Breaking and Entering

As climate change, economic recession, war, and mass migration destabilize the world and create a less certain future, notions of home and shelter loom large. Breaking and Entering considers how contemporary artists and filmmakers address anxieties and vulnerabilities around housing and the house by prying open both physical and metaphorical domestic structures. Deploying tactics that range from cutting into the surface of actual buildings, to making and manipulating "real" and virtual architectural models, to filming urban decay, the artists under discussion dismantle traditional domesticity to expose what remains hidden and to explore what might be salvaged and recycled. The contributors' central themes include exile and homelessness, narratives of belonging and exclusion, domestic rituals, memories, furnishing and hoarding, invasions of privacy, pleasures and perils of home ownership, utopian visions, and playing house. Broached from a variety of methodological perspectives drawn from art history, architecture, and film studies, the essays in this book invite us to contemplate what we can salvage from historical experiences of dwelling and help us find shelter in the future.Contributors include Sandra Alfoldy (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University), Bridget Elliott (Western University), Shelley Hornstein (York University), Claudette Lauzon (Ontario College of Art and Design University), Trista E. Mallory (Whitney Museum, New York), Anthony Purdy (Western University), Stephanie Radu (Western University), Charles Rice (Kingston University), Kirsty Robertson (Western University), Christine Sprengler (Western University), and Malin Zimm (White, Stockholm office).

"An important, timely, and professionally presented collection, Breaking and Entering features artists, architects, and individual works that merit serious and extended discussion." Mark A. Cheetham, Department of History of Art, University of Toronto " Breaking and Entering will generate and excite intellectual debate. This stimulating collection of essays identifies some of the disruptive, invasive and critical approaches to domesticity and ' home' in work across different media - installation art, architecture, photography, and film. Contributors invite the reader to explore the (often tricky) relationship of art, architecture and film to topical issues of homelessness, economic recession, gender politics and migration." Gill Perry, The Open University "Well-researched and original discussions of domesticity, [Breaking and Entering] highlights the complex meanings that support our understandings of the house. It also clearly shows how artists' engagements with architecture should become sustained dialogues between the two disciplines, so that their critical readings may be used to complete architects' attempts at transforming domestic environments." RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review

Bridget Elliott is professor of art history at the University of Western Ontario.