Art Metropole

#16271

Sculpting Cinema

Editors

Melanie Wilmink and Solomon Nagler

Price

$30.00

Date

2017

Publisher

Pleasure Dome

Format

Anthologies

ISBN

978-0-9682115-7-1

Size

12 × 20.5 cm

Length

181 pp

Genre

Film/Video, Canadian, Criticism, Arts Writing

Sculpting Cinema documents the intersections of sculpture, architecture, performance, installation art, and expanded cinema within contemporary Canadian art. Through seven pieces of writing and two artists’ projects, a selection of scholars and creatives from across the country have explored the ways that cinema flows off the screen and into physical space. The book embodies this thematic content through a creative design, making it an attractive collectors’ object and critical discourse simultaneously.

Edited by Melanie Wilmink (Phd candidate, York University) and Solomon Nagler (artist and Associate Professor, NSCAD University), this publication balances strong academic considerations with the sensual and aesthetic qualities of the work under discussion. Essays were commissioned from: Zoë Heyn-Jones (Toronto), Tom Kohut (Winnipeg), Shana MacDonald (Kitchener-Waterloo), Harry Vandervlist (Calgary), Carmen Victor (Toronto), Colin Zipp (Winnipeg), and Melanie Wilmink (Toronto), with artist’s projects by Pierre Hebért (Montreal), as well as Solomon Nagler and Angela Henderson (Halifax). The written texts conceptualized artworks by Christina Battle (London, ON), Shary Boyle (Toronto), Thomas Evans & Jonathan Mandeville (Halifax), David Hoffos (Lethbridge), Donald Lawrence (Kamloops), Alexandre Larose (Montreal), Kristie MacDonald (Toronto), Andrew John Milne (Winnipeg), Solomon Nagler, and Charles Stankievech (Toronto), while the artistic projects embodied Pierre Hebért and Solomon Nagler’s cinematic practices within the book format. These selections engage a variety of regional stakeholders in unique forms of critical discourse, and provide a spectrum of stylistic tones that appeals to academics, artists, along with general interest readers.

The final product of Sculpting Cinema is a compilation of smart and engaging discourse, presented within a publication that is essentially an artists’ book. Each of the 500 copies of the publication includes unique, hand-inserted, photo-emulsion prints by Solomon Nagler and Angela Henderson, and the overall design by Jayme Spinks uses creative layout and typography in order to convey the “feeling” of cinema through the format of a printed book. Her laser-cut jacket, colour transitions from the start to end of the text, and titles all contribute to a sense of individual essays residing within a larger sequence; the temporality of a program of short films manifested as paper and ink.