If you think of artists as strange, unbalanced, complicated personalities whose natural habitat is somewhere on the margins, Herman Goodden is not about to change your opinion. But if you think books about art and artists are dull, academic, jargon-laden wastes of time, paper and ink, Goodden wants you to think again.

The Canadian artist Jack Chambers (1931-78) is the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario that runs until May 13 in the Signy Eaton Gallery. “Jack who?” you may wonder.

AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum acknowledges in the first paragraph of his foreword to this show’s catalogue that Chambers’ “work has all but disappeared” from the national consciousness and that this exhibition is “a project of repositioning,” to pull “back into the spotlight an artist indispensable to a history of the image in 20th-century Canada.”