Sculpting Cinema

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.

Featured artists are Donald Lawrence, Alexandre Larose, Tom Evans & Jonathan Mandeville, Andrew John Milne, David Hoffos, Kristie MacDonald, Christina Battle, Shary Boyle, Charles Stankievech and T.J Edgar.

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. This is further aided by the expert printing support by Gaspereau Press, renowned for their beautiful publications.

This publication was produced through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Initiatives Grant.