AT HOME:
Talks with Canadian Artists about Place and Practice
“Lezli Rubin-Kunda’s poetic book explores the many different iconographies that artists enlist to contain the metaphor of home. Her range is vast not just in terms of the geography she covers, but in the spectrum of imaginative responses that the artists she highlights probe in their installations, performances and site-specific works of art. In these disruptive times where dislocation is more the norm than the exception, this book reminds us of the pervasive human longing to find and inhabit home as a place and as a state of being.”
– Tom Smart, Director and CEO of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery
“This is a magnificent book, from which I have learnt a great deal, It is a gentle manifesto on how to connect one’s own work to a broader scene – an important contribution to the study of contemporary Canadian art.”
– Cliff Eyland, artist, writer, and curator
At Home has now been issued in an eBook edition (kindle and epub formats), with full color reproductions. It is available worldwide through Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other online retailers, including Goose Lane publishers: https://gooselane.com/collections/art-architecture/products/at-home-ebook
At Home will be available internationally through Gazelle Book Services in the UK, the EU and the Middle East. Retail, wholesale, corporate and individual customers: https://gazellebookservices.com/
In the fall of 2019, the book was shortlisted for the Canadian Vine Literary Awards, in the category of non-fiction. Read more >>
In December 2019, the book was featured at Saskatoon’s Remai Museum monthly art reading group, in a discussion led by Susan Shantz, a Saskatoon artist and teacher who is featured in the book. Read more >>
Publisher’s blurb about the book:
In this intimate investigation of the artistic process, Lezli Rubin-Kunda explores the nuanced path of creative work and the way artists make sense of home and place within their art practice and their lives. Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who examines these issues in her own work. But in this book, she expands her horizons, traveling across Canada to talk to more than fifty practicing artists, including Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Sandra Semchuk, Francois Morelli, Simon Frank, Stan Krzyzanowski, Diane Pugen, and Sharon Alward, about their work, their creative process, and the place of “home” in their work.
What emerges from these thoughtful conversations are fascinating and unexpected orientations to place as an impetus for art making, ranging from deep connections to a specific childhood home, to more conscious adoptions of place, to somewhat fluid approaches in which the very concept of “home” seems to dissolve.
Moving from physical landscapes to the geography of memories and recorded histories, from territories of emotion to social environments that condition and contribute to the idea of home, Rubin-Kunda touches on indigenous approaches to ancestral homelands, the land as physical place and emotional territory, the historic role of women in creating and taking care of “home,” ideas of home disconnected from place, and liberating concepts of “homelessness.” Woven through these encounters with other artists are Rubin-Kunda’s reflections on her own artistic path, as a Toronto born Jewish-Canadian who has made her home in Israel.
Candid, empathetic, and insightful, At Home explores the creative process and the ways that artists find and create meaning within a fragmented contemporary landscape.
The book was presented publicly in Canada through a series of book events that took place in cities across the country in 2018-19. In Toronto, it was launched at Ben McNally Bookstore in the fall, and a lecture presentation was given in the spring at Ontario College of Art and Design University; in Montreal it was launched at Galerie B-312 in late October; in Vancouver, at Read Books in the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design; in Winnipeg there was a launch at MacNally books and a lecture presentation at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery; and in Saskatoon, the book was presented at the Snelgrove Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan.
In Israel, public lectures were given at the Hebrew University’s Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies in Jerusalem, and at the School of Architecture’s Colloquium Seminars at the Technion University, Haifa. The book was launched at the Alfred Cooperative Institute of Art and Culture, in Tel Aviv. It was also given out to all the guests at this year’s Canada Day event at the Canadian Ambassador’s residence.
Reviews:
• Reviewed by Marie-Paule Macdonald in RACAR, the Canadian art review of UAAC [Universities Art Association of Canada] in the fall 2020 issue Approaching Home. Click to download PDF >>
• Gallery West: http://www.gallerieswest.ca/magazine/books/exploring-a-sense-of-home/
• THIS Magazine: https://this.org/2019/03/03/state-of-the-art/
• Holon Institute of Technology, Faculty of Design, July 4’2019 כולעיצוב: http://design.hit.ac.il/blog/געגועים-לקנדה/?fbclid=IwAR1IHJIhIwhomH9hEi7vmVInX7jX4XEIFGa7L8VytT1iQmcCikXhZsXIWys
• NEWZ4U.CA: https://www.newz4u.ca/articles/lezli-rubin-kunda-explores-the-concept-of-home-in-her-book-at-home
* If you found the book interesting, please consider recommending it to friends and colleagues, and feel free to send me any feedback you want to share.