Art in Montreal

Julie Tremble 's Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies at Dazibao consists of two video installations that take up the space of the gallery. The first, Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies , is a four-channel installation of 3D animations offering a set of distinct tableaux depicting the birth of the solar system, pre-life mineral formations, and fossilizations. The second is Luce RTX3090 (2022): This speculative fiction is situated in 2062. A digital rendering of the iconic Québec actress Luce Guilbeault is 127 years old (in reality Luce Guilbeault died in 1991 from cancer). She chronicles how in order to increase workforce productivity every person on the planet now undergoes a mandatory anti-aging treatment that maintains the body as though they are 25 years old. But, in order to control overpopulation, at 65 years old, their bodies turn to dust. Within the same introspective monologue, she also considers how her life as an actress, captured on film, will contribute to her own im

Jessica Eaton ’s Mariphasa lupine lumina at Bradley-Ertaskiran takes its title from the imaginary flower central to the old horror movie Werewolf Of London (Stuart Walker, 1935). In the film, a British botanist travels to Tibet to find the rare flower which only blooms by moonlight. Blooming is also equated with the botanist becoming a werewolf. Murder (especially of what one loves) is the only means to avoid full “transvection.” The flower is thought to be the only antidote for those who suffer from lycanthropy, a disease that makes one neither man nor wolf but some demonic creature, described as “the grotesquely familiar.” The film is littered with references to the collapse of distinctions between the plant and animal kingdom, the erosion of sleep and waking states, and the world as a carnivorous zoo. Much of its first third concerns the botanist deploying all manner of lights on the plant, Charles J. Stumar’s cinematography giving the whole thing a mysterious silvery glow. It

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.

{I will preface this by stating that I don’t think I enjoyed another show in the city so much this past year.} According to the exhibition essay for Mia Sandhu 's Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You at Patel|Brown : It's not just the earthly colour palette that triggers olfactory hallucinations of musty shag-carpets, smokey floral upholstery, and dusty rattan furniture. All elements in Sandhu's drawings come together to produce a synaesthetic reaction — you can smell, hear, taste, and feel her staged environments. And you do so in the position of voyeur. However, the aesthetics of the exhibition as a whole have far less to do with pornography in the 1970s – particularly in its North American form (it looks more British/Scandinavian) – than with the aesthetics of sitcoms and game shows. There is far more The Price is Right than Penthouse on display.