Unsettling Canadian Art History


Book Description

Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.




This Is Not a Hoax


Book Description

This Is Not a Hoax shows how the work of some contemporary artists and writers intentionally disrupts the curatorial and authorial practices of the country’s most respected cultural institutions: art galleries, museums, and book publishers. This first-ever study of contemporary Canadian hoaxes in visual art and literature asks why we trust authority in artistic works and how that trust is manifest. This book claims that hoaxes, far from being merely lies meant to deceive or wound, may exert a positive influence. Through their insistent disobedience, they assist viewers and readers in re-examining unquestioned institutional trust, habituated cultural hierarchies, and the deeply inscribed racism and sexism of Canada’s settler-colonial history. Through its attentive look at hoaxical works by Canadian artists Iris Häussler, Brian Jungen, and Rebecca Belmore, photographer Jeff Wall, and writers and translators David Solway and Erin Mouré, this book celebrates the surprising ways hoaxes call attention to human capacities for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience in a cultural moment when radical empathy and imagination is critically needed.




Visiting the Visitor


Book Description

The study of the museum visitor has undergone radical transformation. Each author here has asked unfamiliar questions and responded with fresh answers. Some of these questions involve the visitor's identity, what she brings to her museum experience. Can we gain entry into this experience? Does more technology really increase access to the objects themselves? Others probe the very nature of museum going and exhibition making, demanding that we reexamine the traditional exhibition to reposition the visitor and her meaning-making at the centre. The volume provokes imaginative research and encourages new conclusions.




Losing Site


Book Description

As Ruskin suggests in his Seven Lamps of Architecture: "We may live without [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her." We remember best when we experience an event in a place. But what happens when we leave that place, or that place no longer exists? This book addresses the relationship between memory and place and asks how architecture captures and triggers memory. It explores how architecture exists as a material object and how it registers as a place that we come to remember beyond the physical site itself. It questions what architecture is in the broadest sense, assuming that it is not simply buildings. Rather, architecture is considered to be the mapping of physical, mental or emotional space. The idea that we are all architects in some measure - as we actively organize and select pathways and markers within space - is central to this book's premise. Each chapter provides a different example of the manifold ways in which the physical place of architecture is curated by the architecture in our "mental" space: our imaginary toolbox when we think of a place and look at a photograph, or visit a site and describe it later or send a postcard. By connecting architecture with other disciplines such as geography, visual culture, sociology, and urban studies, as well as the fine and performing arts, this book puts forward the idea that a conversation about architecture is not exclusively about formal, isolated buildings, but instead must be deepened and broadened as spatialized visualizations and experiences of place.




The Search for Heinrich Schlšgel


Book Description

Martha Baillie’s hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a two-week hike into the isolated interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions as shards of Arctic history emerge from the shifting landscape. When he returns from his hike, he discovers that, though he has not aged, thirty years have passed. Narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich’s life, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel dances between reality and dream, asking us to consider not only our role in imagining the future into existence but also the consequences of our past choices.




The Arts


Book Description




Remix


Book Description

Celebrating the diversity of institutions in the United States, Latin America, and Canada, Remix aims to change the discourse about museums from the inside out, proposing a new, “panarchic”—nonhierarchical and adaptive—vision for museum practice. Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez offer an unconventional approach, one premised on breaching conventional systems of communication and challenging the dialogues that drive the field. Featuring more than forty authors in and around the museum world, Remix frames a series of vital case studies demonstrating how specific museums, large and small, have profoundly advanced or creatively redefined their goals to meet their ever-changing worlds. Contributors: Piedade Grinberg (Brazil), Nichole Anderson (Canada), Dr. James D. Fleck O.C. (Canada), Vanda Vitali (Canada), Lydia Bendersky (Chile), Andres Navia (Colombia), Manuel Araya-Incera (Costa Rica), Oscar Arias (Costa Rica), Alejandro de Avila Blomberg (Mexico), Marco Barerra Bassols (Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Camarena Ocampo (Mexico), Miguel Fernández Félix (Mexico), Demian Flores (Mexico), Teresa Morales (Mexico), Nelly Robles (Mexico), Hector Feliciano (Puerto Rico), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Santiago Palomero Plaza (Spain), Maxwell L. Anderson (United States), Susana Bautista (United States), Graham W. J. Beal (United States), Jane Burrell (United States), Thomas P. Campbell (United States), Erica Clark (United States), Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh (United States), Kristina van Dyke (United States), William Fox (United States), Ben Garcia (United States), Ivan Gaskell (United States), Tomas W Hanchett (United States), Richard Koshalek (United States), Clare Kunny (United States), Stephen E. Nash (United States), Joanne Northrup (United States), Jane G. Pisano (United States), Edward Rothstein (United States), Karen Satzman (United States), Lori Starr (United States), Carlos Tortolero (United States), David Wilson (United States), Fred Wilson (United States), Guillermo Barrios (Venezuela), Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (Venezuela)




Family Ties


Book Description

House museums act as both sources and suppliers of history. Functioning first as private residences, they are then preserved as commemorative monuments and become living history museums offering theme-based tours led by period-costumed interpreters so that visitors might experience "what it felt like to live back then." In Family Ties, Andrea Terry considers the appeal and relevance of domesticated representations of Victorian material culture in a contemporary multicultural context. Through three case studies, Terry examines Victorian homes that have been repurposed as living history museums that host speculative performances of the past. The credibility of Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, William Lyon Mackenzie House in Toronto, and the Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site of Canada in Montreal, Terry argues, relies on the belief that architectural monuments and the objects they contain are evidence of the time, culture, nation, or people that produced them. Family Ties connects residential artifacts to performance by examining the Victorian Christmas programs offered annually at each site to demonstrate the complex nuances of living history. Through a detailed exploration of the relationship between heritage, living history, and memory, Family Ties illuminates the effects of institutional interpretations of the past that privilege nationalist myths.




Combinatorial Chemistry in Biology


Book Description

The essence of combinatorial chemistry or techniques involving "molecular diversity" is to generate enormous populations of molecules and to exploit appropriate screening techniques to isolate active components contained in these libraries. This idea has been the focus of research both in academia and in the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry. Its developments go hand in hand with an exploding number of potential drug targets emerging from genomics and proteomics research. When the editors of Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology encouraged us to assemble the present volume on Combinatorial Chemistry in Biology, we immediately felt that this might prove quite beneficial for the audience of this series. The field of combinatorial chemistry extends over a broad range of disciplines, from synthetic organic chemistry to biochemistry, from material sciences to cell biology. Each of these fields may have its own view on this topic, something which is reflected in a growing number of monographs and "special editions" of jour nals devoted to this issue or aspects thereof. The title of the present volume of Springer-Verlag's series suggests that it also has its own special focus. And, generally speaking, this is not wrong: we would even claim the special focus of this volume is on the immunologically relevant aspects of combinatorial chemistry.




Material Cultures in Canada


Book Description

Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. The first of its kind, this collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body. The book’s three sections focus, in turn, on objects that are persistently material, on things whose materiality blends into the immaterial, and on the materials of spaces. Contributors highlight some of the most exciting new developments in the field, such as the emergence of “new materialism,” affect theory, globalization studies, and environmental criticism. Although the book has a Canadian centre, the majority of its contributors consider objects that cross borders or otherwise resist national affiliation. This collection will be valuable to readers within and outside of Canada who are interested in material culture studies and, in addition, will appeal to anyone interested in the central debates taking place in Canadian political and cultural life today, such as climate change, citizenship, shifts in urban and small-town life, and the persistence of imperialism.