Tracings: Writing Art, 1975–2020 is a comprehensive collection of writings by a highly respected senior artist that documents a formative period in the postmodern era of Canada’s visual art community. As a working artist, an educator, a former librarian, and a contemporary historian, Ian Carr-Harris brings a breadth of knowledge and experience to his skills as a writer. The anthology as a whole, predicated around the nature of the text and image as ‘trace,’ particularly expands upon Carr-Harris’s own innovative artistic engagement with the relationship between image and text in the construction of identity and meaning in contemporary culture. His practice, augmented by his focus on history, also continues to dismantle the authority bestowed on the photograph as an objective historical document, influencing his choice of subject matter.

-Carolyn Bell Farrell, independent curator and writer, London, Ontario

Tracings’ first contribution to the field of artists’ writings on art will be to expand it. Few artists have had the dedication and the nerve to comment cogently on the artists, critics, and institutions that make up their social and cultural milieux, and fewer still have twinned practices of making and writing art. Ian Carr-Harris reveals himself in this volume to be an affectionately attentive and engaged observer of the Toronto art community in which he is rooted, and which forms the backdrop of most of the writing. He is also a participant, and the impact of international currents of thought such as feminism and postmodernism on this community is visible in his writing, which engages with the debates around and within poststructuralism with intellectual ease. Trained initially as a historian, he brings an enviable arsenal of analytical and conceptual skills to the framing of his commentary, which goes well beyond the purely documentary.

-Diana Nemiroff, Carleton University

Read online at Manifold.