and look at what sustains us. It asks us to acknowledge the infrastructures of care embedded within our own homes and communities. And it situates those infrastructures not as sentimental backdrops, but as sites of economic and political significance. To say, “I’m in this world, doing” is to refuse erasure. It is to name labour that has too often been dismissed as natural, private, or secondary. Vivian Smith’s work holds that declaration steady. It makes visible what has long been foundational and asks us what kind of world might emerge if we truly valued the work that keeps it going.

Victoria Verge Curator

Vernon Public Art Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

How do we assign value to labour that is unseen?

I explore the complex relationship between unpaid labour and economic systems through mixed-media that transform personal documentation into visible markers of invisible work. Using my own body and daily routines as source material, I photograph, then preserve moments of labour outside of the workforce. The images are printed on domestic textiles such as silk, satin, and chiffon and coated in beeswax, a substance generated by industrious female worker bees that is indicative of gendered expectations around care and household labour. Incorporating feminine-coded and home-associated processes like hand-stitching, quilting, and sewing, I further manipulate and transform the fabrics into marketable commercial goods. The work is rooted in the rhythms of everyday life.

By treating domestic labour as part of a gift economy where work is performed out of love or obligation rather than for compensation, we overlook its true economic contribution. I advocate for recognizing the value of unpaid labour through systems like Universal Basic Income in order to acknowledge the importance of this role in supporting our communities and the Canadian economy.

I’m in this World, Doing presents seven mixed-media pieces and two installations exploring how unpaid care work, affective labour, and domestic chores impact women’s economic independence while contributing to the broader Canadian economy. By embedding images of labour that is unpaid into objects with greater assigned economic value than the work they depict, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider how society compensates this essential but overlooked work. The objects are a physical representation of the intersection of the gift economy and capitalism.

This work examines the complex relationship between domestic labour and economic systems through personal documentation and material exploration. I photograph my own housework while wearing Lululemon clothing and an Apple watch, contemporary middle-class clothing that are manufactured in overseas factories, revealing how our daily consumer choices connect to larger economic structures. The work highlights how women’s contributions span from local domestic spaces to global manufacturing, yet remain undervalued across these contexts.

Vivian Smith

In the Corners of the Eye, 2024. Photos of the artist cleaning, printed on chiffon, beeswax. approx. 4-6 in. each.

A Place for Relaxation, 2025.

Photos of the artist cleaning, printed on satin, velveteen, canvas and chiffon, chair, cushion, drapes, curtain rod, birchwood panel, resin, side table, lamp, rug, and books about masculinity.

A Place for Relaxation (detail), 2025.

Photos of the artist cleaning, printed on satin, velveteen, canvas and chiffon, chair, cushion, drapes, curtain rod, birchwood panel, resin, side table, lamp, rug, and books about masculinity.

Building Blocks (detail), 2024. Photos of the artist caring for a child, financial imagery, resin, 3 cantilevered shelves. 18x28x6 in.

Building Blocks, 2024. Photos of the artist caring for a child, financial imagery, resin, 3 cantilevered shelves. 18x28x6 in.

Cushioned, 2024. Photos of the artist cleaning printed on satin, low loft filling, fibre. 36x180 in.

Cushioned (detail), 2024. Photos of the artist cleaning printed on satin, low loft filling, fibre. 36x180 in.

Domestic Economy, 2024.

Domestic Economy (detail), 2024. White linen tablecloth, ink, acrylic paint, fabric pen. 60x84 in.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 2025.

Photos of the artist engaged in child care and cleaning printed onto chiffon, beeswax. 48-72 in. diameter.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (detail), 2025. Photos of the artist engaged in child care and cleaning printed onto chiffon, beeswax. 48-72 in. diameter.

Woman-Suit, Drying, 2024.

In the Corners of the Eye, 2024. Photos of the artist cleaning, printed on chiffon, beeswax. approx. 4-6 in. each.

CURRICULUM VITAE

VIVIAN SMITH

EDUCATION

2024 RISE Emerging Artist Program, artsPlace, Canmore, AB.

2023 Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction, Alberta University of the Arts, School of Visual Arts, Major in Drawing and Minor in Ceramics.

2022-2023 Emerging Artist Writing Program residency and workshops, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

2022 Professional Practices; a Bootcamp for Artists, Naomi Clement, online.

2020-2021 RBC Future Launch Workshops for Emerging Artists, online, 30 hours.

2021-2022 Hear/d, AUArts Student Association residency and workshops, Calgary, AB.

2020 AUArts Exchange and Study Abroad Program, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

2017 Graphic Design Certificate of Achievement, Alberta College of Art & Design.

AWARDS

2024 Canada Council for the Arts Explore & Create: Research & Creation.

Calgary Arts Development Authority, Artist Development Micro Grant.

Calgary Arts Development Authority, Project Grant Program for Individuals & Collectives.

2023 Residency Scholarship, AUArts, AB.

2022 Alberta Society of Artists Undergraduate Scholarship.

2021 Persons Case Scholarship (Leaders in Equality Award of Distinction).

2020 AUArts Scholarship for Research Project.

Dr. J.C. Sproule Memorial Scholarship.

AUArts Financial Relief Bursary.

Nominee AUArts Exchange and Study Abroad Program.

2018 Jason Lang Scholarship.

ACAD Board of Governor’s First Year Scholarship.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2025 Invisible Foundations: Labour, Gender, & Economic Cycles, NVRLND Gallery, Calgary, AB.

2024 Transitions, Kiwanis Gallery, Red Deer, AB.

2023 Unmoored, Studio C, Prospect, Calgary, AB.

Transitions, The Lebel, Pincher Creek, AB.

2022 40 Mugs, Marion Nicholl LRT Gallery, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

2021 Transitions, Marion Nicholl Gallery, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

Being an Individual, The Screen Gallery, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

2020 – An Evolution, Marion Nicholl Gallery, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

CLEMATIS COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS

2024 The Place I Am, artsPlace, Canmore, AB.

2023 Windows into Clematis: Uniting Through Art, Mini Gallery Exhibits, Rotary Park, Calgary.

The Place I Am, Leighton Art Centre, Millarville, AB.

2022 The Place I Am, Marion Nicholl Gallery, AUArts, Calgary, AB.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2026

Craft Perspectives, Alberta Craft Calgary Gallery, Calgary.

Clocking In for Unpaid Labour, The Outlet Gallery, Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.

2025 Acts of Care, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, United States. Juried exhibition.

Craft Perspectives, Alberta Craft Edmonton Feature Gallery, Edmonton.

Clocking In for Unpaid Labour, Deer Lake Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbia.

2023 Summer Residency Program Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

Think Big, Casa, Lethbridge.

Art Block, Sled Island Music & Arts Festival, NVRLND Boutique, Calgary.

Grad Showcase, Hallway Galleries, cSPACE, Calgary.

AUArts Grad Show, AUArts Gallery Space, Calgary.

Exposure Photography Festival, zine swap, Contemporary Calgary, Calgary. Rewinding the Tape v. 2, Marion Nicholl Gallery, AUArts, Calgary.

Integral Space, Department Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

2022 Where Art Belongs, Loophole Coffee Bar, Calgary.

Emerging Artists! 2022, Quentin Doolittle Memorial Gallery, Calgary.

Subject to Change, Hear/d Residency Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

11th Annual President’s Student Arts & Design Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

Emerging Artists Unleashed: 2022, Alberta Society of Artists, Calgary.

2021 IGNITE! Festival for Emerging Artists, Pump House Theatre, Calgary.

Bow Valley Square Showcase, AUArts digital screen, Calgary.

Emerging Artists Unleashed: 2021, Alberta Society of Artists, Calgary.

The Art of Science, Chinook Blast Festival, Calgary.

YYC Airport Showcase, AUArts digital screen, Calgary.

2020 - 2021 10th Annual President’s Student Arts & Design Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

2020 Work Transforms Work, Ceramic Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

2019 9th Annual President’s Student Arts & Design Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

Like a Rock, Ceramic Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

2018 8th Annual President’s Student Arts & Design Exhibition, AUArts, Calgary.

ASSESSMENT & ADJUDICATION

2025 Juror, 2025 Vibes Show, Alberta Community Arts Club Association (ACACA), Drumheller. 2024, 2021 Juror, Winter Show & Sale, AUArts, Calgary.

2023

Peer Assessor, Calgary Arts Development, Grant Assessment Committee, Calgary. Juror, Marion Nicholl Gallery winter exhibition programming, AUArts, Calgary.

2022 Peer Assessor, Calgary Arts Development, Grant Assessment Committee, Calgary.

Juror, Marion Nicholl Gallery winter exhibition programming, AUArts, Calgary.

Juror, The Fridge Gallery winter exhibition programming, AUArts, Calgary.

2021

Juror, The Fridge Gallery winter exhibition programming, AUArts , Calgary.

RESIDENCIES & PUBLICATIONS

2024

Artist-In-Residence, Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre, Calgary. Artist Residency, Similkameen Artist Residency, Keremeos, British Columbia. 2023 Artist Residency, AUArts Summer Residency, Calgary.

Emerging Artist Writing Program publication, AUArts, Calgary.

2022-2023 Emerging Artist Writing Program, residency and workshops, AUArts, Calgary.

2021-2022 Hear/d, AUArts Student Association residency and workshops, Calgary.

VOLUNTEERING

2023-current Secretary, Board-Member-at-Large, Elephant Artist Relief Society, Calgary. 2023 Volunteer, AUArts Spring Show & Sale, Calgary.

2022-2023 Drawing Representative, Student Leadership Committee, AUArts, Calgary.

2021-2023 Treasurer/Secretary, The Bows (Calgary-based Artist-Run Centre), Calgary.

2021-2022 Note taker for students with disabilities, AUArts, Calgary.

2019-2020 Student Representative, President Student Advisory Committee, AUArts, Calgary.

MEDIA COVERAGE

2025 “Vivian Smith Invisible Foundations: Labour, Gender, and Economic Cycles”, Article by Galleries West.

2024 Artist Talk, Invisible Hands, Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre, Calgary.

“Gallery: Photos: artsPlace Features Group Exhibition: The Place I Am”, Article by Jungmin Ham in the Rocky Mountain Outlook on The Place I Am exhibition at artsPlace. 2023 “Foothills Gallery Showcasing New Works of Evolution and Nature”, Article by Brent Calver in the Western Wheel on The Place I Am exhibition at the Leighton Centre.

MEMBERSHIP

2023-present Elephant Artist Relief Society, Calgary AB.

2022-present Clematis Collective, an Alberta-based artist collective and includes the artists:

● Shea Proulx

● Elise Findlay

● Natalie Melara

2021-present CARFAC Alberta.

2021-present Alberta Craft Council.

2021-present Leighton Art Centre, Calgary AB.

This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition: I’m in this World, Doing: Vivian Smith, March 20 - May 20, 2026

Editor: Victoria Verge

Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery

Layout and graphic design: Vernon Public Art Gallery

Front cover image: Cushioned (detail), 2024, Photos of the artist cleaning printed on satin, low loft filling, fibre. 36x180 in.

Printing: Get Colour Copies, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada

ISBN: 978-1-927407-97-4

copyright © 2026, Vernon Public Art Gallery

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Requests for permission to use these images should be addressed in writing to the Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3, Canada.

Telephone: 250.545.3173 - website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, the Government of Canada, corporate donors, sponsors, general donations and memberships. Charitable Organization # 108113358RR

Vernon Public Art Gallery

3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3 250.545.3173

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