Decades before “the selfie” sparked a cultural revolution, Suzy Lake (b.1947) changed the course of art history by making herself the subject of her pictures and using her camera as a tool to investigate how we manufacture images of identity. Incorporating elements of theatre, performance, and role-play, Lake blended technology and art to create compelling works so ahead of their time it took the art world nearly two decades to catch up. Today she is recognized as one of the world’s most important photo-based practitioners and a significant influence on a new generation of artists that perform in front of the camera.
Born in Detroit, Lake studied painting and drawing during university. She soon became politically active, contributing to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lake immigrated to Montreal in 1968, immersing herself in its vibrant art scene, assisting the painter Guido Molinari, developing her own unique take on conceptual art, and contributing to the city’s artist-run culture. She later moved to Toronto, becoming an influential instructor at the University of Guelph while expanding her practice and creating pop culture-skewering characters such as Suzy Spice. Today one of Canada’s great living artists, Lake is the recipient of the 2016 Scotiabank Photography Award and has been honoured with the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
In Suzy Lake: Life & Work art historian Erin Silver examines Lakes’ interests in issues of identity in relation to society, gender, and the universal experiences of power and authority, and the extraordinary range of her creative experiments with materials. Bringing new insights to Lake’s tremendously varied projects, Silver reveals how Lake’s inventive practice has challenged audiences for decades and continues to do so today.
Also includes essay contribution by faculty member Nuno Porto: Nuno Porto, “African Collections in Times of Restitution” in Anthony Alan Shelton, Under Different Moons: African Art in Conversation. Vancouver, BC: Museum of Anthropology, 2021.
Book Information:
Under Different Moons: African Art in Conversations shares – for the first time in print – the Museum of Anthropology at UBC’s extensive African collections. Featuring more than 250 stunning images of masks, puppets, figurative sculpture, textiles and paintings, the book establishes a dialogue between different aspects and ways of interpreting the continent’s rich and diverse art forms.
The first part of the book, by Anthony Alan Shelton, provides an introduction to African “traditional” visual cultures and describes the philosophical and political ideas behind their uses and significances. In the second part. Titilope Salami focuses on contemporary Nigerian and diasporic artists to show the continued relevance of ritual practices in Nigerian artworks. And in the third, Nuno Porto examines specific items in MOA’s collection to reveal the social, historical and market networks in which they once circulated and the changing significances ascribed them. Under Different Moons aims to encourage the wider use of collections as teaching and community resources, and to instigate a conversation – among makers, thinkers and collectors from both sides of the equator – on the histories and interpretations of these invaluable objects.
Under Different Moons is part of a wider attempt to bring to public attention, especially that of African and diasporic Canadian communities, parts of an important cultural legacy, safeguarded in museums across the country, that can help empower new sectors and generations of citizens and widen the breadth and understanding of Canada’s multi- and intercultural character.
Our four graduate degree programs include an MA in Art History, an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies, an MFA in Visual Art, and a PhD in Art History.
This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture.
From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the Genoese colony of Pera across Constantinople, The Fluctuating Sea investigates how the relationship between movement and the experiences of a multiplicity of users with different social backgrounds can provide a new perspective on architectural history. The book acknowledges the shared characteristics of medieval Mediterranean architecture, but it also argues that for the majority of people inhabiting the fragmented microecologies of the Mediterranean, architecture was a highly localized phenomenon. It is the connectivity of such localized experiences that The Fluctuating Sea uncovers.
The Fluctuating Sea is a valuable source for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean and architectural history.
Theatrum Mundi (“the theatre of the world”) describes the diversity of masks and performances that originated from the violent struggles between European, Arabic and “New World” civilizations. This authoritative study celebrates over 500 years of Mexican and South American Indigenous dance dramas and explains how mask makers, religious practitioners, masqueraders and entrepreneurs have helped to continuously reinvent, revitalize and express the changing world around them.
The culmination of four decades of research by Dr. Anthony Shelton, professor of art history and director of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia, the text is illustrated by field photographs and images from MOA and other notable mask collections.
For more information: https://www.figure1publishing.com/book/theatrum-mundi/?_ga=2.99013978.551086663.1678909234-627434963.1678909234
The book is edited by Gu Xiong and April Liu, with additional contributions by Chris Lee, Xiaoping Li, Xiaoyan Yang, Steven Dragonn, and Henry Heng Lu. The book documents Gu Xiong’s 2020-21 exhibition of the same name at Centre A and Canton-sardine — a major milestone in his repertoire. In unearthing archival images, some of which have not been seen for over 100 years, the multimedia exhibition brought significant chapters of Canada’s Chinese diasporic history to light.
The book is co-published by Centre A and Canton-sardine.
In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows.
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.
Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age’s baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media’s weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.
