Garry Neill Kennedy: The Big Five

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Garry Neill Kennedy, "The Big Five," 2020

Installation view, exhibited this summer at Emerson Gallery in Berlin. Credit: Canadianart.ca

Coming this fall to Victoria Arts Council's VAULT Project Space is an installation from one of Canada's most prominent conceptual artists, Garry Neill Kennedy.

The country's five largest banks (in terms of assets, deposits and capitalization) are the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion, the Bank of Montreal, and Scotiabank. Together they account for more than 85% of the banking industry in Canada.

Kennedy, whose work has often explored institutional power and the political implications of colour, has reassigned the colour schemes of the bank's corporate logos,  shifting them one down the financial ladder. The CIBC logo appears in RBC colours, the RBC in TD colours, TD in Scotiabank colours, etc., thus disrupting the institutions' corporate identities.

Garry Neill Kennedy is a recipient of the Order of Canada (2003) and the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2004). In addition to an extensive international exhibition history, Kennedy was the president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for twenty-three years (1967-1990), establishing NSCAD as a forerunner in art education. Recently, MIT Press invited Kennedy to author a book, The Last Art College, NSCAD (1968-1978) which chronicles the first decade of his presidency. In 2012, the National Gallery of Canada published the catalogue raisonné Garry Neill Kennedy: Printed Matter, 1971 –2009. Concurrent with this reprise of The Big Five is the exhibition NOW BULLETIN: Artworks, Letters and Printed Matter from the Garry Neill Kennedy Collection 1968 – 2019 presented Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver.