Price : $48.00
About the artist
Shannon Bool has pursued a multidisciplinary art practice that involves tapestries, carpets, photograms, sculptures, installations, and paintings. Since 2002, she has mixed fine-art mediums with techniques and materials more commonly associated with crafts as a means of offering a feminist perspective distinct from the authoritative reading commonly applied to modernist craft. Each project she realizes is rooted in art-historical or architectural research through which objects, diagrams, or images retell forgotten stories about long-standing societal biases that have morphed into contemporary issues.
Her imagery is at once extremely refined and assiduously researched—as well as subtly, productively disturbing. Deriving her inspiration from a mixture of high and low culture as well as art-historical figures, Bool takes her viewers through multiple layers of who is looking at what or whom, and what this gaze may mean. Reflections such as these are extremely pertinent in a contemporary society that seems to value subjective viewpoints over objective facts.
About the authors
The texts of this major publication were written by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre (Joliette), Esther Kinsky (Berlin), and Tammer El-Sheikh (Toronto).
Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre focuses on a body of work celebrating and critically assessing Le Corbusier. Bool mobilizes a never-realized project the architect developed in Algiers, revealing hidden aspects of the man and his practice and casting a new light on Le Corbusier’s attention to the gaze.
Esther Kinsky’s essay adroitly analyzes three works by the artist and deploys the image of the terrain—as a field of memory and association—in order to reflect on the perplexing process of cultural cross-pollination.
Tammer El-Sheikh proposes that the historical arc of Bool’s work, tracing modernism’s libidinal and colonial investments, resonates with the complex critique once introduced in Edward Said’s Orientalism.
About the book
Several institutions in North America and Europe—the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Canada), the Centre Culturel Canadien à Paris (France), Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), and the Musée d’art de Joliette (Canada)—have collaborated on this publication and the related exhibitions. We are profoundly grateful to Shannon Bool for her work, vision, and engagement. The overall project required her continuous and extensive involvement for many months. She has approached this publication and each exhibition venue as a new stage of an evolving project, rendering the experience pertinent and highly stimulating for all parties involved.
Correspondingly, each institution has brought its own perspective to Bool’s work: the project’s original exhibition in Canada at the Musée d’art de Joliette was curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre and toured to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston where it was co-curated by St-Jean Aubre and Sunny Kerr. In Paris, a version of the exhibition was co-curated by Catherine Bédard and St-Jean Aubre (Paris) and toured to Germany where it was curated by Jule Hillgärtner in (Braunschweig).
We also wish to thank the technical and administrative staff at the respective exhibiting venues for their role in presenting the exhibitions. Furthermore, we are grateful to Daniel Faria of Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto) and Iris Kadel and Moritz Willborn of the Galerie Kadel Willborn (Düsseldorf). Without their support, this publication and the exhibitions could not have been realized.
176 pages
22 x 31 cm, paperback
In German, English and French
Legal deposit: 2019
ISBN 9783903269743