Art in Montreal

Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert have complementary exhibitions on the work of Betty Goodwin. The eponymous show has works in several media (prints, proofs, works on mylar, etc.) spanning a few decades and showing different aspects of her practice. It has a condensed retrospective quality. The other show consists mostly of photos taken by Geoffrey James of her studio for Canadian Art in 1994. Although there are a few colour works, almost everything in the two shows tends to black and white. This is not stark, but highly textured. Everything becomes about gradients and minute details. The James photos concentrate on all the objects of her practice, either seemingly carefully or haphazardly arranged on various surfaces, and given structure by the architecture that seems to hem them in. Aside from the rather underwhelming colour mylar pieces, most of the work was created when Goodwin was moving away from typical Pop style imagery to something more “personal.” The vest works tha

Stephanie Temma Hier ’s Roadside Picnic at Bradley|Ertaskiran consists largely of stoneware sculptures cast from trash found near the artist’s home. These are arranged to suggest A meadow, a picnic, a gathering; apple cores, bottles, cigarette butts, charred remains. This is the scene of the 1971 sci-fi novella Roadside Picnic by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, chronicling familiar items left behind from visiting extraterrestrials, uncanny matter from another world. This is also the stuff of Stephanie Temma Hier’s world: ants, trash, birds of prey, teeth, fish, and bones abound. […] …always straddling a fine line between alluring and grotesque. Beyond the perils of consumption, we find a world where the nostalgia for lost innocence takes on new meanings. And yet, the sheer scope of Hier’s pieces does not lessen the care or sentimentality imbued into each object; sweet, comic relief and personal mementos are sprinkled throughout. The installation features trash

This is the last part of my coverage of MOMENTA. In the previous two articles, I addressed the disparate implications of two of the key shows and how the one undid the other, and I examined how the logic of images , regardless of the framing imposed by artists and curators, tended to complicate or invert the officially sanctioned interpretations of their purported communicative content. In the first article , I looked at how the entire event was framed. This meant both its broader framing in the press through a rhetoric of crisis that exploited various medical metaphors, and the way that MOMENTA was more specifically conceptualized this year by its curator Ji-Yoon Han. In her concluding essay in the MOMENTA catalogue, the curator substantially extends the kind of panic discourse that was already employed as a plea for funding and publicity. She uses this to frame the event with an extraordinary amount of hyperbole. We are told that we live in a “frantic age” in which artists have lo

The new exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari takes a fundamentally different tack than its last few historical shows. Molinari the 60s and the 70s were both defined by decade, although this was limited to the highlighting of a small body of work and contained only slight means for contextually making their historical framing very meaningful. As a result, while interesting, the curation of the paintings did not typically shed much light on them, nor did it let either simply stand as a show of works. The latter quality is something that is clearly present in Art Mûr’s current show of Claude Tousignant works, mixing those from the 1950s with some more recent ones. Making very little effort to historicize them, they stand quite comfortably as another current exhibition. The show at the Molinari, by contrast, does something very different. Curated by Marie Fraser, L’œil attentif , is described as reconstructing “a fragment of the The Responsive Eye exhibition presented in 1965 at th