Search results for ""Black Dog Press""

How do artists in Toronto visualise their sense of place? Are there particular 'made-in-Toronto' ways of thinking about the city? With work selected by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto considers the ways in which artists visualise Toronto, throughout a period of fifty years. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by 86 artists, the book is premised on the tendency of artists in the city to favour performative and allegorical procedures to articulate their sense of place. Four gestures-mapping, modelling, performing and congregating-serve as guideposts to a diverse array of artistic practices. The book is a constellation of symbolic forms, or memes, that repeatedly appear in the work of artists of different generations; it presents a panorama of the blueprints that artists have drafted over many decades to give form to life in one of North America's largest cities. The book features work by artists such as Suzy Lake, Kent Monkman, Ed Pien, Roula Partheniou and Michael Snow, all of whom have previously published with Black Dog Press. It includes historical documents gathered from local archives, as well as contemporary ephemera.

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Mesozoic Park is an intriguing series of photographs documenting the construction of a (pseudo) prehistoric landscape in Calgary, Canada in the early 1980s. The history of photography has been dominated by the landscape: from its state as a pristine natural phenomenon, to its altered forms, and then to the manufactured, of which the city's Prehistoric Park is a prime example. The site includes multiple geologic structures that humans have built to mimic nature. The images in the monograph address the illusions that humanity creates for itself, as in our increasing quest to find substitutes for 'the real'. The simulated environment in Mesozoic Park focuses on the earth and landscape as packaging or amusement, and more importantly, as a site for social and political inquiry. The black and white photographs, printed in duotone, document a geological dream world in which a 'primordial' landscape has been cleverly designed and programmed for an artificial visitor experience. By exploring the park in great detail, Munro offers privileged access to what we never get to see: the construction of a facsimile panorama that will provide visitors with the illusion of time travel. The real and false are confused, no longer relevant in this walk through a purported 65 million year-old landscape. The book also contains photographs which show the artificial human construct in 2018.

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Posing questions about memory, the body, folklore and rituals, Jumana Emil Abboud's artistic practice confronts the telling and retelling of history and the impacts of language and the fragmentation of memories. In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves includes a selection of the Jerusalem based artist's visual, poetic and text-based projects spanning 20 years, and contributions by Marina Warner and Tina Sherwell engage closely with Abboud's practice. In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves' three chapters focus on Abboud's long engagement with folktales from Palestine and elsewhere. The first chapter entitled, "The Book of Haunted Landscapes" addresses Abboud's connection to the landscape of her homeland and showcases drawings, videos and performances connected to Palestinian folktales, as well as her recent collaboration with filmmaker Issa Freij in which they return to haunted springs and water wells described in 1922 by ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan. A second chapter; "From Lamb to Monster: A Study of Transformation" deals with stories and themes of transformation and journeying, while bridging these with contemporary life in the region. The third chapter, "Happy Endings: The Book of Spells and Remedies" celebrates magical beings and bodies, instilling-after morbid events-a sense of the possibility of realising emancipatory endings. The book also includes collected Palestinian tales that have inspired the artist throughout her practice.In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves marks the finissage of Abboud's solo exhibition The Horse, the Bird, the Tree and the Stone at Bildmuseet and the inauguration of her solo show The pomegranate and the sleeping ghoul at Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation. Supported by Bildmuseet and Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation.

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Phyllida Barlow: folly presents the British Council's new commission created by Phyllida Barlow for the British Pavillion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Best known for her colossal sculptural projects, for over 5 decades Barlow has employed a distinctive vocabulary of inexpensive materials such as plywood, cardboard, plaster, rubber, cement, fabric and paint. Barlow creates striking sculptures and bold and expansive installations that confront the relationship between objects and the space that surrounds them. Drawing on memories of familiar objects from her surroundings, Barlow's practice is grounded in an anti-monumental tradition characterised by her physical experience of handling materials in an expedient and direct way.

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The Abolition of War explores the ideas that inform Krzysztof Wodiczko’s project The World Institute for the Abolition of War and is a manifesto for the dismantling of what Wodiczko sees as the ubiquitous, unconscious, and ultimately perilous “Culture of War”, which is embedded within and constantly reaffirmed by our monuments and our historical narratives. In this volume Wodiczko, winner of the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998, offers a detailed examination of his proposal for The World Institute for the Abolition of War, a projected “Un-War Memorial” constructed as a structure encapsulating the existing Arc de Triomphe in Paris.Wodiczko is joined by anthropologist Douglas Fry to shed light on the silent but deeply rooted ideologies of war, which permeate our contemporary societies, fuelling current acts of aggression and threatening to erupt into further warfare. Fry’s essay “Abolition of War: An Agenda for Survival” contradicts the generally held assumption that war is an inevitable aspect of human life, and posits new models of global interdependency as the necessary step towards viable peace.

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Mapping England shows, through a series of compelling maps, both historic and contemporary, how England has scrutinised itself, been seen by others and how it has recorded its ever-changing circumstances.

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Greg Penoyre and Sunand Prasad (recently elected President of the RIBA) have been in practice together for 18 years. In that time, they have garnered an eclectic portfolio of buildings that are both visually striking and practical, and for a variety of uses, including education, healthcare, housing and culture. "Transformations: The Architecture of Penoyre & Prasad" consists of eight essays written by Prasad: 'The Anchor of Function'; 'Architecture, Art and Culture'; 'Plan Section and Elevation'; 'Who Designs?'; 'From DIY to PFI'; 'Environments for Healing'; 'Environments for Learning'; and 'Working with Existing Buildings'. These texts discuss Penoyre and Prasad's engagement with their clients and examines its relationship to both architectural history and the contemporary situations and purposes for which the practice works. "Transformations" provides a unique and personal insight into Penoyre and Prasad's major projects, including Moorfields Eye Hospital, the Rich Mix Centre, Wolverhampton Civic Halls, Woodacre Farm Learning Difficulties Unit and the University of Portsmouth Frewen Library.

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Remember radicalism? A time when the Toronto art scene was in formation - and destruction? When there were no models and anything was possible? The late 1970s was a key period when Toronto thought itself Canada's most important art centre, but history has shown that the nascent downtown art community - not the established uptown scene of commercial galleries - was where it was happening. It was a political period. Beyond the art politics, art itself was politicised in its contents and context. Art's political dimension was continually polemically posed - or postured - by artists in these years. Beyond politics, posturing, in fact, was a constant presence as the community invented itself. It was also a period rich in invention of new forms of art. Punk, semiotics, and fashion were equally influential, not to mention transgressive sexuality. It was the beginning of the photo-blowup allied to the deconstructed languages of advertising. Video and performance aligned in simulations of television production as the "underground" mimicked the models of the mainstream for its own satiric, critical purposes. With no dominant art form and the influence of New York in decline, there were no models and anything was possible: even the invention of the idea of an art community as a fictional creation. Is Toronto Burning? takes you on a journey through this period rich in invention of new forms of art. It brings together artworks by Susan Britton, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Elizabeth Chitty, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Judith Doyle, General Idea, Isobel Harry, Ross McLaren, Missing Associates (Peter Dudar & Lily Eng), Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, and Rodney Werden alongside archival documents. The artworks were all shown at the exhibition of the same name at the end of 2014 at The Art Gallery of York University, curated by Director Philip Monk. In partnership with The Art Gallery of York University.

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Photographs have played a crucial role in shaping perceptions of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. In Camera Atomica, art historian John O’Brian explores the intimate relationship between photography and nuclear events to uncover how the camera lens has shaped public perceptions of the atomic age and its anxieties. Bringing together both vintage and contemporary photographs that have recorded and, in certain instances, provided motivation for the production of nuclear events, O’Brian travels through history — from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. In this vivid volume, readers will encounter more than 200 images that simultaneously document and raise questions about the contradictory roles of photography during this period. Included are Hiromitso Toyosaki and Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs of hibakusha (individuals exposed to radiation from atomic bombs), David McMillan’s photographs at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and Sandy Skoglund’s darkly humorous Radioactive Cats, along with photographs by Nancy Burson, Edward Burtynsky, Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Kenji Higuchi, Richard Misrach, Weegee, and many others.

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An Imaginary Place Called Home is the first publication of multimedia artist and writer Leena Al-Nasser’s creative output. This hardback title combines illustration and storytelling to present nine of Al-Nasser’s film works produced during the coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath. This collection of narrative pieces tackles such social issues as loneliness, identity, connection and the need to engage with the inner world of the imagination.

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New Wave is an illustrated adventure into the incredible world of flags, revealing that there is often more than meets the eye. From the infamous national flags through to signal flags, artistic flags, sporting flags and many more. New Wave presents useful general knowledge facts about flags as well as unveiling a surprising world of flags beyond our expectation.Spanning geography, politics, history, culture, design and art, New Wave is a playfully entertaining exploration of the diversity of flags, as well as the rituals and visual aspects surrounding them. With it’s fun design and handy format, this is an engaging visual treat which will draw you into its colorful world.

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Fractured Light focuses on a key body of work by the British artist Johnnie Cooper, which was instrumental in his transformation from sculptor to painter. Throughout the 1990s, with a renewed dedication Cooper embarked on an industrious and experimental trajectory with paint and collage. These works on paper, made by layering multiple strips of paintings, were directly inspired by a series of large assemblage works he constructed during the late 1980s, when the culmination of his work in art education brought a new found freedom. The view from a new studio in rural Worcestershire conjured fresh inspirations and instilled a fascination with the ever-changing colour, shape and light values that fractured through a nearby woodland over the course of a day. This book documents an important part of Cooper's oeuvre and is a must for enthusiasts of Johnnie's work or anyone who is into British Expressionism or abstract art. It accompanies an exhibition, also called Fractured Light, and follows Johnnie Cooper: Sunset Strip, a major monograph on the artist in 2019, also published by Black Dog Press.

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British abstract artist Johnnie Cooper presents his new major body of work, inspired by Walter de la Mare’s brooding poem 'The Listeners'. Painted during the twilight hours outside his woodland studio, Cooper’s work captures the deep beauty and mystery of a forest dissolving into nighttime shadows, bringing a darker and more abstract emotion to the fore. Following on from Johnnie Cooper’s two previous Black Dog Press publications – Sunset Strip (2019) and Fractured Light (2020) – The Listener focuses on the British abstract artist’s most recent major body of work.Inspired by Walter de la Mare’s brooding poem ‘The Listeners’ (1912), Cooper’s latest works are beautifully presented in this book, which conveys the power of his polychromatic collection of paintings brilliantly. These works serve as a meditation of the lived experience and the rich atmosphere of the artist’s rural surroundings.The Listener documents an important shift in Cooper’s practice – in tone and texture, and also in material, with the introduction of industrial bitumen paint. Overall, the paintings bring a darker and more abstract emotion to the fore, confirming Cooper’s status as one of the most distinct and important British artists working in the UK today.

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This publication comprises the first monographic survey dedicated to artist Kevin Schmidt. Based in Vancouver, Schmidt is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, photography and installation who has exhibited widely across North America and Europe. He is perhaps best known for performance expeditions and interventions into the natural world, which are documented in photographs, installations and videos, such as his eleven-and-a-half-hour Epic Journey, which documents a marathon nighttime screening of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a small boat as it drifted down the Fraser River, or his Aurora with Roman Candle, which shows him firing roman candles at the Aurora Borealis.At a time when we might consider cultural production as being democratised through the Internet, Schmidt combines notions of the heroic with the seemingly amateur by using visible reminders of construction and theatrical devices-smoke machines, stage lights and DIY photographic equipment. Through this he proposes a utopian assertion of "the commons", where both land and culture are publicly accessible to all.Presented in partnership with Kamloops Art Gallery and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, this publication features essays by Charo Neville, Kathleen Ritter and an artist interview with Nigel Prince. The book charts Schmidt's ongoing body of work addressing the tensions between man and nature, performance and document and indoors and outdoors. These propositions are tackled through references to landscape, the invocation of the sublime at the point of apprehending such wild beauty, and by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements within these environments. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages remarkable events that transfer elements of urban culture into untouched natural contexts. In this way, he simultaneously examines both the seductive elements of contemporary cultural production and the constructions that surround the idea of nature.

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Consists of photographs, film scripts, found family portraits and childhood drawings. This book is grouped by concept into five sections: 'Events and Conditions', 'Finding Transmitting Receiving', 'Scripts', 'Family and Evidence' and 'Pavilions'.

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The ability to use imagination and envision future needs is crucial in art, design and architecture. Future thinking and making require imagination and capability to create narratives for near and far futures and the capacity to compose proposals to meet the imagined future needs. Future-oriented creative practices also require future literacy-understanding the temporal continuum in which the future-oriented work is created and being aware of underlying incentives, motivations and structures of the self-initiated works or commissions. Similarly, viewing or consuming the speculative creative works requires some level of understanding of the context of the works. Studio Time: Future Fictions in Art and Design approaches these questions with essays from international design and art thinkers, reflective shorter essays and a selection of art, design and architecture projects. The book consists of three parts that each focus on future fictions in art and design from different perspectives: future fictions and imagination in creative practices, future literacy, and future ethics. Each part consists of two essays, two practical, reflective contributions from artists and designers and a selection of art and design projects from practitioners around the world. The book is a closing chapter of Studio Future, which is one of the research studios developed by Belgian-based Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Since 2012, Studio Future has focused on a variety of aspects on future-oriented art and design practices through different research and exhibition projects, which have been accompanied by online and offline publishing.

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Public Enquiries is the culmination of a multidisciplinary research project that operated through a series of public hearings in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Gothenburg (2015-2016). The hearings focused on Kerstin Bergendal's Park Lek (2010-2014), which was described at the time as a utopian art project and a concrete intervention in the urban planning process. Public Enquiries maps how Bergendal's extraordinary art project contested and ultimately transformed the local government processes used to shape a segregated urban area of Stockholm. Though Park Lek is primarily examined within the context of Scandinavian society, the writers additionally go on to outline how the project can function as a blueprint for how artistic practice can act as an agent in reconstructing local democracy worldwide, making Public Enquiries a must-read for anyone with an interest in the current state of socially engaged art practice anywhere.This title is co-published with Valand Academy, a school for film, photography, literary composition and fine art at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden"

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This publication reflects upon the celebrated collection at the internationally renowned Gardiner Museum, Toronto, which has grown to become one of the world's great speciality museums with its devotion to the ceramic arts. Featuring more than 100 images, the book focuses upon 30 objects that reflect the temporal and geographical breadth of the Museum's collection, as well as the universality of the medium it celebrates. An international body of scholars and curators share their insights and expertise within the book's essays telling the story of ceramic production throughout history and with reference to a vast array of approaches to the medium. Featuring works by such illustrious names as Marc Chagall, Betty Woodman, Marilyn Levine, Wedgwood and Delft, this book provides a fascinating insight into one of the greatest collections in the world of ceramics.

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A fascinating and long-overdue study of the artist’s work spanning five decades of her diverse practice, this comprehensive and thought-provoking book provides an overview of Marianne’s oeuvre. It also creates dialogues between different periods of her work by presenting them alongside one another – many shown this way for the first time in print. From her spontaneous, gesturally abstract drawings of the 1970s, to her bolder, more defined, large-scale drawings that gained public attention at the 1980 Venice Biennale, to her lesser-known sculptural and photographic works, to the wall painting created for Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018 – this book spans the artist’s creative scope.The characteristic linear forms that underscore Marianne’s practice come from the meditative process of drawing she developed in her lifetime, whereby she externalised her personal experiences onto paper. Marianne Eigenheer documents beautifully how the artist created a highly distinctive and recognisable visual language by working in this way throughout her career. The book also features a selection of essays by a diverse group of writers that discuss and explore the different aspects of Marianne’s practice, shining a light on her work as artist, writer, curator and teacher.

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Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen’s lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen’s work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His  Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre  has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

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Artist Kent Monkman's all-encompassing project, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, takes viewers on a journey through Canada's history, starting in the present and going back to before Canadian confederation. Throughout the book there are clever, albeit controversial, commentaries told by Monkman's genderfluid, time-travelling, supernatural alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Her narratives take viewers through the history of New France and the fur trade, the nineteenth-century dispossession of First Nations lands through Canadian colonial policies, the horrors of the residential school system, and modern First Nations experiences in urban environments. Shame and Prejudice challenges predominant narratives of Canadian history and honours the resilience of First Nations peoples. This book accompanies Monkman's largest solo exhibition to date, which is currently travelling across Canada at venues including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. The exhibition includes the artist's own paintings, drawings, and sculptural works, which form a dialogue with historical artefacts and artworks borrowed from museums and private collections across Canada. The book is trilingual with all text in English, French and Cree.

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Eat & Art, from the people behind Lisbon's famous Can the Can restaurant, brings together some of Portugal's finest chefs and artists, using the country's canned fish industry as the source of inspiration. Using striking photography and contemporary design, the book explores the undeniable affinities between gastronomy and art. It features a fascinating and expansive historical timeline, which charts parallel events in the two fields, such as early Egyptian tomb painting and the Chinese cultivating soybeans, rice, wheat and barley to create noodles in 3000 BCE. The book, which aims to place the canned fish industry, one of the oldest and most important in Portugal, firmly in the international spotlight, presents eighteen dynamic chef and artist pairings. The combined output of these pairings, either as an inspirational dish or innovative work of art, is a visual feast that will feed the hearts, heads and stomachs of readers.

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The Central Line Series documents and celebrates a selection of artworks commissioned and presented at a range of sites along the Central Line of the London Underground, intended to enhance the experience of traveling on the Tube.Projects include: Michael Landy, Acts of Kindness, 2011 and the collaborative work A Lock is a Gate, 2011, from Ruth Ewan, composer Kerry Andrew and poet Evlynn Sharp in conjunction with the Laburnum Boat Club, amongst many others.

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The Makeshift Body is the first monograph to document the work of contemporary artist Mandy El-Sayegh, whose process-driven practice is rooted in an exploration of material and language.Executed in a wide range of media, including densely layered painting, sculpture, installation, sound, video and performance, El-Sayegh’s work investigates the formation and breakdown of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic or political.El-Sayegh likens her exploratory, observational process to the occurrence of contemporary social and political events, which unfold in highly chaotic and often disturbing ways. Justifications or explanations typically appear after the fact, devised to impose order on an inherently subjective and incomplete set of social, cultural and political processes. Through her work, she aims to remove the veil of these superimposed structures and reveal the intricacies of growth and decay as they happen in real time.Elements such as found fragments, pages of the Financial Times and imagery from advertisements, social media, medical textbooks and pornography, as well as collected doodles and Arabic calligraphy from her father’s home in London, are combined as collage. El-Sayegh then asserts her own perspective by drawing directly on top of them, creating double meanings and calling into question our assumptions and understanding of typically unquestioned systems. Her art is preoccupied with the attempt to symbolically create a coherent “body” from disparate parts, a repeated exercise that ultimately reveals its own impossibility.Revealing a fascinating, multifaceted art practice in until now unseen detail, The Makeshift Body is a visually rich publication that includes critical essays on El-Sayegh’s work, conversations with the artist, and photography documenting her exhibitions, performances and studio processes. In addition, a new visual essay created by El-Sayegh draws from the archive of raw materials that inform her myriad works.

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This book features exclusive photography by the renowned artist Allen Jones RA. These images enable the shadows of his celebrated sculptures to become works of art in their own right, revealing a viewpoint previously unseen or unnoticed. Intermingled with views of the Jones’s own home and household objects, Shadows is an intimate, beautiful and playful 60-page publication featuring previously unseen work by the artist.“Light can transform a solid object into an insubstantial shadow, not a copy but a unique slant on the real thing,” says Jones. “Domestic shadows are anchored to their place but out of doors they can come alive seemingly of their own volition. Dependent on the sun and moon for their existence these shadow drawings will exactly repeat themselves only once a year – weather permitting.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.Shadows is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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Morgan Howell paints classic 7" singles and takes into account every crease, every tear, every imperfection-producing a one-off, truly unique artwork, almost identical to the owner's original copy, but blown up, supersize, to 70 by 70 cm, and three-dimensional, with the spindle in the centre, as if the record is ready to play. This completely original approach has resulted in Howell attracting a cult following amongst art collectors and musicians alike-with paintings commissioned by the likes of Neil Diamond, Jude Law, Edgar Wright, and The Stone Roses' Ian Brown, and major music labels selecting the artist's work for display in their headquarters, indeed, Howell's painting of David Bowie's The Jean Genie is displayed at the Sony Music Building in London, and Yesterday by The Beatles has been shown at the Capitol Building in L.A. Morgan Howell at 45 RPM, published by Black Dog Press, beautifully documents 95 of Howell's creations, from 'Tutti Frutti' by Little Richard to 'Heart of Glass' by Blondie, to 'Gimme Shelter' by The Rolling Stones, to 'Waterloo Sunset' by The Kinks. The artworks are shown in full, alongside evocative commentaries from fans of Howell's work, including The Smiths' Johnny Marr, Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp, comedian Al Murray, journalist Tony Parsons, actress Kay Mellor, Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder, producer William Orbit and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The book features Forewords by Sir Peter Blake and Andrew Marr, plus an in-depth interview with Morgan Howell, exploring his process as an artist and why, for him, music and art are intrinsically linked. With a format perfectly designed to fit on record shelves, this book is a must for vinyl junkies, music heads and art lovers everywhere.

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Johnnie Cooper: Sunset Strip is the first monograph of the British artist's work, joining a curatorial initiative over recent decades to undertake important re-evaluations of the careers of important twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists such as Tess Jaray, William Turnbull and Cuban-born, American Minimalist artist Carmen Herrera. Johnnie Cooper has, for the past half-century, devoted himself to a tireless investigation into the nature and potential of painting in his rural Worcestershire studio, constantly exploring new principles and processes. This book provides an opportunity to explore the development of Cooper's practice, from the figurative totems sculpted in his student days to the rich, Abstract Expressionist works of the 1980s and the Minimalist, gestural works on paper of the past decade. Johnnie Cooper: Sunset Strip charts the journey of his signature investigations into colour, line and form. Born in Wolverhampton, UK, Cooper attended the sculpture course at Staffordshire College of Art, run by internationally renowned sculptor Stuart Osborne. After completing a postgraduate year at Staffordshire University in Fine Art Sculpture, Cooper was awarded a travel bursary and also won a prestigious grant from the Gulbenkian Society to study in Florence. As well as exhibiting in mixed shows throughout the UK over the past 40 years, Cooper has recently shown work in Dallas and Shanghai, and is held in numerous private collections. Cooper has also exhibited with the Free Painters and Sculptors Society, and at the Manchester Academy of Fine Art, the Mall Galleries and the Royal Academy.

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Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Her work in a range of media-painting, film, video, dance and performance, constructions and installations, the written word, and assemblage-presents an unparalleled catalogue of radical aesthetic experimentation. Meat Joy, 1964, Fuses, 1964-66, Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976, and Interior Scroll, 1975, are now considered canonical projects, required entries in any meaningful account of contemporary art, belying their once notoriety as feminist challenges of the very concept of the art historical canon.Throughout the last fifty years, Schneemann has participated in the most significant formulations of the avant-garde, having made crucial contributions in Fluxus, happenings, expanded cinema, and performance cultures, while complicating generic definitions that might cohere to her work. Schneemann has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her career, and her work is in the collections of Tate Modern, Commune di Milano, Centre Georges Pompidou, Muzeum Wspoczesne Wroclaw, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable is the most thorough visual overview of Schneemann's work to date. Organized by five interrelated categories-Interviews and Correspondence, Painting, Cinema, Sites, and Technological Processes-this volume brings together previously published essays and interviews by authorities on the artist's work. The texts, many scarce or out of print, examine the significance of Schneemann's work in its historical context, and its vital urgency for our present.Contributors: Stephane Aquin, Emily Caigan, R Bruce Elder, Ron Hanson, Juan Carlos Kase, Brett Kashmere, Anette Kubitza, Erica Levin, Scott MacDonald, Thomas McEvilley, Ara Osterweil, Melissa Ragona, Maura Reilly, Kristine Stiles and Kenneth White.

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Artist Bob and Roberta Smith was recently appointed to oversee a project in which five artists were commissioned to create site-specific projects to transform open spaces. This title presents an intimate account of this project, written in diary form.

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Rick Mather Architects (RMA) have been working in London since the early 70s. Best known for their award winning museum extensions, such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Maritime Museum, RMA's portfolio spans a broad spectrum of projects, including residential and student housing, master plans and urban design for both renovations and new buildings. They are world renowned for their intuitive sense of place and context, as well as their pioneering technologies in structural glass and sustainable design. The book establishes Rick Mather's unique approach to resolving complex design issues on both a large scale and in the fine details; the work of the practice is described in accessible terms through the texts and through a wealth of visual material, including photography and drawings supplied by the practice. Alongside this documentation, the visual aspect is supplemented by reproduced paintings, maps and drawings from a diverse range of sources, which have inspired and informed the work. Over the past 33 years, the practice has undertaken 500 projects. These include the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; the student halls of residence in Norfolk; the Ashmolean Museum extension, Oxford; the masterplanning of London's South Bank Centre; as well as Mather's iconic housing of the 1980s and 90s. This book will cover the full range of the projects, exploring Mather's response to the technical and social requirements of the briefs, and the way that a US born architect has re-imagined Britain's culture and made it his own.

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March Avery: A Life in Color is the first monograph on the New York-based painter March Avery. Documenting the artist’s practice of more than 80 years, the book features three newly commissioned texts and some 200 images.Avery was born in 1932 to the painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, and began painting as a child. As she says, “I think I was painting in utero.” The dividing line between life and art was blurred during her upbringing, as is reflected in the subject matter of her work: everyday domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.Avery’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolors are known for their flat picture planes, interlocking shapes and simplicity of forms. The artist’s mastery of colour brings life, imme

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The first monograph of photographer Ryan Koopmans, an award winning Canadian/Dutch photographer whose work is exhibited and published across the world, Vantage explores the earth's manmade structures, surreal architecture and megacities, evoking the insight and intrigue experienced from a travelling photographer's perspective. Koopman's compelling photographs are presented alongside conversations with political leaders, business tycoons and local residents, providing a timeless vision of our world that is both contemporary and creative. Marvin Heiferman, an independent curator and writer who originates projects about the impact of photographic images on art, visual culture and science, offers an insightful foreword. With photographs shot on location in Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Iraq, Brazil, USA, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Georgia, Ukraine, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Dubai, Malaysia and South Korea.

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Through the art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, "The Seriousness of Play" explores the multiple forms, materialities and meaning of Haida Manga as it playfully mutates through repurposed automobile parts, large-scale public art projects, mixed media sculptures and two-dimensional painted and graphic forms. Haida Manga combines traditional Native Northwest Coast designs and form-lines with manga (or manhwa) to create a distinctive and dynamic artform for re-telling oral histories and addressing contemporary issues surrounding land, cultural memory, ecological destruction and the politics of belonging, ownership and identity.

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Whether you are a new parent in London, or a tourist with three young children in tow, Kids London will tell you all you need to know to entertain and inspire your children - and give you a break - in the capital. It features major attractions like museums as well as little known places like city farms, spots for nap time and much more.

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PETAL is a photographic series by Bex Day, created in celebration of the uniqueness of the vulva. Each vulva pictured in the collection is covered by either a single petal or flower to simultaneously reflect their shared qualities and individuality in an effort to dismantle the taboos that envelop female genitalia.Colloquial terms for the vagina, including “pussy”, “cunt” and “gash”, have all been adopted as negatives in the English language; being used as insults, curses or as an insinuation of weakness or passivity. In society as we know it, the vagina has for too long been perceived as the lesser sexual organ, conceptualised not on its qualities but what it lacks in comparison to the penis. Even the word vagina itself evokes a squeamishness among many, highlighting the urgent need for a change of perspective.

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Starstruck: An American Tale maps the artist Shimon Attie’s newest project, a cut through the layers of America past and present at the site of the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The monograph documents Attie’s multi-year project filming community members and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries.Starstruck: An American Tale maps the artist Shimon Attie’s newest project, a cut through the layers of America past and present at the site of the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The monograph documents Attie’s multi-year project of excavating stories of the city by filming community members, clothed in contemporary and historical dress, transiting iconic local buildings and topography – and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, anchored by a two-channel video and a modified scaled facsimile of Bethlehem’s 90-foot tall lighted sculptural representation of the biblical Star of Bethlehem, a civic project from the 1930s that overlooks the city to this day. The book is published together with the Lehigh University Art Galleries.From the city’s founding by Moravian Christian utopian settlers in 1741, through to its industrial heyday in the late 19th to 20th centuries as a capital of the American steel industry, to the collapse of its steel mill and manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent post-industrial reincarnation with a new casino and gambling, Bethlehem is a microcosm of America’s hopes and dreams, failures and realities. Starstruck: An American Tale probes this uneasy, distinctly American blend of utopian aspirations, industrial capitalism, and the dream of “making it big”, which have defined life in Bethlehem and other communities across the United States since the country’s founding.

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What Comes to My Lips is the first monograph on the artist Ambreen Butt. Trained in the thousand-year tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting and contemporary Western art and theory, Butt’s studio practice circumvents history, tradition and contemporaneity, creating a multifaceted project that explores civil liberties and rights, mutual responsibilities and complex geopolitical forces.Illuminated with images of the artist’s paintings, collaged works on paper and large-scale installations from the past three decades, this in-depth book features essays by curator/writer Sara Raza and artist/critic Quddus Mirza. Raza examines Butt’s practice through the thematic lens of the sciences of Islam’s Golden Age (7th–14th century), proposing a bridge that connects art, history and cosmology. In his essay, Mirza places the conventions of the artist’s work in relation to longer historical narratives and traditional gendered roles across the spectrums of time and locality.An intimate archive of Butt’s technically rich, aesthetically delightful work, What Comes to My Lips invites the reader to enter the symbolic landscape of Butt’s oeuvre and discover the hidden, unseen and unrecorded aspects that shimmer beneath the surface of even the most fraught realities.

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Suzy Lake has been examining and critiquing ideals of the body, gender, and identity since the late 1960s. In her photographs, videos, and performances, she draws attention to social norms and constraints and aims to diminish the barrier between the viewer and the artwork. Introducing Suzy Lake follows the artist in images across five decades, as her political ideals are forged in Detroit’s civil rights movement in the late 1960s; as she realizes her first successes in Montreal’s artist-led cultural boom of the 1970s in the post-Expo 67, post-Duplessis era; and since 1978 in Toronto, as she finds her home and hones her artistic vision. Influenced by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Lake’s work demonstrates the innovation and continued influence of the “Feminist Avant-Garde” on contemporary art. Introducing Suzy Lake features almost 100 reproductions of Lake’s photographs, some drawn from celebrated installations, others from newly commissioned series. Complemented by essays by Allyson Mitchell, Robert Longo, Elizabeth Smith, Michelle Jacques, and Sara Angel, Introducing Suzy Lake reveals the richness and originality of Lake’s work and her stature as one of North America’s most influential contemporary artists.

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The fourth publication of Krzysztof Wodiczko with Black Dog Press, exploring the artist and writer's distinctive oeuvre. Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings is a comprehensive collection of Wodiczko's writing from the 1970s to the present day, providing a new perspective on this often controversial artist. An in-depth book which represents the many political, social and theoretical motivations and concerns of Wodiczko's work, this is a must for art and culture theorists and fans alike. This overarching publication highlights the equal merits of Wodiczko's writings in respect of his artistic practice, demonstrating the overlapping influences and considerations that run throughout his life. Wodiczko is famed for his large-scale, politically-charged video and slide projections, projected onto prominent architectural structures. Since the 1980s his work has been engaging marginalised residents of cities to make their voice and experience public. He is Professor in Residence at Harvard University, and was awarded the Hiroshima Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an artist to world peace.

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Taking the form of a composition book – a classic style of American notebook – Written English is an Allen Jones RA artwork in book form. Over 40 pages, Jones playfully explores the English language, and its use… and misuse.“Conquest and trade allowed the English language to become the World’s lingua franca, perhaps because its phonetic and grammatical structure is more pliable than most languages,” says Jones. “Global, popular culture, advertising and newspapers have shown a creativity that has enriched and extended our English usage.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.Written English is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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In this beautifully executed, concertina-fold book, Allen Jones RA explores the human form and how painting on a figure is a vastly different process, and has vastly different results, to painting from a figure. The first half of the book features detail photography of the artist’s sculpture series Waiting on Table. The second half concertinas out to reveal the front and back of one of Jones’s most prominent sculptures, A Muse, which can also be displayed as a wall hanging. For many years as a student, Jones had to draw from casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. Over time he developed a reverence for their idealised bodies, heightened by the tactile purity of the white marble. It seemed sacrilegious to him, therefore, to discover later that the marble was often painted over with colour. For many years as a student, Jones had to draw from casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. Over time he developed a reverence for their idealised bodies, heightened by the tactile purity of the white marble. It seemed sacrilegious to him, therefore, to discover later that the marble was often painted over with colour. “Painting on a figure is quite different from painting the figure” is an observation that Jones has grown to embrace, and one that has greatly informed his practice. Like the Romans, Jones has discovered that colour matters. Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.Colour Matters is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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Allen Jones RA’s 52-page book On the Road: Parking Markings takes the reader on a graphic visual journey… by road.“Since roads were first bisected by a white line, a pictorial language has evolved that, in classic parlance, is the first or Primitive phase in ever-developing visual vocabulary,” says Jones. “Parking markings were introduced during my final years as a student. Produced with stencils, these marks are enlivened by human error and chance.“Because of increasing traffic during the 1960s a change was needed. Yellow represented a new and Classical phase, telling us what we should NOT do,” the artist continues. “Familiarity breeds contempt and by the 1990s the problem required desperate measures. Red, the colour of danger, anger and hell marked a third, Baroque phase in the developing language of road marking.“During the 1950s we were asked politely – in white. During the 1960s we were told – in yellow. During the 1990s we were shouted at – in red. Now the air – is blue.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.On the Road: Parking Markings is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet tells the story of the evolution of Iranian contemporary art by examining the work of 30 artists.This is art where the ills of internal politics remain astutely masked below a layer of ornamentation, poetry, or humor. What unites the disparate works into a coherent theme is the artists coping mechanisms, which consist of subversive critique, quiet rebellion, humor, mysticism, and poetryhence the publications title. The subtitle Contemporary Persians is also a reference to a strategy of survival, this one used by Iranians in the United States during the early 2000s; at a time when Iranians were identified with hostage takers and terrorists, they adopted the identity Persians, which remained free of such associations.This title collects the work of a number of artists who are already well-known in the United States, including among others Afruz Amighi, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Monir Farmanfarmaian, who received a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015."

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Envisaged as visually rich and elegantly designed book.

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In Ten Shows, Vancouver-born artist Barb Choit immerses herself in the vast and disparate slide library of the California Institute of the Arts. The resulting spectacle, a small and unassuming book on the outside, leads the viewer on a fascinating journey through the library's perspectives on Art History. Taking the singular viewpoint of this one institution, manifested aptly in its collection of historical slides, Ten Shows charts an exclusively visual trajectory into this now-obsolete medium of documentation. The documentation of works by artists including Allan Kaprow, Joan Jonas, Robert Morris, Jeff Wall and Carolee Schneemann, amongst others, becomes the work itself, and the archival inclination of the institution is shown as humbly beautiful. Slides are organised into simplistic groupings, based on their content's formal elements; Abstract Weather Patterns; Clouds in Grey Landscapes; Triple Shadows. The recurrence of certain objects, shapes or circumstances in multiple images becomes prevalent as Choit encourages the viewer to see comparable beauty in the works of famous artists and anonymously produced stock imagery. Published in association with Or Gallery, Vancouver.

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Mining Couture: A Manifesto for Common Wear is a collaborative art project between the artists Barber Swindells and Leicestershire County Council’s Snibston Discovery Museum, exploring the relationship between coal mining and fashion and its surprisingly rich cultural history. Featuring essays, interviews and discussions, illustrated with photographs, maps, video stills and more, Mining Couture is a unique study that merges history, fashion art and contemporary life. Delving into the notion of ‘common wear’ and focusing on its social context, the book is brought to life through first-hand written recollections by miners and industry workers, including an interview with the 1972 National Coal Queen Margaret Dominiak, alongside participation with contemporary artists and curators.

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The fourth book with the Royal College of Art Photography Department showcasing the cutting-edge work of these nascent artists.

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Federico Solmi: Escape Into The Metaverse examines the work of Federico Solmi, a leading practitioner in the genre of new media art. As a narrative and figurative artist, Solmi utilises lurid colours and satire to portray a dystopian vision of contemporary society, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that characterise our time. Employing video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound and digital game design, he creates a carnivalesque virtual reality with historical and present-day world leaders – animated by computer script and motion capture performance – in a critique of Western society’s obsession with power. Inspired by real events and fabricated myths, Solmi explores, re-interprets and concocts celebrated moments in history. As reconfigured narratives, these social and political commentaries disrupt the mythologies that underpin Western society, revealing its ties to nationalism, colonialism, religion and consumerism.The book documents Solmi’s unique process of melding traditional art practices and digital technologies in a case study of his most ambitious video-painting to date, The Bathhouse (2020). Pioneering new modes of cultural production and art experience afforded by the metaverse, Solmi’s absurd rewriting of past and present merge dark humor and a sense of the grotesque in a virtual world that indicts our own reality.Solmi was born in 1973 to a working-class family in Bologna, Italy. He is self-trained and self-educated. In 1999, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to pursue his career. His perspective reflects his outlook as a cultural voyeur, questioning the nationalistic and revisionist American mythologies that are often presented as fact. In 2003, Solmi began to experiment with the tools of video game design, fascinated by the parallel universe made possible by 3D graphics, which he saw as a structure to create narrative video sequences using drawings and paintings. Every visual texture is painted and scanned on the computer up to three times to achieve the intentional flickering effect. The art of Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio di Chirico serve as references for his visual compositions, while the writings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Oriana Fallaci serve as inspiration for his social and political commentary.

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