Joyce Wieland

Joyce Wieland triumphed over what she called “obscene poverty” to achieve international celebrity as a painter, collagist, quiltmaker, and filmmaker, celebrated as Canada’s most important woman artist next to Emily Carr. Her art portrays strikingly Canadian themes of environmental issues, historical passages, and aboriginal rights in buoyant, satirical images. To make her distinctive, highly personal art, Wieland uses toys, paper cut-outs, wood, glass, and pieces of her panties and dresses just as boldly and felicitously as she uses oils, watercolors, and pencils. Some of her most famous works are quilts, such as Reason Over Passion and Confedspread. She made underground films long before Andy Warhol did, producing a total of 16. Joyce Wieland achieved acclaim through unstinting courage, vivacity, and her off-the-wall humor. She was known for tucking away her secrets in her work. Author Iris Nowell has uncovered some of these secrets through primary sources, such as Joyce’s friends and family, and through her own perspective of having known Joyce for many years. This intimate, rollicking, poignant biography uncovers Joyce Wieland’s life as she lived it, intimately and fully—through the 1950s “Dark Ages of Art” in Toronto, for much of the 1960s in New York’s grungy artist’s loft community and the underground film scene, and back to Toronto for the most productive, stunning years of her life.

A visionary who consistently explored new styles and approaches in her art and films, Joyce Wieland grappled with nationalism, feminism, environmentalism and spirituality. The Films of Joyce Wieland brings together essays by Canadian and American theorists about the artists and her work. It includes a never-before-published interview between Wieland and experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton and a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the film literature on Wieland. Published by Cinematheque Ontario. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana University Press.

The Far Shore (1976), made under the direction of celebrated visual artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland, is one of Canada's most innovative contributions to cinema. The film borrows elements from the life of Canadian painter Tom Thomson, who is represented by the character of Tom McLeod. The main character, however, is not Tom, but the fictional creation of Eulalie de Chicoutimi, the married Québécoise woman who loves him. Using Eulalie's perspective, Wieland was able to re-frame Thomson's life and story as a romantic melodrama while infusing it with subversive commentary on gender, nature and nationalism, and ultimately, on the value of art. Here, Wieland specialist Johanne Sloan offers a fascinating new perspective on The Far Shore, making it more accessible by discussing Wieland's utopian fusion of art and politics, the importance of landscape within Canadian culture, and the on-going struggle over the meaning of the natural environment.

The Far Shore (1976), made under the direction of celebrated visual artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland, is one of Canada's most innovative contributions to cinema. The film borrows elements from the life of Canadian painter Tom Thomson, who is represented by the character of Tom McLeod. The main character, however, is not Tom, but the fictional creation of Eulalie de Chicoutimi, the married Québécoise woman who loves him. Using Eulalie's perspective, Wieland was able to re-frame Thomson's life and story as a romantic melodrama while infusing it with subversive commentary on gender, nature and nationalism, and ultimately, on the value of art. Here, Wieland specialist Johanne Sloan offers a fascinating new perspective on The Far Shore, making it more accessible by discussing Wieland's utopian fusion of art and politics, the importance of landscape within Canadian culture, and the on-going struggle over the meaning of the natural environment.

Essay contributors include Stan Brakhage, Fred Camper, Jack Chambers, R. Bruce Elder, Avis Lang, Sarah Milroy, Bart Testa, Peter Tscherkassky, Ross Woodman, and Michael Zyd. Published by Cinematheque Ontario. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana Unviersity Press.

In detailing the relationship of three women filmmakers' lives and films to the changing institutions of the post-World War II era, Lauren Rabinovitz has created the first feminist social history of the North American avant-garde cinema. At a time when there were few women directors in commercial films, the postwar avant-garde movement offered an opportunity. Rabinovitz argues that avant-garde cinema, open to women because of its marginal status in the art world, included women as filmmakers, organizers, and critics. Focusing on Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, and Joyce Wieland, Rabinovitz illustrates how women used bold physical images to enhance their work and how each provided entrée to her subversive art while remaining culturally acceptable. She combines archival materials with her own interviews to show how the women's labor and films, even their identities as women filmmakers, were produced, disseminated, and understood. With a new preface and an updated bibliography, Points of Resistance simultaneously demonstrates the avant-garde's importance as an organizational network for women filmmakers and the processes by which women remained marginal figures within that network.