Juan Davila is a painter who passionately believes in using art to facilitate social change. Davila was born in Santiago, Chile, and moved to Australia in the 1970s to escape the violent totalitarian regime of Pinochet. His work had an immediate impact on the Australian art scene and he has since become one of Australia's most respected and creative artists and is represented in all State and National art museums. His work addresses international issues, especially with reference to Latin American and Australian themes, and he draws on his own experiences of repression and loss suffered during Chile's dark history. Davila's art - beautiful, complex, confronting and provocative - sets to counter indifference in the community and spark intellectual discourse on many issues in the international political landscape - terrorism, refugees, political and social rights and undemocratic governments.

First published in 1993 Interviews-Artists is a body of thirty seven recorded conversations made since 1988. In considering their work, often in the context of a current exhibition, artists discuss their ideas in formation and the factors which have informed their development. Read together, another picture emerges of unexpected links between the makers, in the expression of their concerns, in the work and with the world beyond, that forms a unique and coherent overview of the developing art of our time.

In Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, Joe McElhaney situates Visconti's films as privileged and deeply expressive instances of a trope that McElhaney identifies as the ""cinema of fabric"": a reoccurrence in film in which textiles-clothing, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets-determine the filming process. An Italian neorealist, Visconti emerges out of a movement immediately following WWII wherein fabric assumes crucial functions, yet Visconti's use of fabric surpasses his colleagues in many ways, including its fluid, multifaceted articulations of space and time. Visconti's homosexuality is central to this theory in that it assumes metaphoric potential in addressing ""forbidden"" sexual desires that are made visible in the films. Visconti's cinema of fabric gives voice to desires not simply for human bodies draped in fabric but also for entire environments, a world of the senses in which fabric becomes a crucial method for giving form to such desires. McElhaney examines Visconti's neorealist origins in Ossessione, La terra trema, and Rocco and His Brothers, particularly through fabric's function within literary realism and naturalism. Neorealist revisionism through the extravagant drapings of the diva film is examined in Bellissima and Senso whereas White Nights and The Stranger are examined for the theatricalizing through fabric of their literary sources. Visconti's interest in German culture vis-?a-vis The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig, is articulated through a complex intertwining of fabric, aesthetics, politics, and transgressive sexual desire. Finally, Visconti's final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, assess through fabric both the origins of Italian fascism and the political tensions contemporaneous with the films' productions. Fabric in Visconti is often tied to the aesthetic impulse itself in a world of visionaries attempting to dominate their surrounding environments and where a single piece of fabric may come to represent the raw material for creation. This book will tantalize any reader with a keen eye and strong interest in film and queer studies.

In The Image Business, Steve Powell's autobiography lifts the lid on the development of sports photography and photojournalism. With a no holds barred account of his life as a working photographer and business innovator, he tells of covering world-beating sporting successes and occasional failures, and of how he built the Allsport Photographic agency into an industry leader that made him a millionaire. "The authors' experiences are so vast and often outrageous that it's easy to forget that this is a true story." L Lemay. He has worked with everyone from world beating powerboat racers to Olympic greats such as Seb Coe and Daley Thompson. Muhammad Ali, Bjorn Borg, Seve Ballesteros and Diego Maradona have all been his subjects during a lifetime of capturing iconic images. "In a book market full of often told stories, this is a unique and compelling read." MarcoVB. Unique insights into the athletes and administrators who shaped sport over thirty years could only come from a true insider. He gives a fascinating and fast-paced narrative of a career that began on the gritty streets of London and took him to every global arena where sport is played, working with every major publication and sponsor as he developed ways to help them deliver their messages. - "This book is right up there with Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog"." Anonymous Powell reveals the struggles of an emerging independent agency as it fought to gain recognition, how it helped break the union stranglehold on Fleet Street and established Allsport and its photographers as the go-to source for all that was best in the emerging sports photography industry. - "This is a thoroughly entertaining book and, I believe, an important one." R Bundy. Follow his riveting personal narrative as he describes how he overcame personality clashes that almost brought the agency to its knees and how riding the tide of advancing technologies helped create a unique business model. Always just one step ahead of the opposition, his career mirrors how he harnessed fast moving changes in the industry to create his own unique place in sports media history. "(The author) has you feeling as if you are right there living it alongside him." Anonymous. This is the story of the man who built the world's biggest and most famous sports photography business and under whose guidance, became the first official photographer to the International Olympic Committee and worked with every major sporting organisation, governing body and athlete in Europe, and North America. "A truly inspiring read, by a truly inspiring guy. His life, his travels keep you reading until the end. What a life, great read." J Tilley. Finally, the book traces with engaging candour his learning curve in preparing the company for sale, turning the business of capturing images into capitalising images as a business. The buyer was Mark Getty and guided by Powell, Allsport became a bedrock in the rapidly emerging Getty Images and made Powell more successful than he could have imagined.

This book provides an informal biography of the wunderkind who became one of America's greatest living artists and most well-known architects. Many are familiar with the art and architectural design work of Maya Lin, but the compelling details of her personal background are less well known. This book not only focuses upon Lin's substantial achievements throughout her life, but also presents Maya Lin's "prehistory," describing family events in China that led to her parents' flight to the United States. Author Donald Langmead guides readers through Lin's ancestry and family connections in precommunist China; her childhood and youth in Athens, Ohio; the story behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; her career after 1982 (by decades); and emphasis on environmental conservation. Written for a young adult and general readership, Maya Lin: A Biography provides an up-to-date description of how she became one of the most famous and respected artists in America. Provides a timeline of Maya Lin's significant life events, artworks, and exhibitions Includes various photographs to accompany the text Contains a bibliography organized by types of sources, including writings by Maya Lin, books, monographs and catalogues, transcripts of interviews, and videos Includes an index of important people and artworks

Laura Knight (1877-1970) was one of the most distinguished women artist of the early 20th century with an international reputation. This highly readable and objective biography covers her early years in Nottingham, her relationship with her husband Harold, life in the artists colonies of Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast, her immersion in the world of ballet, the circus and theatre and her travels in Europe and America. It also examines her role as Official War Artist during World War II and recorder of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46. This revised and updated book offers so much more than just an account of an artist's work, it allows the reader to experience the vibrant personality of the artist as well as the darker shades of her personality. It gives this portrait of an artist depth and perspective.

James Cahill presents a review of a new exhibition by the renowned artist Francesco Clemente,(b.1952) exploring his first show in London for seven years. The monograph includes a conversation recorded with the artist in which he discusses the new paintings, and the ideas which grounded their development. Clemente embodies a binding of different cultures: the Western Italian Renaissance, Eastern philosophy of Buddhism and the Mandala; formed in a life divided between New York and India. The exhibition of fourteen works at Blain|Southern, Hanover Square, is entitled 'Mandala for Crusoe' and runs until 26th January 2013. Francesco Clemente (b. 1952, Naples, Italy) is a renowned artist from the Neo-Expressionist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1970 he studied architecture at the University of Rome, and began to exhibit his drawings, photographs and conceptual works in Europe. From 1973, he travelled regularly to India, and in 1981 he moved to New York. He collaborated with close friends, notably the poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and reacting against a wave of anti-painting sentiment among critical circles, Clemente initiated a series of collaborative paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Since the mid-1980s, Clemente's work has been the subject of many international solo exhibitions, including; Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1984 - 5); Kunstmuseum Basel (1987); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); Royal Academy of Arts, London (1990); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994 - 5); Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999 - 2000); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); Museo MAXXI, Rome (2006); Museum MADRE, Naples (2009); and more recently at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2011). His works have also been included in notable group exhibitions including Documenta 7 in 1982 and the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1995. Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Blain|Southern)