The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg's Ghost Photographs

Review

"[These] issues are literally life and death, with art and ideas that explore the strange liminal spaces between the material and immaterial [and] call up the ghosts that haunt us now." -- Alison Gillmor ― Border Crossings"This collection offers fascinating photos from [the Hamilton Family Fonds] as well as a range of essays about the meetings, notes and images from the encounters and ruminations on the ways in which the work continues to capture the imagination today." -- Ben Sigurdson ― Winnipeg Free Press"Whether Hamilton's work is evidence of ghosts, documents intangible phenomena, or illuminates a society grappling with loss, is ultimately up to the reader to determine. But one thing is clear: a century later, these photos still have the power to fascinate." -- David Jón Fuller ― Prairie Books NOW"With a collection as rich as the Hamilton Family Fonds, the question becomes what kind of impact did these images have on the world over the last 100 years? This question is explored in the new book The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs [which] examines and contextualizes the influence and impact Hamilton’s ectoplasmic images have had and continue to have on the world." -- Kitty Wong ― Winnipeg Free Press"Published on large-format paper, the book itself is a work of art… For anyone interested in the Hamilton séances from an artistic, historical or psychical research perspective, it is worth going beyond the amazing photos and reading the text." -- Janice Hamilton ― Writing Up the Ancestors"The Art of Ectoplasm [is] an elaborate and startling new book of essays, pictures, and art inspired by the Hamiltons’ collection of seance photographs and by contemporary art." -- Tom Jokinen ― Literary Review of Canada"Serena Keshavjee weaves both scientific and artistic theory into a remarkable visual history, situating the Hamilton photographs within Modernist art and taking us from James Tissot and Auguste Rodin to Guy Maddin and current artists such as Teresa Burrows and Erika DeFreitas, whose work has been inspired in part by the Hamilton photographs. These varied and fascinating discussions take as their starting point a single archival fonds." -- Cheryl Avery ― Archivaria"The contributors to Serena Keshavjee’s edited volume have done a service not only in extending our knowledge of séance art phenomena but in further stimulating art historians to re-imagine the artistic structure and function of the spiritualist séance." -- John M. Andrick ― Art History"Keshavjee’s central insightful chapter reviews how Dr Hamilton put the scientific method into the service of his religious beliefs in his attempts to prove the existence of powerful psychic forces and paranormal phenomena... [Hamilton's] work resonates anew in a digital era that complicates the relationship of the medium (whether spiritual or photographic) to truth." -- Louis Kaplan ― Journal of Curatorial Studies"Generously illustrated and indexed, The Art of Ectoplasm provides a multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach that expands the possibilities of archival research. It is through this extrapolation and reimagining of the use of our collections that archives can foster greater transparency and become spirited, potentially transformative, and necessarily reparative." -- Kure Croker ― The American Archivist"En prenant pour point de départ un fonds d’archives unique en son genre et en l’analysant au prisme d’unefascination pour une matière « monstrueusement extraordinaire », The Art of Ectoplasm démontre que lafi nalité des archives est non seulement multiple, mais surtout, qu’elle se déploie comme un champ despossibles." -- Annaëlle Winand ― Archives

Review

"With a collection as rich as the Hamilton Family Fonds, the question becomes what kind of impact did these images have on the world over the last 100 years? This question is explored in the new book The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs [which] examines and contextualizes the influence and impact Hamilton’s ectoplasmic images have had and continue to have on the world."