2023/2024 Fine Arts Speaker Series

The book features Vancouver-based artist Carol Sawyer's two-decades long project reconstructing the life and work of the (fictional) historical, genre-blurring performance artist, Natalie Brettschneider.

In 'staged' photography the artist takes on the role of a director, creating or staging an image. This text traces the history of the staged photograph, focusing on such key themes as the artist as actor, art historical imagery, and narratives and allegories.

The Queen's Throat: Opera, (Homo)sexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum

Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience​ Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine.

In the turmoil of the 1920s and '30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly contemporary, or even from the future. She wrote poetry and prose for major French literary magazines, worked in avant-garde theater, and was both comrade of and critical outsider to the Surrealists. Exist Otherwise is the first work in English to the tell the full story of Claude Cahun's art and life, one that celebrates and makes accessible Cahun's remarkable vision.

The Wetland Project book is the print component of a multidisciplinary and multimedia project centred on the sounds emanating from the TEKTEKSEN marsh, in unceded WSANEC territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia). The book is edited by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, who have been inspired by the sonic phenomena produced by this small patch of Earth to create a 24-hour Slow Radio Broadcast, based on field recordings from the marsh, that radio stations across North America and Europe have aired on Earth Day since 2017; a musical arrangement titled Wetland Senario, co-composed with Stephen Morris and performed by vocal ensemble musica intima; and a new media installation that algorithmically transforms sound frequencies from the marsh recordings into pure colour fields in flux.

The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition. The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.

Combining a range of content with self-reflexive examination by scholars and practitioners, this edited volume interrogates the contemporary significance of the avant-garde. Rather than focusing on a particular region, period, or movement, the contributors bring together case studies to examine what constitutes the avant-garde canon.

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to pinpoint the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwärzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis, as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives.

This edited collection proposes new directions for understanding cinematic intermediality, mapping out innovative approaches to film's relationship with some of its most influential artistic predecessors in the fields of performance, sculpture, painting, photography and dance. With essays by leading researchers and practitioners, this book investigates cinema's productive synergies and crossovers with the other arts through a broad range of avant-garde and experimental work.

There exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art and Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Lucky PDF. In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid 'artivism'? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alternative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion.

A magnificently illustrated showcase of the work of 300 women photographers from all over the world, from the invention of the medium to the dawn of the 21st century. As in many fields of art history, the work of women photographers has often been overlooked, and few of their names are now widely recognized. However, women were closely involved in all major photography movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and have used the camera as an extraordinary tool for emancipation and experimentation. These are artists who never stopped documenting, questioning and transforming the world, breaking down social boundaries, challenging gender roles and expressing their imagination and sexuality. To capture the diversity of this global body of work, Luce Lebart and Marie Robert have invited 160 international women writers to contribute to this volume, which is a bold and beautifully illustrated manifesto as well as an invaluable work of reference.

Modern and contemporary women's artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production--photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe--create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities. Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been at the vanguard of the study of women's self-representation, and here have collected leading critics' and scholars' thoughts on artistic fusions of the visual and autobiographical.