The Undesirables

Myfwany MacLeod has over the past twenty years become widely known for her complex and irreverent artwork that draws upon a broad set of references, from conceptual and minimalist art to motifs salvaged from popular literature, music and cinema. MacLeod takes the familiar, cartoons, movie posters, record albums and soft-core porn magazines and shifts their form or context to make visible the way they shape our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. With a longstanding interest in satire as a tool for critical examination of the world around us, she uses humour to speak to the vexations that persistently confront artists: the struggle to produce something “socially relevant,” the tension between art and commerce, and the conflict between popular entertainment and “high culture.” Her work explores widely held conceptions of beauty and truth, while also presenting a subversively humorous critique of imbalances of power within the art world — inequities MacLeod sees as representative of the world at large.

MacLeod has been the recipient of numerous awards including the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Award (2013), The Glenfiddich Distillery artist-in-residence program (2005), The City of Vancouver Live/Work studio residency (2003-2005), The Canada Council for the Arts Paris Studio (1999), The Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation VIVA award (1999) and the Fondation Andre Piolat (1994).

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet based in France. She formerly lived in Vancouver and was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing. Robertson has held residencies and visiting positions at Cambridge University, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, American University of Paris and the California College of the Arts and The Warburg Institute in London. Robertson’s books of poetry include XEclogue (1993); Debbie: An Epic (1997), nominated for a Governor General’s Award; The Weather (2001), which Robertson wrote during her Judith E. Wilson fellowship at Cambridge University; The Men (2006); Magenta Soul Whip (2009) and R’s Boat (2010). Her architectural essays are collected in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (revised ed. 2010), she published a work of prose essays, Nilling (2012), and an essayistic poem in her book Cinema of the Present (2014).

The mandate of ECU Press is to present the work of emerging Vancouver based artists alongside international artists by publishing artists’ books, monographs, collected writings and music projects.