Lisa Baldissera

Sticky Pictures examines and celebrates the evolving work of Montreal-based artist Janet Werner. In her paintings, Werner builds a constellation of spatial and figurative explorations drawn from fashion magazines and art history to create collage-like composite figures that slip easily between articulations of beauty, gender, psychology and emotion. Werner's painterly operations are both unsettling and seductive, revealing the conditions of perception and looking as passageways to understanding the intensity of the world at hand. Werner's unique combination of abstraction, fictional portraiture, and the rich history of painting are explored in Sticky Pictures through texts by art and media historians, as well as an interview with the artist.Janet Werner’s work has been featured in international solo exhibitions from New York to Los Angeles and as far away as Cape Town. Her work was included in the Prague Biennale in 2003 and is featured in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, the University of Lethbridge, Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, and numerous private and corporate collections. Werner lives and works in Montreal.

Drawing on her decades of navigating the art world, Lisa Baldissera weaves writing conventions from the visual arts with the imaginative possibilities of magic realism and autofiction in this groundbreaking collection of short fiction. The stories in Dead Peasant reveal the fraught circumstances and neglected emotions of an underclass who toil below the glossy economies of the international high-art world, including artists and art workers. Here, characters from across centuries are haunted by war, floods, and their parental histories. An auction-house worker vomits blueberries on an art-collecting oligarch. An aspiring curator converses with Lindsay Lohan about an exhibition of horse paintings before tragedy strikes. An archivist studies planet Earth from space, reflecting on tax havens and the embattled ecology. Through these startling, affective, incisive, and fun stories, Baldissera chronicles the unique challenges of the art world and the damage it inflicts on those struggling to get by. Like the eviscerative work of Rachel Cusk and the dark humour of Miranda July, she satirizes the neoliberal double-speak of the 'creative economy' and its punyfiying forces, to ask, what is it, truly, that art can do now?

Emily Carr (1871-1945) is one of Canada's most beloved artists. An independent woman and a Westerner who gained prominence at a time when female painters were not recognized internationally, her life and work reflect a profound commitment to the land she knew and loved. Carr's sensitive evocations reveal an artist grappling with spiritual questions inspired by the Canadian sea, land, and people. Although more than half a century has passed since her death, any artist who engages with the West Coast must contend with her legacy. Her paintings continue to inspire generations of artists. Along with the Group of Seven, Carr became a leading figure in Canadian modern art in the early twentieth century. Emily Carr: Life & Work traces the artist's trajectory from her life in Victoria, where she struggled to receive acceptance, to her status as one of Canada's most influential painters. With insight and intelligence, author Lisa Baldissera explores how although during Carr's life she endured hardship, personal isolation, and rejection, she persevered to create an iconic vision for the nation. This book explores how Carr travelled extensively, learning from European, American, and Indigenous forms and receiving formal training at art academies as well as from private tutors. In doing so, she continued to grow in artistic power as a result of her own intense observation and of her vigorous experimentation with a variety of methods and media, reflecting the fusion of wide-ranging influences. Baldissera reveals why Carr's art remains relevant today and its legacy interests many contemporary West Coast artists.