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Reviews: Judith Bellavance at Galerie DÈS; Embodied at Atelier 531; Pierre-Olivier Déry at Elektra; and Herman Kolgen at Art Mûr

This time around, I highlight a set of interrelated concerns in four seemingly disparate exhibitions. Part of the Post-Invisibles Biennale , Histoires de disparition by Judith Bellavance was at Galerie DÈS . The exhibition involved a series of approximately life-sized photos of clothing that once belonged to the departed. Not as austere as mourning or typical funereal display garments, they were everyday or nightwear, which added to their diaphanous quality and the muted sense of illumination their production treatment infused them with. These were displayed hanging horizontally in the middle of the gallery space, suspended in clusters. Images were set back-to-back, and their presentational hanging doubled the image of the clothes hanging.  Bellavance framed it all as a counterpart to her work as an embalmer: To engage with my creative themes of loss and disappearance, I have been working in the funeral sector since 2019. This proximity constantly heightens my awareness o...
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Reviews: "Sixty Years Ago" at Château Dufresne; "Créer à rebours vers l’exposition" at Vox; "Street Actions" at Optica; "The Art Gallery Problem" at Dazibao

  This review is a trifle long, but the four exhibitions I discuss seem to dovetail quite nicely into one another and, in context, perhaps illuminate some points better than they would if discussed in isolation. What follows is mostly about curation and only secondarily about the artworks themselves. To start with an anecdote: I was touring MFA studios a few years ago (seven or eight, I think) and was told that one student was making art for wildlife, specifically, beavers. I naively assumed this must have meant they were doing wilderness installations intended solely for an animal audience to interact with. That sounded great. Unfortunately, that was just the “concept.” What they were actually doing was making underwhelming mixed-media sculptures that resembled discards from a costume shop if they’d fallen off a truck on the highway and then been stitched together. The work was produced for the typical display spaces and leaning on the discursive norms of Contemporary Art. T...
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Reviews: Miles Rufelds' “A Hall of Mirrors” at Centre Vox and Guillaume Lachapelle’s "Points de fuite" at Art Mûr

  Miles Rufelds ' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations. It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art histor...
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Review: Kent Monkman: "History Is Painted by the Victors" at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors is the latest large single-artist exhibition to open at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. A mid-career retrospective, it was organized in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum . John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, co‑curated it with Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA. As usual with such exhibitions, the press previews, notably from official broadcasters such as the English and French CBC, were effusive. Eshrāghi told Westmount Magazine that, “The stories Monkman tells offer crucial insights into contemporary realities for Indigenous peoples, while questioning dominant culture and society as a whole.”  A social media post from the institution markets it this way: ““My name is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and I come from the stars.” [p] Meet Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical), the fierce, time-traveling character cr...
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