Miles Rufelds: Salvage Archives at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Opening Reception and Art Bus, February 8, 2025

Miles Rufelds, Salvage Archives (still), 2024. Digital video with sound. 43:00 mins. Courtesy of the Artist.

Miles Rufelds: Salvage Archives

February 8 – May 25, 2025
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: February 8, 2 – 4pm
Curated by Darryn Doull

Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems.

Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste.

As both narrators’ grandiose overtures slowly narrow, contort, or fizzle out, the film meditates on the failures of narrativity, synthesizing themes of digital loneliness, class alienation, capitalist paranoia, and the tragic arc of histories constrained by these forces.

KWAG is proud to share that we have commissioned a critical text for this exhibition by author Angel Callander. This text will be published in a special Exhibition Resource Guide that will be available in the exhibition and online.

Exhibition Programming:

Opening Reception and Artist Talk with Angel Callander
Saturday, February 8, 2 – 4pm
Miles Rufelds in discussion with Angel Callander

This dialogue will explore Rufelds’ ongoing research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation and the ways collective storytelling emerges within the shadows of unjust material systems.

Toronto – KWAG Art Bus
Opening Reception and Artist Talk with Angel Callander
Saturday, February 8, 11am – 5pm

Take the free art bus departing from Mercer Union to the opening reception and artist talk with Miles Rufelds and Angel Callander. The trip includes an introduction to New Mineral Collective: The Pleasure Report exhibition at Mercer Union. Register here.

About the Artist:

Miles Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Toronto. He holds a Master of Visual Studies in studio art from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa.

Rufelds’ research-based practice mixes archival investigation with strategies of speculative- and para-fiction, considering how forms of narrativity mediate the operations of systemic power and exploitation. His projects often focus on stories where histories of science, industry, labour, and war intersect with artistic, political, or esoteric subcultures.

Rufelds has participated in exhibitions and screenings nationally and internationally, including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Blackwood Gallery, PAVED Arts, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Karsh-Masson Gallery, ArtworxTO, and the SIM Gallery. Rufelds is also a co- founder and co-director of Toronto gallery ‘the plumb’.

Also on View:

Dan Hudson, Infinite Cave, 2022. Digital video installation, dimensions variable. Installation view from the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre. Photo courtesy of the Artist.

SOS A Story of Survival, Part III: The Planet

November 9, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Curated by Darryn Doull

SOS: A Story of Survival is a three-part exhibition exploring what survival is, what it looks like and what it means to survive. The exhibition series has never pretended to have the answers to solve global climate collapse. We are already past all of the tipping points. There is no going back. Instead, the series offers alternative and hybrid nodes, relations and techniques as pathways into the future and of recuperating hope, juxtaposing the individual with community and emphasizing mutual aid. Part III – The Planet draws attention back to the matter of our world: to the rocks beneath our feet, the air in our lungs and the water throughout and all around us.

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955), Carrara Marble Quarries #20, Carrara, Italy, 1993. Digital C print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Permanent Collection: Courtesy of Edward Burtynsky, 2014. Photo: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

A Broken Planet

November 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025
Curated by Jennifer Bullock

Drawing on the KWAG Permanent Collection, A Broken Planet builds on the themes of SOS: A Story of Survival, Part III – The Planet by looking at ways that environmental harm can be found in the collection. Featuring the industrial devastation unfolding before Edward Burtynsky’s camera lens, the exhibition uses aesthetic and compositional beauty as a way to approach difficult subjects that are otherwise much easier to look away from.

Land Acknowledgment

The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery respectfully acknowledges that we are located in Block 2 on the Haldimand Tract: land promised to Six Nations, which includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River. This is the traditional home of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples, whose resilience we honor by offering this Gallery as a space to reflect and learn from one another. We are committed to reconciliation and ensuring that our Gallery’s programs and Permanent Collection demonstrate more diverse, culturally relevant Canadian art and artists.

About Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

As Waterloo Region’s leading public art gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) connects people and ideas through art. Its nationally acclaimed exhibitions and programs welcome all to be inspired and challenged through a deepened understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our communities. It offers dynamic public programs that inspire creativity and an appreciation of the visual arts in the Region and beyond. Established in 1956 and incorporated in 1968, KWAG is a non-profit organization open to the public and administered in the public trust. Admission is free.

Accessibility: KWAG is fully accessible.

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
101 Queen Street North
Kitchener, ON N2H 6P7
www.kwag.ca

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Artist Talks sponsored by Momentum Developments and Sorbara Law.