* For a change, I have given the poor souls who write exhibition statements a break and not engaged with them. Inés Fernández-Shaw , Objects in the Mirror May Are Closer Than They Appear at Duran Contemporain The gallery walls are dotted with a baker’s dozen of paintings. The imagery mostly involves faceless nude female bodies, the different elements of the anatomy recombined in biologically impossible ways, or arranged in cropped clumps. When not heaped in a barely defined landscape, the bodies are placed in architectural or mirror-like frames. The flesh is rendered with a cosmetic finish and contrasted with the flat rendering of moon faces and birds. There is a playful eroticism to the work, but there is also a forced aspect that either highlights or subtracts from it, depending on the painting. That is her treatment of various other figurative elements, whether birds or the moon. Cast in a different style than the flesh, the contrast, I assume, should be jarring and give it a...
The Autumn season began with the city's second-funniest exhibition this year. It was at MICA and part of the multi-venue exhibition, Une assemblée pour le cosmos , which spreads across Galerie de l’UQAM , the Institut d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Adélard . (I attended the first two and did not make it to the Frelighsburg exhibition, which extends one of the works at UQAM.) According to one of the official exhibition statements The project invites viewers to take a renewed look at the cosmos, which has always captivated our imaginaries and shaped our relationship with the world. While the ambitions for space conquest dominate the current context, the participating artists bring forward a diversity of forms of knowledge and sensibilities through works that draw on affectively charged materials such as meteorites, stones, and sealskin, and a variety of media, such as sculpture, beadwork, installation, video, and sound. «Making Assembly» thus becomes a way to fos...