Synopsis
Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars is a comprehensive look at the career of Canadian performance art legend, Tanya Mars, from the early 1970s to the present.
Paul Couillard, former director of FADO Performance Art Centre in Toronto and editor of the book, sums up the importance of the artist's work with the following: Mars has relentlessly shown us that the best way to the jugular is through the funny bone, creating a series of compelling 'three-dimensional pictures' that have made her one of Canada s most acclaimed and important performance artists.
This anthology offers a comprehensive look at her early career as well as her many recent major works and successes, including extensive photo documentation in a 32 full colour page break, and a DVD featuring video documentation of her durational 7-hour site-specific performance work produced by FADO in Toronto in 2004, Tyranny of Bliss.
Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars includes contributions by some of Canada's most respected and established performance artists, theorists and champions including Paul Couillard, Tagny Duff, Jennifer Fisher, Randy Gledhill, Nelson Henricks, Will Kwan, Paul Ledoux, Joanna Nash, Jennifer Oille, John Oughton, Andrew James Paterson, Pam Patterson, Kim Sawchuck and Dot Tuer.
An innovative leader in the performance art scene here and internationally, Tanya Mars makes art that is courageous, humourous, operatic and original. Ironic to Iconic gives the reader a cogent and too little known background to Mars' career and her role in the development of performance art in Canada.
Jessica Bradley, curator and director of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects
About the Author
Tanya Mars, winner of a 2008 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Art, has been a key figure in Canadian art since she burst on the scene in Montreal in 1974 with her first ground-breaking exhibition, Codpieces: Phallic Paraphernalia. Tanya Mars is a feminist, performance artist, video maker, writer, curator and educator. Among her many contributions to the development of Canadian art, artists and art practices over the years, Mars was a founding member and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale), in Montreal, the first women's art gallery in Canada; editor of Parallelogramme magazine for 13 years; and very active in ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres), for 15 years.
Mars' large-scale performance work is often characterized as visually-rich layers of spectacular, satirical feminist imagery, taking inspiration from myriad of sources from other fields including literature, history, philosophy and social theory. She has performed widely across Canada, and in Chile, Finland and Sweden. Her most recent major work, a 7-hour durational performance entitled Tyranny of Bliss involved over 30 performers who created 14 tableaux depicting the 7 deadly sins and the 7 heavenly virtues, set against the urban political backdrop of the Queens' Park legislature buildings, and other locations around Toronto. She is co-editor, with Johanna Householder, of Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), published by YYZ Books. Mars is also a member of the 7a*11d Collective, established in 1997, which produces a bi-annual international festival of performance art in Toronto. She currently teaches performance art and video at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, and is part of the graduate faculty at the University of Toronto. In 2004, she was named Artist of the Year by the Untitled Arts Awards (Toronto) and in 2008 she was honoured with a Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts. In the autumn of 2008, she will be the Canada Council for the Arts International Artist in Residence in Paris, France.
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