At the West Vancouver Museum until March 7

Kim Kennedy Austin’s drawings, whether executed in ink, watercolour, or cross-stitch, are compellingly and profoundly labour-intensive. They also bring together the extraordinary and the mundane in curious ways.

Austin’s textual and pictorial sources range from architectural drawings to teen romance novels, and from philosophical treatises by Georges Bataille to manuals for ham-radio operators. The works we most closely associate with this Vancouver-based artist are characterized by beautifully and meticulously hand-lettered bodies of text, suggestive of a meditative immersion in the creation of a medieval illuminated manuscript, perhaps, or a Buddhist mandala.

Guest-curated by Patrik Andersson and subtitled Industry, Charity, Faith, Hope, the show surveys work Austin has produced since 2002, and also includes new watercolours created specifically for this site. (The subject of these delicately executed watercolours is the bridges that connect Vancouver with the North Shore, with allusions, as well, to historic bridge collapses, here and elsewhere.)

The exhibition subtitle is drawn from the chorus of a song performed by Bette Midler in the 1980 film Beaches. Unlike the maudlin content of the movie, the lyrics of this song, which Austin has cross-stitched in pink on a plain white ground, are weirdly political. They’re suggestive of the decline of American industry, which Andersson interpreted, while guiding the Straight through the show, as paralleling the decline of modernism. Although in the movie the song is satirical, delivered by “a captain of industry”, Austin’s hand-stitched lyrics call up ideas of actual obsolescence and the displacement of the worker.

The theme of labour reverberates throughout the show, whether in Austin’s intensely focused and time-consuming practice or the subjects she alludes to. She has drawn words or pictures from an old manual for sheet-metal workers, a history of the Dominion Bridge Company, and a guide for aspirants in the auto trade.

A series of homilies and aphorisms, executed in watercolour on scallop-edged ovals that evoke doilies, juxtaposes antiquated religious ideals about women’s work with contemporary TV culture. For instance, a Shaker text advising “Cleanliness, Honesty, Frugality” may be posed next to “Ritual, Routine, Control” from Dexter, and “Hands to Work & Heart to God” may lodge next to “Gym, Tan, Laundry” from Jersey Shore. Here, as elsewhere, Austin creates her lettering in white silhouette against a washy ground of bright, pale, and peachy pinks. The words, colours, and doily shapes of this series contribute to a critique of historical (but oddly persistent) notions of domesticity and gender roles, while also suggesting how some value systems have become obsolete in 21st-century life.

Austin’s use of pink watercolour throughout the show is in itself a feminist critique. Her palette, subject matter, and medium all challenge entrenched masculine ideals in art, such as heroic scale and vaunted themes. She treats schematic drawings of bridges with the same degree of respect as she does Dolly Parton song titles. Ditto quotations from French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and teen romance novel Kiss Me, Creep.

This conflation of the profound and the banal, the enduring and the obsolete, the masculine and the feminine unsettles our assumptions about what is important and why. Austin provokes us to think about who determines value, whether of sheet-metal-cutting, songwriting, or art-making.