Author: Bradley, Jessica. Published by The Power Plant, 1994. 48 pages, black & white and colour illustrations.

ISBN: 0-921047-83-5

Price: $15

Author: Burke, Gregory, Gianfranco Maraniello, and David Rimanelli. Published by The Power Plant, 2008. 121 pages, colour illustrations. ISBN:978-1-894212-12-0.

Price:$45

“the only thing that counts at the moment is gossip”
— Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love, 1920, from Francesco Vezzoli, Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!

Launched in association with The Power Plant exhibition ‘Francesco Vezzoli: A True Hollywood Story!,’ this clothbound publication documents the first major North American survey of work produced by Vezzoli since 1995. The unique square-shaped catalogue features beautiful illustrations of Vezzoli’s Homage to the Square inspired needleworks and colossal film posters advertising fictional films starring Marlene Dietrich and Anni Albers. Essays by Gregory Burke, Curator of the exhibition and Director of The Power Plant; Gianfranco Maraniello, Italian writer and Director of the Galleria d´Arte Moderna di Bologna; and David Rimanelli, critic and regular contributor to Artforum playfully tease out the contradictions of Vezzoli’s personal, art practice, fascination with celebrity culture and the phenomenon of ‘the remake.’

Francesco Vezzoli rose to international fame after his inclusion in the 2001 Venice Biennale, with the remarkable piece Veruschka Was Here. Part performance, part installation, the work featured the legendary model embroidering the iconic image of herself that graced the cover of Stern magazine and cemented her fame as the world’s first supermodel in 1969. Six years later in 2007, Vezzoli represented Italy once again at the Venice Biennale, this time with a film installation starring Sharon Stone and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Author: Dompierre, Louise, Marnie Fleming. Published by The Power Plant, 1992. 16 pages, colour illustrations. ISBN: 0921027346

Price: $32

Through his judicious alteration of scale and function, Kim Adams playfully manipulates everyday objects, toys, vehicles and mass-produced shelters. The catalogue examines Adams’ work from 1983 to 2001, and documents the two major exhibitions: Kim Adams, a survey exhibition of the artist’s work at The Power Plant, Toronto; and Kim Adams: Bruegel-Bosch Bus at Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario. This 144-page catalogue includes in-depth essays by Tomas Pospiszyl, a Prague-based art historian, and Marnie Fleming, Curator of Contemporary Art, Oakville Galleries, as well as an interview with the artist by Marc Mayer, curator of Adams’ exhibition at The Power Plant.

Author: Campbell, James D. Published by The Power Plant, 1991. 24 pages, colour illustrations. ISBN: 0921047746

Price: $5

Abstract Practices 1 features 28 art works by Jean-Marie Delavalle, Rice Evans, Jean Poldaas, and Claude Tousignant, all working within the constructive mode of abstract painting. These accomplished artists show pieces that are emblematic of a clear and logical evolution. Delaville, having moved from sculpture to painting, shows his monochromal aluminum, masonite and cold-rolled steel panel paintings from a framework grounded in the phenomenology of perception and observer rather than artist experience. Evans has stated that “A painting should be approached empirically. It contains information and produces sensations.” Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, Evans’ duo-panel paintings interact on multiple layers of tension via differentiations in colour, shape, and surface quality. Poldaas, also inspired by Wittgenstein, proposes an algebraic framework for colour, with which he has a personal, felt relationship. Tousignant, the most long-standing artist in the group, presents his two-colour, monumental environmental steel constructions in the show, representing the art object as stripped of all outside referents yet standing alongside them with equal status as object. Coupled with the autonomy of such works is an existential experience – a potential for human response and connection deliberately induced by all four exhibiting artists.

Author: Fischer, Barbara, Dot Tuer. Published by The Power Plant, 1990. 40 pages, black & white illustrations. ISBN: 09210479

Price: $10

A re-working of interconnected performances Pure Virtue (1984), Pure Sin (1986), and Pure Nonsense (1987), Pure Hell (1990) features iconic women Queen Elizabeth I, Mae West and Lewis Carroll’s Alice pursuing personal journeys in a gallery-set stage complete with props, seating design, and dressing room. Elizabeth, representing political power, seeks truth. Mae West, representing the power of sexuality, femininity, and seduction, looks for her rightful place in history. And Alice, representing the power of creativity and the imagination, searches for her missing penis. In the 90-minute performance, the three female archetypes interact with and comfort one another on their respective quests. Tanya Mars addresses a range of feminist issues in the performance, including the construction of femininity, the processes of socialization, the formation of feminine role-models, and the psychological, sexual and social implications of women’s relation to power.

Widely exhibited teacher, writer, feminist, and multi-disciplinary artist Tanya Mars has been at the forefront of the Performance art movement in Canada since the 1970s. The catalogue includes her biography and detailed overviews of her past works.

Author: Dompierre, Louise, Sandra Meigs. Published by The Power Plant, 1990. 32 pages, colour illustrations. ISBN: 0921047703

Price: $10

Sandra Meigs’ exhibition Pas de deux explores the dual tension between opposing thematic and formal values: Love Muscle (1989), a series of paintings, drawings and texts in primary colours set with rustic framing, is meant to be read sequentially. The work joins the visual with the literary, high art with vulgar, its text focused on acquiescence versus imperative, authoritative voice versus vulnerable. Visually, the linear, phallic readability of Love Muscle echoes the sexual overtones of its text and title, a subject which is carried over into the show’s next piece, The Western Gothic (1984). Enthusiastically drawing upon cowboy imagery, American cartoons and performed sexuality, the installation leads viewers into two passages: the Corridor of Paleontology, which focuses on science and cartoon imagery, and the Corridor of Dreams, which deals with nightmares and the unconscious. Acknowledging tradition with the museum-like quality of the installation, Meigs also challenges the dominant narratives behind Western and contemporary art by merging high and low, narrative and non-narrative, and madness with reason.

The texts from both works are reproduced in the catalogue, along with colour illustrations, a curatorial essay, an artist biography and selected bibliography.

Author: Elder, Alan C. Published by The Power Plant, 1990. 1 page folded leaflet, colour illustrations.

Price: $

Tim Jocelyn works with appropriated tribal imagery, cultural cliché, and myth in the work featured in this 1990 exhibition catalogue. His 1984 Ooga Booga Suite presented the fictionalized Ooga Booga tribe in a series of performances, textiles, and artist-designed products characterized by brightly coloured iconographic symbols. It is presented in the catalogue alongside his New Dimensions Astrolabe, first installed in the Canada pavilion at Expo 86 (Vancouver, BC). The astrolabe, traditionally used by sailors at night in order to plot location based on astrological altitudes, is used by Jocelyn to reflect land, sea, air and space on one side, and iconic Canadian symbols on the other. Provincial flowers, aboriginal designs, coinage and clichés are all utilized in this playful and tactile project. Along with the Ooga Booga Suite, the New Dimensions Astrolabe reveals Jocelyn’s continued fascination with the primitive, the exotic, the carefree and the hedonistic. The result is a juxtaposition that manifests tension between cultural dichotomies, cultural stereotypes and fiction versus reality.
y Alan C. Elder, curator of Canadian crafts, decorative arts, and design at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Author: Eden, Xandra, Philip Monk. Published by The Power Plant, 2002. 86 pages, colour illustrations. ISBN: 921047924.

Price:$20

This two-part catalogue examines the work of six of Canada’s top young artists. Part one, Bounce, highlights the work of Vancouver artists Brian Jungen, Myfanwy MacLeod, and Damian Moppett. Curated by Philip Monk, this section underlines the sculptural dimension of these artists’ work in relation to the photo-conceptualism that has predominated Vancouver for the past generation. Part two, entitled In Through The Out Door, showcases work by Toronto-based artists David Armstrong-Six, Germaine Koh, and Nestor Krüger. In this section, curator Xandra Eden examines these artists’ interest in transforming the viewer’s perception of territory and space through their sculpture, video, and performance-based works. . Collectively, the artists in Bounce: in through the out door have continued to exhibit to international acclaim. Brian Jungen has recently showed his reworked found items at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Germaine Koh has presented work at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2005, the Liverpool Biennial and the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2004, Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2003, and Bloomberg SPACE in 2003.

Author: Dompierre, Louise, Friedrich Meschede, Ulrich Wilmes, Annelie Pohlen, Noemi Smolik. Published by The Power Plant, 1989. 139 pages, black & white and colour illustrations. ISBN: 0921047568

Price: $17

Alan Belcher has been recognized for creating objects that, in conflating unlikely elements and images, amount to the dissolution and merging of signifiers – a loss of stability of meaning. In “Play this Essay Loud” Rosetta Brooks states that Belcher’s iconoclastic work “cuts across the conventional lines that have always distinguished the art experience from common, everyday reality”. Canadian Softwood (1987), a series of photo constructions, features photographs of wood fragments stapled and nailed onto actual wood. Labeled for export as “art”, the pieces defied the 15% duty levied on Canadian softwood lumber when exported for exhibition into the US. Briefcase No. 24 (1988), a briefcase covered with photographs of men’s briefs, likewise combines documented reality with the “real”, teasingly questioning preconceptions about the nature of art and reflecting the dissonance of daily life. ,

Belcher’s internationally exhibited work was gathered together for collection at The Power Plant in the spring of 1989. The catalogue features 13 of the exhibition’s 29 pieces, reproduced in black and white.

Author: Dompierre, Louise. Published by The Power Plant, 1989. 64 pages, black & white illustrations. ISBN: 0921047401

Price: $15

The 21 pieces in this catalogue engage in what Power Plant curator Louise Dompierre calls an “Ongoing dialectic between the individual, the natural and the cultural, giving to none an absolute voice but stressing the immanence of each within the others”. Fones looks at cultural memory and historical awareness in mediums ranging from woodblock prints to photography to collage. Each work alludes discreetly to its title, in a self-referential manner that signals shared cultural consciousness in its acknowledged system of signs. The artist is concerned with the social manifestations that determine cultural history, with the identification of known signs, and with traces of cultural intervention into natural processes. His Range Maps of Individual Tree Species (1984) documents natural areas of North American tree growth circa 1400 AD, before human interference in their native landscapes. His House Viruses (1979), on the other hand, assembles generations of found wallpaper fragments, representing multilayered periods of cultural intervention, which are mounted onto three geodesic forms to reconstruct conceptual notions of time and history.

Featuring a full artist biography and in-depth curatorial essay, the catalogue is illustrated in black and white.