Art in Montreal

Fruit bowls, dolls and their dismembered limbs, stickers, and what look like renderings of film stills are what make up the minimal contents of Alexis Lavoie ’s latest show at Simon Blais . Childhood imagery has long been part of his work. This used to be theatricalized in a deliberate way, working on larger canvases with architectural settings. There were also clear and consistent nods to Francis Bacon and to media events like Abu Ghraib, all slit in amid the birthday decorations for a kid’s party. These paintings (selected from work made between 2019-2022) don’t have that scope of content. Lavoie’s latest oils follow the direction to greater minimalism that he seems to have been going in over his past few shows. This is true in terms of his treatment of surfaces, his range of referents, and his use of scale. The imagery primarily consists of doll limbs, fruit, and bowls. There is a studied sense of painting plastic while flattening the plasticity of the paint application as much

In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read. - Bruce Chatwin Diyar Mayil ’s Houseguest at Centre Clarke contains a series of objects that conjure a domestic space. Its loosely legible objects (a clock, a broom, a medicine cabinet, a table etc.) are obscured by being covered with a thin, textured material that vaguely resembles skin. More explicitly, it seems like a representation of skin. Before entering the narrow room where these objects are stationed, there is an accompanying text by Mojeanne Behzadi that provides a welter of trite cliches to guide you through: Mayil invites you into a space of tension and vulnerability. She asks you, its guest, to consider your positionality and relationship to home, land,

  These two exhibitions at Occurrence are both architecture-heavy. It is an interesting juxtaposition with each set suggesting something quite different, not necessarily complementary. Noémie Weinstein, Solariums A set of paintings, they are controlled exercises in clashing modes of abstraction knit together through a clear set of intersecting parts that each offer a different mode of painterly articulation. Based on found and personal source material, these images are readily legible as solariums and other spaces where wet and light intersect, rich in patterning. Instantly, deliberate or not, in terms of imagery and colour scheme, Weinstein’s warm-cool graded paintings are reminiscent of the aesthetics associated with vaporwave and comparable slightly melancholy nostalgia nods to the 1980s. Thematically, Weinstein’s suite of images deals with the threshold where interior and exterior meet. This is done in a lot of very blatant ways. Almost everything in her figurative selection

Jessica Houston, The Long Haul   Jessica Houston ’s exhibition Over the Edge of the World offers a set of alternative history narratives constructed around polar exploration. It relies upon a set of different material approaches (collage, video, objects, oil painting, and ink), each discretely investigating a different perspective on the space. This includes a feminist alternative history of exploration, surrealist imagery of exploration that takes on a nearly mystical quality, maps, and collages fashioned largely from National Geographic magazine. In this respect, the show makes many of the same rhetorical gestures, and probes some of the same issues as Patrick Bérubé’s more enigmatic and humorous Mother Rock! exhibition in the same space a few months ago (March-April). Spanning two large rooms and broken into half a dozen distinct sections, Houston’s exhibition is sprawling, each aspect adding a different spin to her basic theme. Presumably, the scale is intended to convey

Rose-Marie Arbour’s L’art qui nous est contemporain (1999) was one of the first extended attempts to conceptualize what the Contemporary Art that developed in Québec consisted of. In examining this issue, she set the province against models that had been established in the United States and Europe. {All quotations are my translation.} Arbour’s examination of Contemporary Art as it evolved in Québec is situated between two key statements. First: “This essay is rather an attempt to historically link artistic aims of the relatively recent past with others that are current, for the purpose of reflecting on the links that can be sketched that could mutually illuminate them.” [Arbour, 137] Second: “Today, the international is based in part on the local, contrary to what prevailed in the days of modernism when universal values were advocated in opposition to particularities and singularities. The contemporary is, in this respect, post-modern.” [Arbour, 138] These two contentions are c