Materiality And Perception In Contemporary Atlantic Art

Materiality and Perception in Contemporary Atlantic Art' showcases over forty contemporary works of art from Atlantic Canada, from established artists such as Freeman Patterson, Gerald Beaulieu, Dawn MacNutt, and Alan Syliboy to emerging artists such as Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Ursula Johnson, and Marie Fox. This is art engaged with contemporary conversations: the frailty of bodies and land, the interactions between people and environment, Indigenous -- Settler relations, and the inner and outer markings of identity. Focusing intently on the materiality of the objects themselves -- from jewellery to photographs, from carved paddles to video installations -- the works selected for this publication and the associated exhibition ask viewers to look again, challenging their initial perceptions about what they see and what they perceive about the context in which the work is made. Tom Smart's accompanying essay introduces each work and its context and discusses the role of the viewer in interpreting art objects and creating meaning, whether viewing works as discrete individual objects or as part of the larger, holistic whole. Exhibition: Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, Canada (19.10.2019-26.01.2020).

A new reality for the art object has emerged in the world of contemporary art: it is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. In this book, Kaira M. Cabañas describes how such a shift in conceptions of art’s materiality came to occur, exploring key artistic practices in Venezuela, Brazil, and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Immanent Vitalities expands the discourse of new materialisms by charting how artists, ranging from Gego to Laura Lima, distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western–non-Western in order to impact our understanding of what is animate. Tracing migrations of people, objects, and ideas between South America and Europe, Cabañas historicizes changing perceptions about art’s agency while prompting readers to remain attentive to the ethical dimensions of materiality and of social difference and lived experience.

Religion and Contemporary Art sets the theoretical frameworks and interpretive strategies for exploring the re-emergence of religion in the making, exhibiting, and discussion of contemporary art. Featuring essays from both established and emerging scholars, critics, and artists, the book reflects on what might be termed an "accord" between contemporary art and religion. It explores the common strategies contemporary artists employ in the interface between religion and contemporary art practice. It also includes case studies to provide more in-depth treatments of specific artists grappling with themes such as ritual, abstraction, mythology, the body, popular culture, science, liturgy, and social justice, among other themes. It is a must-read resource for working artists, critics, and scholars in this field, and an invitation to new voices "curious" about its promises and possibilities.

Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.

Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on the diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind the production and application of these colors; the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region to another. By emphasizing color's materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts. This book captures color's global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the 'discovery' of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techn?and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color's capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare's sonnets, red threads in women's needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages. The purpose of this book is to recover color's complex-and sometimes morally troubling-past, and in doing so,

Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art’s historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.