Voluntary Detours

After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive. Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.

This insightful Handbook scrutinizes alternative concepts and approaches to the dominant economic or industrial theories of innovation. Providing an assessment of these alternatives, it questions the absence of these neglected types of innovation and suggests diverse theories.

In a time when we are encouraged to look within and search for answers that are supposedly destined to solve our dilemmas, Sarah Ashley Neal invites readers to fearlessly explore their relationships with words and in the process naturally allow those answers to surface. The first in a series, Emotional Sandwiches introduces readers to the concept and characters of Sarah's brand, and in a refreshing and humorous book applies a fictional twist to a non-fiction idea. Considering some of the most influential words in the English language, this book transforms them into stimulating characters that readers will relate to emotionally. While primarily a self-help book, Emotional Sandwiches will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those looking for a new perspective on life to those simply seeking a charming and entertaining read. This interesting and inclusive concept will leave readers feeling inspired and uplifted having had the chance to reconsider their emotional friends and foes along the way.

During the late twentieth century, the number of museums in the UK dramatically increased. Typically small and independent, the new museums concentrated on local history, war and transport. This book asks who founded them, how and why. In order to find out more, Fiona Candlin, a professor in museology, and Toby Butler, an expert oral historian, travelled around the UK to meet the individuals, families, community groups and special interest societies who established the museums. The rich oral histories they collected provide a new account of recent museum history – one that weaves together personal experience and social change while putting ordinary people at the heart of cultural production. Combining academic rigour with a lively writing style, Stories from small museums is essential reading for students and museum enthusiasts alike.

Variable Conditions recovers and explores early Canadian encounters between computational media and contemporary art in the late twentieth century, charting a network of developments linking meteorology, computation, and the arts that arose long before the age of cloud computing. Essays uncover the material conditions that shaped the emergence of computational arts in Canada, from projects executed by mainframe to digital paintings and analog synthesizer performances. A surprising number of institutional circumstances granted access to early computer hardware – government nuclear and hydroelectric infrastructure, agencies as diverse as the National Film Board and the National Research Council, and a myriad of university settings across the country – and creative conditions varied from benign administrative neglect to the artistic exploration of randomness or a distinct emphasis on thematizing transformation as a motor for graphic visualization and auditory exploration. Interviews featuring leading artists give first-hand insight into artistic practices and the historical moment in which they occurred. The book provides valuable new perspectives on computer art pioneers such as Leslie Mezei, Robert Adrian X, Suzanne Duquet, Roger Vilder, and Vera Frenkel, as well as new contexts for understanding Michael Snow and IAIN BAXTER&. Not limiting their explorations to art generated using computers, contributors outline the integration of computational techniques and concepts into artistic methods across disciplines and trace computation’s emergence as a matter of interest and concern for a range of contemporary cultural producers. Combining historical analyses with theoretical approaches to computation and its entanglement with contemporary cultural discourses and social movements, Variable Conditions excavates the origins of computational arts and, in the process, sketches a new landscape of interdisciplinary creation and surprising connections between scientific and artistic institutions.

Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.

A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art’ is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions. Organized into three sections, this work first reviews the history and theory of the visual arts since 1980 and introduces readers to the emerging area of scholarship that seeks to place contemporary art in a global framework. The second section traces the progression of recent developments in the art world, focusing on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding efforts to globalize the art world and the visual arts in particular global and transnational frameworks. The final section addresses a wide range of key themes in contemporary art, such as the fundamental institutions and ontologies of art practice, and the interactions among art, politics, and the public sphere. A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, researchers, and general readers interested in exploring global art beyond the traditional Euro-American context.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists. Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.

Photography, one of the most influential inventions of the nineteenth century, has been shaped by Canadian innovators. Among them are two Quebec men who have flown beneath the radar in studies of the history of photography: the Smeaton brothers. Out of the Studio documents the life, oeuvre, and achievement of Charles Smeaton and his younger brother, John. Launched by the opening of their “photographic gallery” in 1861, they developed a reputation in Quebec for images of contemporaneous people, places, and events taken in challenging outdoor settings. Smeaton pictures of the aftermath of the Great Fire of Quebec in 1866 helped bring an understanding of the disaster to an international audience; images featuring the gold mining industry were displayed at the Exposition universelle in Paris the following year. When Charles travelled to Europe in 1866, he accomplished a feat previously thought impossible, taking the first successful photographs in the Roman catacombs. John moved to Montreal in 1869, where he worked for newspapers and developed techniques for the direct transfer of photographs into print without the necessity of intermediary engravings. Out of the Studio is the first comprehensive biographical study detailing the innovation and imagination of the Smeaton brothers and their legacy of images across two continents.