About this event
Visual ArtVisible Vault Study Centre
“As a shopping adept, eschewing analysis or fact, La Betty restricted her acquisitive desire to objects favoured by celebrity endorsement and a breath-taking price. These criteria confirmed, La Betty knew what she liked. It is probably accurate to say consumerism replaced her insanity.”
– Jeanne Randolph, My Claustrophobic Happiness
In the Visible Vault’s Study Centre is the latest iteration of Jeanne Randolph’s series of exhibitions and texts that explore the world of La Betty, a trust fund recluse who has retreated into the comfort of her Vancouver condo overlooking English Bay. Inspired by the tribulations of St. Anthony of the Desert, La Betty is the inheritor of twentieth-century consumer-grade materialism, buttressing herself from existential anxieties with advertising slogans and luxury goods. The exhibition itself is a mis-en-scène, constructed with a selection of abstract works from the collection of York University, their flatness intended to echo the flatness of La Betty’s engagement with the world. Works by Victor Vasarely, Josef Albers, and Robert Motherwell dominate the space, hung salon-style in a grid format. Laying in front, however, we find an abstract rug by contemporary artist John Monteith. Brought in to unsettle the works on the wall (and perhaps the assumptions of the collection), it provides a stage from which Randolph’s narrative unravels.