Art in Montreal

  Eddy Firmin 's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr , employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on. The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.

  According to the accompanying text by Catherine Barnabé, Maryam Eizadifard ’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica “attempts to sense the effects that spaces have on the body. Specifically, in places where the body has no reference point. She is attentive to the imprint of the body’s memory that can be awakened by theses spaces. A smell, a familiar atmosphere, the handling of an object can arouse a buried memory and, suddenly, a new environment becomes a point of reference.” The exhibition uses a few different tactics to approach this. The text goes on to explain that the artist ritualistically cut herself off from “the outside world” and stayed in a basement in Terrbonne which, by environmental analogy, reminded her of her childhood in Iran. It was here, under these experimental conditions, that she made the drawings that form the base of the work. Eizadifard has created three distinct areas: spanning two walls are a series of glass pieces with photos suspended in them; on another

At Occurrence , Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf, deuxième itération , follows on from the first’s “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition.” This time, The Empty S(h)elf engages the archive in a more direct reflection on the role of language and subjectivity: here concerned with how the acquisition of language defines one’s sense of self and simultaneously separates self and other—the primordial being that exists outside of language. In this instance, the “other” is represented by the main character in a story by Franz Kafka entitled “A Report to an Academy”: an ape recounts how he survived and escaped life in a zoo by mimicking human actions, eventually adopting speech to become a circus performer. An analogy to the construction of the self and even the “escape” into becoming an artist might be suggested. Created in collaboration with graphic designer Réjean Myette and with sound elements by Melissa Grey and David Morn

Molinari, the 1960s at the fondation Guido Molinari displays 9 of his acrylic paintings, 2 seriagraphs, 1 sculpture, a collage, and some preliminary sketches. It takes up the entire exhibition space, including the vault. Some remnants of the artist’s studio are maintained in a corner and can be peered into. While the juxtaposition of differentiated areas gives the show a very loose developmental narrative, not much else helps it along. The wall texts are primarily quotations from reviews and catalogues which provide a broad suggestion of the theoretical undepinnings of some of the work. The small historicizing texts and images, displayed by dates as in a ledger, provide an extremely vague context. But it is context that seems otherwise absent. The 60s were a crucial period in his work and the mechanics of the art world in Canada at the time go some way to explaining why he became one of the country’s few high-profile artists.