Sightlines & Album XIV by Luis Jacob (2017) (signed)

10 ¼ x 7 ¼ inches
two soft-covers in slip cover case
 
signed
 
These two books, presented as a set, are a new book work by artist Luis Jacob, who is known for his multidisciplinary practice that destabilizes conventions of looking to highlight the socio-political dimensions of the visual world.
 
Sightlines emerges from the artist’s extensive archive of postcards chronicling a century of urban development in Toronto. More than a chronicle of Toronto’s visual history, this semi-chronological series of images of Toronto's cityscapes queries the relationship of the city’s culture to its economic life and its forms of self-identity (both projected and submerged).
 
Album XIV is the newest work in a series begun nearly two decades ago. Each Album is constructed of hundreds of images cut from books and magazines and displayed as an extended sequence without identifying captions or context. Featuring images of city planning, abstract Constructivist and Minimalist art, and references to forms of spectatorship and self-representation, Album XIV also pictures the work of various Toronto artists and particular moments in the city’s development, grounding the work in a specific place and history.
 
The publication continues Jacob’s role as a renegade semiotician—an artist whose reordering of images exerts conscious and unconscious pressure on the ways that people assign, experience, and reconfigure meaning.
 
Co-published with Gallery TPW on occasion of the exhibition Luis Jacob: Habitat,  May 5-June 10, 2017 in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
 
Luis Jacob is a Peruvian-born, Toronto-based artist and curator. He studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Since his participation as an exhibiting artist in Documenta12 in 2007, he has achieved an international reputation, with exhibitions at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2018); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and Limerick City Gallery of Art (2014); Centro Párraga, Murcia (2013); Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Taipei Biennial (2012); Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto, and Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Kunsthalle Bern, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009); Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg (2008); and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007). His curatorial work includes Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto (2016) at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. In 2015, he co-curated the conference “This is Paradise: Art and Artists in Toronto” with Barbara Fischer in collaboration with Kitty Scott.