Volumes is an anthology of writings on contemporary artists’ engagement with sound and music. The publication is composed of artists’ projects and essays drawn from a series of exhibitions that took place between 2003 and 2013. Volumes is a hybrid publication in several respects. First, it includes textual, visual, and audio material from more than one exhibition. The curatorial projects include: Re-Play (curators Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer), Come a Singin' (curator Andrew Hunter), See Hear! (curators Timothy Long and Ben Portis), Video Heroes (curator Sylvie Gilbert) and Volume: Hear Here (curator Christof Migone). All of the exhibitions save the last one took place in 2003, the last one came a decade later. In the intervening decade the presence of sound in visual art has grown immeasurably, and this publication implicitly track this evolution—from the way in which contemporary Canadian artists engage popular music through film, video, performance, and installation that was the focus of the 2003 exhibitions, to the way that sound activates specific phenomenological and ontological questions in the 2013 iteration of this series of curatorial propositions. The progression is by no means linear or continuous, consequently the publication presents a heterogeneous ensemble and does not attempt to draw definitive conclusions from what has become a pluralistic field with a broad set of concerns. In the context of a burgeoning body of literature on the sonic arts, this entry featuring exclusively Canadian artists and authors offers a diverse cross-section of some of the production in the visual arts that centered on sound, music and silence in the last decade.

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