Fillip

Conversation: On Gaslight
November 14th, 2021

Fillip is pleased to announce the launch of a conversation between artists Grace Ndiritu and Kathleen Ritter on the anniversary of the installation of Ritter’s Gaslight, a commissioned public artwork installed at the northeast roofline of the Del Mar Inn at 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver.

Join us Sunday, November 14 at 3 p.m. for a casual open house at the site to celebrate the work and enjoy a hot drink in the company of friends. This live event will be supplemented by a secret online screening all weekend — visit Fillip’s Screening Room for more information.

Read Grace and Kathleen’s conversation here.

About Gaslight

Kathleen Ritter’s Gaslight is a neon sign of glowing block letters circled by the outline of a flickering gas flame. The work’s design is drawn from the title card for Thorold Dickinson’s 1940 film Gaslight. Adapted from a popular 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, Dickinson’s film describes a man who manipulates his wife into thinking she is losing her mind. The success of the film popularized the phrase “gaslighting” within psychoanalytic literature as a colloquialism for a form of abuse in which the victim is covertly manipulated into doubting their own memory, perception, judgment, and eventually, their sanity.

Read “The Healing of America,” Grace Ndiritu’s essay on Gaslight, here.

Acknowledgments

Kathleen Ritter’s Gaslight was commissioned by Fillip with the support of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program. The work is supplemented by a text by Grace Ndiritu published on the occasion of the commission. Special thanks to Mike Riste, Marcia Belluce, Rob Shantz and UFOs Made Here, Benjamin Critton, and Rachel Topham.

About the Artists

Kathleen Ritter is a Canadian artist based in Paris. Her works takes an investigative approach to specific histories, institutions, and constructs of power, gender, language, and technology. By recontextualizing archival images, recorded media, and text, she draws connections between disparate fields, uncovering material from the past as a potential cipher for the present. Ritter was a resident at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2014. Recent exhibitions have taken place at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Open Studio and G Gallery, Toronto; and Battat Contemporary, Montréal. Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in ESSE, Prefix Photo, Fillip and The Brooklyn Rail as well as in numerous catalogues.

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Ndiritu has been featured in​ ​TIME magazine, Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book, Art Monthly, Apollo Magazine’s “40 under 40” list and Elephant magazine. Her ​​work is housed in museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the British Council, and the Modern Art Museum (Warsaw). Her writing has been published in Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art anthology series, The Paris Review, Le Journal Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Animal Shelter Journal (Semiotext(e) & MIT Press), and Metropolis M. Her debut non-fiction book, Dissent Without Modification, was published in 2021 by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway.