McMaster Museum of Art
Husar Handbook
Gerta Moray, Carol Podedworny, Stuart Reid, Dawn Owen & Meeka Walsh
Natalka Husar is a socially conscious artist passionately engaged in reflections on art and history. Her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, has led her to create an overwhelming and immediately identifiable body of work centered on the conflict between the ideal of womanhood as silent and compliant and the self she sees as powerful and aggressive. Her complex images convey multiple narratives of the past and the present, of autobiography and social history, and of the lives of girls and women caught on the cusp of change. The view would be unrelenting were it not for a dark wit and an attention to texture and fabric reminiscent of Rembrandt and Vermeer. This sumptuously produced publication provides, as the title suggests, a unique visual and intellectual encounter with the work of a singular artist. Five essays and a text by the artist are accompanied by numerous colour plates and fold-outs .Published with the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre to accompany the nationally touring exhibition, The Burden of Innocence.
McMaster Museum of Art (10/2010) 82 pp 56 ill (48 col) 9 x 9.5 in hardcover 978-0-9208108-7-3 $50.00 Can. $56.00 U.S. (40 €)
Fierce: Women’s Hot-Blooded Film/Video
Edited by Janice Hladki. Essays by Lisa Steele, Jeremy Todd, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Richard Fung & Patricia R. Zimmermann
Publication of a group exhibition adressing how Canadian-based women artists contribute to contemporary moving image culture, particularly in terms of producing the thinking image. Essays by leading artists and critics provide a rich account of video art and experimental film in the Canadian context and the impact of Canadian-based work within transnational spheres. Mobilizing narrative, documentary, autobiographical, video essay, video poem, animation, and experimental forms, the artists explore urgent concerns: public life and social justice, the global and the local, history and memory, the environment and species diversity, and war and peace. Participating artists: Maureen Bradley, Dana Claxton, Allyson Mitchell and b. h. Yael. McMaster Museum of Art (01/2010) 56 pp 32 col. ill. 10 x 8 in softcover 978-1-926632-04-9 $20.00 Can. $23.95 U.S. (16 €)
Shelagh Keeley
Peggy Gale & Christopher Dewdney
Shelagh Keeley came to prominence in the 1980s and has a significant early body of work that is housed in numerous Canadian institutions and, given Keeley’s 22-year residence in New York City, in most major American institutions. From very early on Keeley’s drawings challenged the established art world with investigations into Africa, AIDS, health and the body. More recent work includes bookworks that serve as an archive of the artist’s visual vocabulary during nearly three decades of practice. They record themes that have pervaded her practice: diversity, history, representation and that which is political and social. This monograph is the first critical assessment of Keeley's thirty-year career.Robert McLaughlin Gallery / McMaster Museum of Art (01/2010) 92 pp 28 col. ill. 10 x 7.5 softcover 978-1-926589-03-9 $22.00 Can. $25.00 U.S. (18 €)
Leonard Baskin: Works in the Collection of the McMaster Mueum of Art
Carol Podedworny
This presentation of lithographs and etchings highlights the visionary career of the American artist (1922-2000). A sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and book designer, Baskin founded The Gehenna Press for which many of these prints were produced. This publication honours the Press by duplicating its characteristic saddle-stiched binding. The works of Leonard Baskin are found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery, the Vatican Museum and the British Museum.
Allyson Mitchell: Ladies Sasquatch
Carla Garnet, Allyson Mitchell, Josephine Mills & Ann Cvetkovich
Allyson Mitchell creates installations that are epic figures, each one a monumental symbol of female brains, brawn and sexuality. Standing upright at over 10 feet tall, the sculptural works embody feminist theory and are painstakingly crafted creations of fun fur, taxidermy glass eyes and various fake bear parts. Since 1997, the Toronto-based artist has been melding feminism and pop culture to play with ideas about autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Also an active curator, Mitchell is responsible for the exhibition When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread.
McMaster Museum of Art (03/2009) 56 pp col. ill. 10 x 8 in softcover 978-1-926632-01-8 $20.00 Can. $21.95 U.S. (14 €)
Richard Fung: Landscapes
Monika Kin Gagnon
Publication devoted to a new video installation by the Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic. In merging the etchings of J.M.W. Turner with video of Canadian landscape bearing the same geographical names as their British counterparts, Fung reveals the subtle ways in which land is culturally misappropriated. In her essay, Gagnon refers to the superimposition of contemporary moving images upon older fixed ones as temporal collages. As a Canadian of Chinese ancestry born in Trinidad, Fung conveys his understanding of the misrepresentation of place as conveyed by popular film and media.
McMaster Museum of Art (01/2009) 48 pp col. ill. 8 x 10.5 in softcover 978-0-9783585-9-4 $20.00 Can. $21.95 U.S. (14 €)
Matthew Varey: Building on History
Gary Michael Dault
Varey’s pre-apocalyptic paintings of dark, hermetic towers against a meteor-streaked sky are discussed by one of the country’s most eminent art critics.
McMaster Museum of Art (01/2009) 20 pp col. ill. (two fold-outs) 10 x 7.5 in softcover 978-1-926632-02-5 $4.00 Can. $5.00 U.S. (3 €)
Synesthesia: Art and the Mind
Greta Berman, Carol Steen, Daphne Maurer & Patricia Albers
Four essayists explore the impact of synesthesia, or the involuntary joining of the senses, on the work of artists who are, or who are suspected to have been, synesthestic. They include David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Tom Thomson, and Vincent van Gogh. Carol Steen is a New York-based synesthestic artist. Greta Berman is professor of Art History at the The Juilliard School. Daphne Maurer is professor at the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior at McMaster University.
McMaster Museum of Art (10/2008) 62 pp 12 col. ill. 10,5 x 8.5 in softcover 978-0-9783585-8-7 $20.00 Can. $23.95 U.S. (16 €)
Reciprocal
Carol Podedworny & Sally Mckay
Works by University faculty and alumni, all practicing artists, have been selected by a jury of Canadian artists who studied at the University. Presentations on participating artists are accompanied by a study of the jury process.
McMaster Museum of Art (10/2008) 40 pp col. ill. 10 x 7.5 in softcover 978-0-9783585-7-0 $10.00 Can. $12.00 U.S. (8 €)
John Abrams: Cinema Vernis
Edited by R.M. Vaughan
A review of Abrams' film inspired paintings with short essays by acclaimed Canadian filmmakers Sky Gilbert, John Greyson, Jeremy Podeswa and Christina Zeidler. Abrams takes Beineix's Betty Blue, Goddard's Breathless and Wertmuller's Swept Away, from the language of film to the language of painting.
McMaster University Museum of Art (02/2008) 48 pp col. ill. 8 x 8.5 in softcover 978-0-9783585-4-9 $15.75 (12 €)
Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction
Carol Podedworny, Mark A. Cheetham, Gerald McMaster & W. Jackson
Rushing III
Robert
Houle has been a visionary artist since the beginning of his career.
"Native artists," he wrote in 1982, "are committed to involvement in
the polemics of modern art. Meaning derives from living in the
twentieth century, where painting ranges from realism to abstraction
and sculpture varies from shamanism to assemblage." Employing the
traditions of modernist painting, particularly as practiced by
Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Houle has tenaciously insisted on
reciprocity among the aesthetic and cultural specificities with which
he engages. After years of breathtaking solo exhibitions, he returns
here to his first stylistic impulse: abstraction and the parfleche
figure. This important publication, with three essays and an artist's
statement, documents a unique and vital side to Houle's innovative
artistic practice. Mark A. Cheetham is Chair of the Department of Art
at the University of Toronto. Gerald McMaster is Curator of Canadian
Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. W. Jackson Rushing III is the
author of numerous books, notably, Native American Art in the
Twentieth Century (Routledge) and Allan Houser: An American
Master (Abrams).
McMaster Museum of Art / The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (11/2007)
105 pp 36 ill. (24 col.) 7 x 5 in softcover 978-0-9783585-2-5
$20.00 Can./U.S. (16 €)