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  • I'm Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada by Kristina Huneault
  • Jen Kennedy (bio)
Kristina Huneault. I'm Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada. McGill-Queen's. xiv, 382 $65.00

Subjective dissonance, subjective dislocation, and subjective non-correspondence are terms that Kristina Huneault uses interchangeably in I'm Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada to describe the book's central concern: the complex configurations of selfhood that have been both inscribed and subverted in a range of women's artistic practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Canada. The six essays that comprise the body of the book were written independently over a number of years, and each brings together rich archival research and close visual analysis to offer an insightful reading of selected works by artists – both familiar and lesser known – within their historical contexts. Taken as a whole, the book is a resonant, critically engaged, and theoretically rigorous survey of a diversity of creative works by Indigenous and Settler women in Canada during this period, which foregrounds the myriad ways in which colonialism has explicitly and tacitly shaped both the field of cultural production and women's roles therein.

Works of art, Huneault emphasizes, are records of their maker's engagement with the perceptible world; the result of a series of aesthetic, material, and conceptual decisions that simultaneously constitute a process of subjective becoming. The interminable nature of this process as it unfolds in relation to societal formations around gender and colonialism, "the book's two major axes of investigation," means that no such record is transparent or complete. Huneault, however, is primarily interested in visual and material evidence of [End Page 547] disjuncture or non-compliance, instances in which the evidence of subjectivity in the work itself conflicts with the tools and theories we have on hand to understand it. The first three chapters, which respectively focus on Henrietta Marta Hamilton's 1819 miniature portrait of Beothuk captive Demasduit, wilderness paintings made by British artist Frances Anne Hopkins during a trip to Canada, and impressionist works by Helen McNicoll, explore how women artists negotiated subjectivity in relation to the narrow categories of identity that were socially and culturally available to them and that they, in turn, assigned to others. The final three chapters, on women's botanical illustrations, reverie and maternité genre paintings, and a cross-cultural comparison of Emily Carr's mature landscapes and Sewinchelwet's (Sophie Frank) coiled cedar baskets, argue that certain examples of women's material and visual culture serve as evidence of articulations of subjectivity that not only resisted or exceeded the dominant discourse of identity but also offer glimpses of altogether new ways of understanding the self in relation to the world.

The author herself writes that close looking is one of the things that the book does best. While I agree that Huneault delivers nuanced, precise, and beautifully descriptive visual analysis of a breadth of works (accompanied by stunning illustrations), I would add that another of the book's great strengths is the author's handling of feminist theory. Written in accessible and evocative language, the introduction, in particular, functions as a useful critical overview of key theories of subjectivity, including those of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz as well as their possibilities and limitations within the field of visual arts.

I'm Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada is a well-written and thoughtful investigation of how ways of being in the world are reflected through the process of making and looking at art. The book ends by calling for "expansive and generous interpretive acts." If one wonders what this means, it is precisely the type of looking and thinking that Huneault models throughout.

Jen Kennedy

jen kennedy
Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen's University

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