Fine Arts Subject Guide: Find Books

In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth. While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period's reconceptualization of art.

Subject to Change presents catalogue statements, essays, interviews, lecture notes, communications with gallerists and authors, and unpublished and out-of-print writings by Liz Magor, one of the most important contemporary artists of the last fifty years. As a writer, Magor uses narrative to make sense of her work, but she also turns and returns to themes over her career including subject/object relations and transformations; artist education and training; consumption and commodification; human attachment and relationships; and complexities of time, place, and situation, particularly her own as a feminist artist in a settler colonial society. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Magor's practice, as well as the history of Canadian art since the 1970s.

This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves.

Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman's armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources - including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs - The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women's lives.

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture.