Art Metropole

16 Apr. 2025

Reactivating the Archive 6: Kiera Boult on Walter Scott's Wendy Critical Reader

Time

6:00-8:00 PM

Please join us on Wednesday April 16th from 6–8PM for Reactivating the Archive 6, in which artist Kiera Boult will be responding to Walter Scott’s publication Wendy Critical Reader through her performance persona Kiki. In this performative lecture, Kiki examines the limitations of identity and persona for both Wendy and herself.

Wendy Critical Reader is a collection of stories told in Walter Scott’s signature graphic style, examining the lives of Wendy, Winona, Screamo, and Useless Urban Person. Weaved in these fun, fashionable tales are themes of feminism, women’s labour, Indigenous identity, queerness, and using your iPhone too much. Published by Art Metropole in 2014, the edition features texts by D St-Amour and Ange Loft.

Reactivating the Archive is a series of artist talks and performance lectures by artists and curators responding to works published by Art Metropole over our 50-year history. This series expands Art Metropole’s past lecture series Activating the Archive, which ran from 1989–1995.

Kiera Boult is an interdisciplinary artist and performer from Hamilton, ON. Her work uses comedy and camp aesthetics to critically explore race, identity, gentrification, and the pageantry of popular culture. Her performance persona, Kiki, reigns as the ultimate Art/Reality Star, equal parts theory and hot mess. She is the celebrity you deserve: guilt-free, high-glam, and critically unhinged, inviting audiences to explore the artist’s role in society skeptically. Boult’s recent work, Hamilton’s My Lady (2022), was presented at the 7A*11D performance art festival and Hamilton’s Supercrawl. In 2019, she received the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Emerging Visual Artist, with exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Artcite Inc. Windsor. When not delivering hot takes and even colder reads, Boult manages Outreach & Public Programming at Vtape.