Monika Kin Gagnon – författare

Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with “Western” influences, using a powerful and emotive “mix, meld and mash” approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality. This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton’s practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton’s colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton’s work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New York–based scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

A personal and intimate perspective on one of Canada's most prominent 20th century multidisciplinary artists, who was once described as "abstraction’s poet-philosopher."Charles Gagnon (1934–2003) was a painter, photographer and filmmaker considered by many to be an important figure in Quebec and Canadian art in the 20th century.His early career emerged alongside the American Abstract Expressionists and his growing multidisciplinary practice broke away from the singularity of painting shared by his Montreal contemporaries of the Automatistes and the Plasticiens. The complexity and depth of his work as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker was distinguished by a probing, introspective quality. His paintings were simultaneously rigid and free-flowing, with self-imposed rules and structure contrasted by rich fracture and gestural brush work. Across all disciplines he played with multiple levels of perception, and many works evoke the liminal space of the threshold, or multi-plane spaces.In Charles Gagnon: The Colour of Time, the Sound of Space, this long-standing multidisciplinary work is brought into full view with texts that explore Gagnon’s various practices, from painting to photography to film. An English-language essay by art historian and curator Roald Nasgaard chronicles Gagnon’s artistic evolution from his early years in New York in the 1950s to his final productive years in the late 1990s in Quebec, and situates him within an expanded international historical context of artists, artworks, and art movements. Filmmaker and professor Olivier Asselin’s French-language essay engages Gagnon’s use of different media, including the role of sound and music in his artworks. Michiko Yajima Gagnon, the wife of the late artist, gives insight into the inseparability of everyday life and Charles’s creative undertakings: his friendships with other artists (Tōru Takemitsu, Lee Friedlander), travel (to New York, Japan, and, particularly, the American Southwest), and the relationship between the landscapes surrounding his studios and his artwork.Featuring more than 250 art reproductions and archival images, Charles Gagnon is an intimate portrait of an artist and the celebration of a life’s work.