BETWEEN THE COVERS OF RECENT VISUAL ARTS PUBLICATIONS~BY PAULA GUSTAFSON

1920 - 2005, Gail Crawford, 310 pages, 370 photos (170 in colour), bibliography, index, Goose Lane Editions with the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, 2005, $45.00; www.gooselane.com

Cultural historian Gail Crawford successfully wraps the diverse histories, personalities, and geographies of Canadian studio ceramic practice into a comprehensive and sumptuously illustrated narrative that, among other things, explains why Canadian clay art — recognized internationally for its excellence and innovation — does not have a single homogenous style or sensibility but many authentic voices. The result of more than a decade of primary research, Studio Ceramics in Canada is the definitive record of ceramic art development in Canada.

Seventh edition, 1200 pages, 1450 images (1000 in full colour), 30 maps, glossary, bibliography, index, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006, $156.25; www.prenhall.com/art

Janson’s History of Art has been a cornerstone of western art history studies for more than four decades. This seventh edition, edited by Penelope Davies (Ancient art), David L. Simon (Medieval art), Walter B. Denny (Islamic art), Ann Roberts (Renaissance art), Frima Fox Hofrichter (Baroque and Rococo art), and Joseph Jacobs (Modern art), combines up-to-date art historical research in a remarkably easy-to-read text with a massive number of excellent colour photos.

By Tina Oldknow, 248 pages, 200 colour images, index, The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 2005, $29.95 US; www.cmog.org

Since 1976 the annual edition of New Glass Review has featured the work of thousands of famous and soon-to-be-famous glass artists around the world, documenting the relatively recent development of contemporary glass art and the versatility of glass as a creative material. 25 Years of New Glass Review is necessarily a Who’s Who of artists who have made significant contributions in the fields of blown and flat glass. But as Corning Glass Museum founding director Thomas S. Buechner outlines in his introduction, this selection of works by 200 artists is based on “the excellence of the idea or function, as well as the high quality of the aesthetic or technique.” Only Laura Donefer, Irene Frolic, Julie Gibb, François Houdé, Kevin Lockau and seven other Canadian glass artists are showcased on the book‘s pages. The explanation, it seems, is that most of our homegrown talent has been focused on producing innovative, prize-winning glass art instead of getting their names into print.

Rudolf and Elizabeth Kurz, The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2006; 64 pages, $19.95; pql@sentex.net

On the literary scale, An Illustrated Alphabet for the Illiterate balances somewhere between the dirges of Eeyore and the inane rationality of Arthur Dent. Part word whimsy, part twee etchings, the 26 episodes in this alphabet purport to be musings on the seven deadly sins — or possibly the seven pillars of wisdom. J for Jealousy, for example, appears in the guise of the last living dinosaur bemoaning that he must wait a billion years “to be unearthed by a woman in khaki shorts.” In L for Loyalty, a performing seal encourages her ball to try again when it falls.

Ontario artist Rudolf Kurz’s first book, Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon — a compilation of 36 etchings and musings about erotic circus performers and tree trunks that morph into elephants — was a 2005 Alcuin Award honourable mention. This second illustrated book is a collaboration with his daughter. In R for Reach, Kurz has sketched a hoop-jumping lizard. With world-weary ’tude, 18-year-old Elizabeth writes, “No matter how high you fly, some clown in a top hat will always be close at hand to take the bow and accept the applause.”

Some books you want to hug to your heart. An Illustrated Alphabet for the Illiterate is one to share with friend and other book lovers.

Regina Clay: Worlds in the Making, edited by Timothy Long with essays by Sandra Alfoldy, Timothy Long, Julie Krueger and David Howard, 128 pages, approximately 100 photos (38 colour plates), bibliography, artist biographies, index, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 2005, $32.95

Kenneth Lochhead: Garden of Light, Ted Fraser, 95 pages, approximately 100 photos (40 colour images), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 2005; mackenzie@uregina.ca

These two exhibition catalogues, read in tandem, offer compelling insights into the personalities and politics that, for a few brief years, gave star billing to Regina art. Kenneth Lochhead was a member of the Regina Five, the group of abstract painters who rose to fame in the mid-1960s through the influence of New York art guru Clement Greenberg. The 14 ceramic artists featured in Regina Clay, many of whom were teachers and students during the waning years of Lochhead’s tenure at the University of Regina, totally rejected Greenbergian orthodoxy and never formed a cohesive group. Nevertheless, the ironic, playful approach to ceramic sculpture by Vic Cicansky, Joe Fafard, David Gilhooly, Marilyn Levine, Jack Sures, and David Thauberger, to name just few, attracted widespread international attention and launched enduring reputations.

CRITIQUES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY GALLERIES WEST REVIEWS EDITOR PAULA GUSTAFSON

by Alyce Mahon, Oxford University Press, 2005, 304 pp., 100 illustrations, 65 in colour, $30; www.oup.com

Sex sells. In the case of Eroticism and Art, sex plus a good Irish storyteller results in an engaging romp through modern art history. From Impressionist Paris to contemporary carnality, artists have inflamed opinion and provoked controversy by portraying the naked body as the site of transgressive ideas. Discussed with intellectual enthusiasm by University of Cambridge art historian Alyce Mahon, the subversive role of eroticism provides a highly readable educational tour through most of the important 20th-century art movements.

edited by Robin Lenman, Oxford University Press, 2005; 445 pages, 49 colour and 239 B&W photographs, indexed, $88.00; www.oup.com/ca

This massive compendium — it weighs in at about four kilos — provides answers to almost any question that might be put about the techniques of photography, its social consequences, and the personalities that have expanded photographic practice from its beginnings in the mid-18th century. Historically, the Canadian biographical notes include Humphrey Lloyd Hime, the official photographer to the 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan expedition; Hannah Maynard, who opened a professional photographic studio in Victoria, BC, in 1862; William Notman, whose photographic studios by 1874 were producing 14,000 photographs annually; photographer Geraldine Moodie, who spent 32 years (1885-1917) following her RCMP husband to posts across Western Canada and into the Arctic; and Sidney Carter, who organized Canada’s first major exhibition of pictorial photography in 1907. The contemporary list is equally eclectic: Roloff Beny, Janieta Eyre, Yousuf Karsh, Freeman Patterson, Peter Pitseolak, and Jeff Wall. Amply illustrated with full-page colour and black-and-white photographs, the 16,000 entries in The Oxford Companion to the Photograph are fully cross-referenced, making it easy to locate information.

by Virginia G. Berry, Winnipeg Art Gallery and Bayeux Arts Inc., 2005, 190 pp., indexed, $29.95; www.wag.mb.ca

No wagon trains or gunslingers between this book’s covers. Taming the Frontier is an unassuming chronicle of the ladies who introduced fine arts to Winnipeg.

Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 2005, 64 pp., 65 illustrations, 20 in colour, $27.95; www. temerondetselig.com

Every art practice has its minor genres and, within each sub-category, its minor talents. Edward Frederick
Hagell’s contribution to the genre of cowboy art falls into the latter group. Despite former Galt Museum
director/curator Wilma Wood’s willingness to ennoble the life and work of this peripatetic Southern Alberta artist, she concludes that “the sad truth about Hagell . . . is that the treasure [of success] was never realized.” A touring exhibition of some of the Galt Museum’s extensive collection of Hagell’s drawings and paintings is scheduled for 2007.

Faye Heavyshield, essay by Paul Chaat Smith, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2005; 48 pp., illustrated; www.saag.ca

Published subsequent to the 2004 exhibition of blood, this stylish catalogue features photographs of the installation at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Faye Heavyshield’s preliminary sketches for the project, eight of her poems relating to blood, and a six-part essay by Museum of the American Indian associate curator Paul Chaat Smith. The poems are spare, reflecting Heavyshield’s minimalist ethic. Obliquely touching on Heavyshield’s oeuvre, Smith’s essay is mostly about Smith.

curated by Gordon Snyder, The Works International Visual Arts Society, 2005; 126 pp., 100 B&W photographs; www.theworks.ab.ca

In 1962 Edmonton radiologist Orest Semchishen began documenting the people and places of rural and ethnic Alberta, from First Nations and Metis to his own Ukrainian heritage. “My job as a photographer is to portray with honesty a segment of life which is not seen by most people,” he wrote in his journal. Five exhibitions, each composed of 20 of his silver gelatin prints, began touring during Alberta’s centennial year.

essays by Elena Feder, PhD, and Christine Laffer, 2005: 24 pp., 14 colour illustrations

The two series of tapestries discussed in this exhibition book — Cover Ups and Revelations — are the strongest and unquestionably the most memorable anti-war, pro-humanity images woven by internationally acclaimed Vancouver artist Barbara Heller. See them at the Alberta Craft Council’s Discovery Gallery, July 15 - August 22.

by Jimmie Durham, Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 2005; 80 pp., illustrated; www.banffcentre.ca

The complete title of Cherokee artist and political activist Jimmie Durham’s book is The Second Particle Wave Theory (as performed on the banks of the River Wear, a stone’s throw from S’underland and the Durham Cathedral). The performance it commemorates is the July 16, 2005, sinking of a red-painted rowboat with a very large pink granite boulder. The boulder was also painted, somewhat in the manner of a Mr. Potato Head, which it vaguely resembled. In his rambling, Python-esque text, Durham discusses the resemblance between rocks and potatoes: “Potatoes camouflage themselves to look like stones. The hope is that any worm or grub passing by will think, ‘Oh, nothing to eat here, just a field of boulders’.” 

Mary-Beth Laviolette, Altitude Publishing, 2005; 544 pages and CD-ROM with 197 colour images, index, $39.95

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A History of Art in Alberta 1905 - 1970, Nancy Townshend, Bayeux Arts, Inc., 2005, 304 pages, 50 colour and 21 B&W images, index, $39.95; www.bayeux.com


A History of Art in Alberta 1905 - 1970 and An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art together span Alberta’s century — from its inception as a Canadian province through to its present-day status as a centre of visual art production. Conceived as a joint venture when art historians Mary-Beth Laviolette and Nancy Townshend began their research 10 years ago, each book is incomplete without the other. Similarities, however, are mainly focused on the hundreds of artists whose career trajectories overlap from book to book, and the assertions by both authors that Alberta art is regionally unique, highly innovative, and regrettably undervalued in the national context. Laviolette and Townshend share a commitment to chasing down every last shred of material and oral evidence documenting Alberta’s art and artists. Their extensively footnoted texts attest to the depth and breadth of their primary research and provide a strong foundation on which future scholarship can be constructed.
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A READING OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY GALLERIES WEST REVIEWS EDITOR, PAULA GUSTAFSON.

paintings by Karen Brownlee, text by Kenneth Tingley, Red Deer Press, 144 pp., 128 watercolour images, $35 hard cover. www.reddeerpress.com

The prairie landscape is dramatically changing. Iconic landmarks are fast disappearing and mega-agribusinesses are replacing family farms. In Alberta Remembers: Recalling Our Rural Roots, Kenneth Tingley’s historical text and the improbably vivid colour choices in Lethbridge artist Karen Brownlee’s paintings of rural communities — exhibited throughout Alberta during the 2005 centennial year — may be more than even wet-eyed nostalgia buffs might want to know about the rise and fall of grain elevators.

texts by Carol Prokop, Peter Ohler, Matt Petley Jones, published by Petley Jones Gallery, hard cover, 120 pp.,100 colour plates, $60  [limited edition with colour etching $250]. www.petleyjones.com

In 1999, Don Li-Leger shifted his artistic focus from realistic representations of flowers and birds to colour-infused semi-abstract compositions. Carol Prokop’s insightful essay suggests the painter’s world travels and his South Surrey, B.C., garden are twin sources of inspiration for Li-Leger’s new imagery.

Landscape, photographs by Courteney Milne, Red Deer Press, 144 pp., 225 colour photos, $35 hard cover. www.reddeerpress.com

Award-winning Saskatoon photographer Courteney Milne has travelled across all seven continents during his 30-year career, documenting sacred sites and sharing his reverence for the land with audiences everywhere. In Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape, Milne turns his lens on the splendours of his home province, from microviews of lichen-brocaded rocks to the thousand-kilometre-long stretch of sand dunes bordering Lake Athabaska where, he writes, the “land makes no distinctions, cuts no deals, regards you as neither friend nor foe.”

essays by Ian Thom, Roald Nasgaard, Nancy Tousley, Jeffrey Spalding, Douglas & McIntyre, 172 pp., approx. 100 colour plates, $60 hard cover. www.douglas-mcintyre.com

In his biographical essay, Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Ian Thom refutes the commonly held notion that Takao Tanabe’s wide-horizon landscapes are informed by his Japanese heritage — a motivation the artist dismisses outright. Instead, Thom characterizes Tanabe as a quintessentially West Coast artist concerned with the ineffable qualities of light and weather. Augmented by Nancy Tousley’s, Jeffrey Spalding’s and Dr. Roald Nasgaard’s perceptive comments about other aspects of Tanabe’s work, Takao Tanabe is the first definitive study of this important Canadian artist. A major exhibition of Takao Tanabe’s paintings and prints opened at the Art Gallery of Victoria in October 2005 and travels during 2006 to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.

photographs by John Conway, texts by Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, Helen Marzolf, The University of Alberta Press, 156 pp., 61 colour plates, $30 soft cover. www.uap.ualberta.ca

John Conway’s “uncommon views” of post-pastoral Saskatchewan are like the long, unsmiling pause following the punch line of a bleak joke: a telephone pole striped with discarded licence plates, a derelict windmill, sterile rows of plastic-wrapped hay bales, each exquisitely framed against an endless expanse of prairie and sky. “In Saskatchewan,” David Carpenter writes, “optimism is a guarded hope.”

autobiography by John Koerner, Ronsdale Press, 170 pp., 65 colour and 50 b&w images, $40 hard cover. www.ronsdalepress.com

In a memory tour that ranges from recollections of Salvador Dali’s first Paris exhibition through the cultural wasteland of Vancouver in the 1950s to his still active art practice — a new series of paintings was launched at Diane Farris Gallery last August — 92-year-old John Koerner offers a gentle perspective on the development of West Coast modernism.

Eva Diener: New Paintings
Sylvie Tourangeau: La résidence, le performatif: 15 minutes d’Humanité
Grunt
Manawa: Pacific Heartbeat
TransFormations: Ceramics 2005
Source Book 1955 - 2005 (continue...)