I'm Not Myself At All: Women, Art And Subjectivity In Canada

Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018. Hardcover. VG (crinkling to spine ends. corners bumped & creased. dustjacket has light scratches; creasing to corners). dark aqua boards w/ silver spine printing. 381 pgs w/ color & bw illustrations. illustrated & light blue dustjacket w/ white & black printing. A nice, bright copy. "In this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault offers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understandings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women's artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the importance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I'm Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restrictive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis."--Amazon.