Tom Burrows

Scott Watson and Ian Wallace, Tom Burrows. Vancouver, BC: Figure 1 Publishing, 2018

Book information:

Tom Burrows, and the exhibition that preceded the book, presents work by the artist from his early career to the present. The book is a timely refocusing of attention on an artist who has made an immense contribution to the development of art in Vancouver, not only as an artist but as an educator and activist as well. Burrows first rose to prominence in the late-1960s and was included in several exhibitions at the UBC Fine Arts Library, an institution that was seminal in encouraging Vancouver’s growing and now vibrant art community. In 1975 he received a United Nations commission to document squatters communities in Europe, Africa and Asia, a work that is now in the Belkin’s collection. Burrows’ work, which demonstrates an interest in process and new materials, has encompassed a number of disciplines including sculpture, early performance art, video, painting and iconic hand-built houses on the Maplewood Mudflats and Hornby Island. Currently most well known for his innovative monochromatic cast polymer resin “paintings/sculptures” produced during the last forty-five years, the book examines the full breadth of his career with works from the Belkin’s permanent collection as the basis with other works from the artist, collectors and public institutions.

Burrows has had solo exhibitions in London, Rome, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Edinburgh and across Canada. His work is included in private, corporate and public collections in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

For more information: https://www.figure1publishing.com/book/tom-burrows/?_ga=2.189039275.100248760.1684277138-2076941012.1683746629

For more information about the exhibition: https://belkin.ubc.ca/exhibitions/tom-burrows/

Graphic Culture, Illustration, and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830-1848

Nineteenth-century Paris is often celebrated as the capital of modernity. However, this story is about cultural producers who were among the first to popularize and profit from that idea. Graphic Culture investigates the graphic artists and publishers who positioned themselves as connoisseurs of Parisian modernity in order to market new print publications that would amplify their cultural authority while distributing their impressions to a broad public.

Jillian Lerner’s exploration of print culture illuminates the changing conditions of vision and social history in July Monarchy Paris. Analyzing a variety of caricatures, fashion plates, celebrity portraits, city guides, and advertising posters from the 1830s and 1840s, she shows how quotidian print imagery began to transform the material and symbolic dimensions of metropolitan life. The author’s interdisciplinary approach situates the careers and visual strategies of illustrators such as Paul Gavarni and Achille Devéria in a broader context of urban entertainments and social practices; it brings to light a rich terrain of artistic collaboration and commercial experimentation that linked the worlds of art, literature, fashion, publicity, and the theatre.

A timely historical meditation on the emergence of a commercial visual culture that prefigured our own, Graphic Culture traces the promotional power of artistic celebrities and the crucial perceptual and social transformations generated by new media.

For more information: https://www.mqup.ca/graphic-culture-products-9780773554559.php

Aileen Bahmanipour

Christopher Lacroix

Cameron McLellan

Candice Okada

Madiha Padhiani

Ines Min

Weiyi Chang

From Carnival to Lucha Libre: Mexican Masks and Devotions / Do Carnaval à Luta Libre: Máscaras e Devoções Mexicanas

Lavell, Nicola and Anthony Alan Shelton, From Carnival to Lucha Libre: Mexican Masks and Devotions / Do Carnaval à Luta Libre: Máscaras e Devoções Mexicanas. Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Lisboa, 2017

Book information:

From Carnival to Lucha Libre: Mexican Masks and Devotions offers a series of glimpses into some of the most ingenious expressions of Mexico’s collective imagination, made and performed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unlike previous books on Mexican masks, From Carnival to Lucha Libre not only invites us to reflect on the relations between Indigenous and mestizo ceremonial and commercial masks and masquerades, but expands the lens to encompass the distinctive masks worn by the luchadores (wrestlers) and devoted fans of lucha libre, Mexico’s iconic wrestling culture.

The book illustrates with over 300 masks, as well as films and posters and a selection of superb photographs of luchadores by the celebrated visual artist Lourdes Grobet. The organization of the book follows the layout of the exhibition. Immersion begins in room one, Mirrored Worlds, with Tlaxcala carnival masks and masquerades featuring catrines, depictions of European dandies once credited with supernatural powers to bring the rains. Mirrored Worlds leads to room two, Theatres of Memory, and its rich display of ceremonial masks, including devils, tigers, Spaniards, Africans and Moors, to name just a few of the characters engaged in the millenarian battles between good and evil. Room three, the Mexican Imaginarium, is full of fantastic creations, from masks representing bats, alligators and other animals, to demons, mermaids and plumed serpents, ingeniously created by Mexican artists in response to market demand. From the Imaginarium, we step into the world of lucha libre, in films, posters, masks and images to encounter the legendary luchadores of the ring, the reel, and the still.