Mary Filer (1920-2016) trained as a nurse and an artist and lived a vibrant and intellectually stimulating life creating dazzling pioneer work in ‘cool’ glass art sculpture in Victoria and Vancouver. During the 1950s, Filer studied under Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer and painter John Lyman and taught university art. Her involvement with architects and her partnership with Harold Spence-Sales, who started the first School of Urban Planning in Canada at McGill University, led to a honourary doctorate from Simon Fraser University in 1991 and an Allied Arts Silver Medal from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 1992. Major examples of her sculpture are at SFU Harbour Centre and the Vancouver General Hospital. Her work is in numerous collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Toronto Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Design and Agency brings together leading international design scholars and practitioners to address the concept of agency in relation to objects, organisations and people. The authors set out to expand the scope of design history and practice, avoiding the heroic narratives of a typical modernist approach. They consider both how the agents of design construct and express their identities and subjectivities through practice, while also investigating the distinctive contribution of design in the construction of individual identity and subjectivity. Individual chapters explore notions of agency in a range of design disciplines and historical periods, including the agency of women in effecting changes to the design of offices and working practices; the role of Jeffrey Lindsay and Buckminster Fuller in developing the design of a geodesic dome; Le Corbusier's 'Casa Curutchet'; a re-consideration of the gendered historiography of the 'Jugendstil' movement, and Bruce Mau's design exhibitions. Taken together, the essays in Design and Agency provide a much-needed response to the traditional texts which dominate design history. With a broad chronological span from 1900 to the present, and an equally broad understanding of the term 'design', it expands how we view the discipline, and shows how design itself can be an agent for social, cultural and economic change.
In Learning to Look Lesley Clement traces the evolution of Mavis Gallant's visually evocative style through five decades of her short fictional works. From her earliest explorations of displacement and the disparity between perception and reality, through her later explorations of memory and history, to her more recent explorations of the role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and enlightenment, Gallant envisages and renders her fictional world with the techniques analogous to those of visual artists. Clement shows us that Gallant's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved through concentration on line, that her fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s reveals a heightened interest in composition achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, and form or shape, and that her fiction after the mid 1970s demonstrates the full realization of her art through attention to colour and light. Gallant increasingly explores the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds as the lines, shapes, and colours suggested by her allusions, analogies, and structures give her fiction the perspective, proportion, density, and fluidity that illuminate the printed page and challenge us as readers. Alert to visual cues in Gallant's fiction we acquire a heightened perception of the manifold richness of worlds and lives that might otherwise have been relegated to the unseen and unsung.
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.
Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open source, identities are - like websites - always under construction, and where private life is lived in public forever more. Ultimately, media are to us as water is to fish. The question is: how can we live a good life in media like fish in water? Media Life offers a compass for the way ahead.
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.
In 1934 Wilder Penfield's vision of an establishment dedicated to the relief of sickness and pain and the study of neurology led to the creation of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Setting the standard for neurological research and care for patients disabled by neurological illnesses, Penfield's institute became a beacon of light in a largely unexplored field of medicine. The Wounded Brain Healed describes the pioneering research that took place during the MNI's first fifty years. During the institute's golden age, Penfield and his colleagues designed the EEG test for the study of epileptic patients, discovered some of the causes of epilepsy, and developed new treatments that have since been adopted worldwide. Additionally, they delineated the sensory and motor representation in the cerebral cortex and localized the major areas of the brain related to speech. The institute also boasts the discoveries of two types of memory - one serving immediate recall, the other long term - as well as the discovery of the localization of short-term memory to the inner structures of the temporal lobe. Physicians and scientists who trained at the MNI went on to establish renowned neurology and neurosurgery departments throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Recounting the story of one of Canada’s greatest contributions to international medical science through archival research, personal interviews, photographs, illustrations, and paintings, The Wounded Brain Healed provides fascinating insight into the institution that had a global and lasting impact.
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
For many years, Maud Lewis was one of Nova Scotia's best-loved folk painters. In the 1990s she was embraced by the rest of the country when the landmark exhibition of her work The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis travelled across Canada. By the time the tour was over, half a million people had become acquainted with her delightful work. Between 1938, when she married Everett Lewis, until her death in 1970, Maud Lewis lived in a tiny one-room house near Digby, Nova Scotia. Over the years, she painted the doors inside and out, the windowpanes, the walls and cupboards, the wallpaper, the little staircase to the sleeping loft, the woodstove, the breadbox, the dustpan, almost everything her hand touched. Her house was a joy to behold, and it became a magnet for tourists as well as a focal point in her village. In 1979, after Everett Lewis died, the Maud Lewis Painted House Society worked diligently to raise funds to acquire, preserve, and display the house as part of the cultural heritage of the area as well as a memorial to their beloved artist. In 1984, the house and its contents were purchased by the Province of Nova Scotia for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In The Painted House of Maud Lewis, Laurie Hamilton, the conservator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, shows how all the different parts of the house -- the building itself, the painted household items, even the wallpaper -- were catalogued, conserved, and prepared for exhibition. The preliminary stages of conservation treatment began in 1996 in a most unusual location: the Sunnyside Mall in Bedford, just outside Halifax, where conservators worked in full view of the public. The conservators used established techniques and invented new ones to complete their unique project and documented every stage of the restoration photographically. The book also features more than sixty-five colour photos including several taken by noted photographer Bob Brooks in 1965 for the Star Weekly. Today, anyone can visit the tiny house that has become a folk art phenomenon. The restoration story spans two decades, but the story of the Painted House continues as each new visitor to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia finds delight and inspiration in Maud Lewis's joyous vision.
