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Review: "A Light That Never Goes Out" at Fonderie Darling

A Light That Never Goes Out at Fonderie Darling features the work of Omar Castillo Alfaro , Camille Charbonneau , Jesús Hilario-Reyes , Simon Petepiece , Jeremy Shaw , and James Webb . It was curated by Renaud Gadoury . The exhibition fills both the large and small galleries and contains primarily sculptural and sound works. The large gallery is dimly lit and the small one brightly lit. There is a general expectation that the viewer will interact with the various works, an activity that ranges from holding a soundwork to one’s body to walking through structures or around them. Textual supplements are absent in the gallery spaces. Upon entering, the attendant informed me that it was an exhibition about the status of religion when people no longer attend church or other religious institutions. While this is scarcely accurate, the gist is that it investigates the numerous places where the “sacred” can be witnessed, something that, for whatever reason, seems to involve architecture or i...
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Reviews: Lynda Gaudreau at Centre Vox; Megan Wade-Darragh at Duran Contemporain; Wanda Koop at Blouin|Division; David Altmejd at Bradley|Ertaskiran

Lynda Gaudreau’s “Romances” at Centre Vox There are half a dozen basic elements to Gaudreau' s show. At the entrance is a wall of staggered images in a dark, makeshift alley. Once you walk through that, there is a little table with coloured lights and some magazines covered in plastic you can flip through. In the anteroom is a prop version of the type of press kiosk that once existed in Montréal, filled with stacks of tabloids, or the “yellow press.” There are two trailers projected for a giallo film (one at a time): one from the perspective of the investigation and one from the victims'. And there is a sound installation, consisting of fragments of music, dialogue, gasps, etc.   According to the accompanying text : The storyline, inspired by the aesthetics of Italian giallo cinema, proceeds through a series of crimes in which the victims’ eyes are mutilated. This motif references the drive and desire to see that is integral to cinema and visual culture. In both the giallo...

Review: Adam Basanta's Common Absurd at Oboro

Common Absurd is an exhibition of work by Adam Basanta at Oboro in the Salle Daniel-Dion et Su Schnee. The supplemental text by Neal Thomas frames it as a re-examination of the optimistic spin on the possibilities once posed by new technologies and networks. For the techno-optimists of the late 1960s, this burgeoning situation seemed to be paving a way to escaping from old dichotomies between users and use. As Neal relays it, “The user emerged as a catch-all referent for this new subjectivity, mixing consumer, creator, technician, actor, and audience member into a composite heroic position that anyone might plausibly occupy.” Yet, after more than half a century of this heroic posturing, the “‘creative user’ feels so much more like a mandated norm than an emancipatory possibility.” There are (at least) two different thematic directions from which you could approach the exhibition. One: as dealing with general concepts about the function of the user in the post-industrial era, how...

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...