Art in Montreal

Curated by Trevor Kiernander and featuring artists from several countries, Reverb is part of the second edition of the Pictura Triennale (we looked at a very different exhibition from it last week). The event’s organizers define it as : a project that has been in constant development with the specific intention of collectively presenting the various formal, critical, and political positions of Montreal painting to a wider audience, with the aim of bringing international attention to Montreal, which is probably one of the central cities for painting in Canada. The works selected by Kiernander are on display at Art Mûr and form a miniature survey of trends that he has encountered over the past several years and which he frames in reference to the difficulties posed to painting in the post-internet era. Artists selected are Colin Canary, Beth Frey, Ian Gonczarow, Anaïs Goupy, Karine Guyon, Claudia Kleiner, Lauren Pelc McArthur, John Drew Munro, Ianick Raymond, and Megan Wade-Darrag

The three exhibitions this week may only seem very loosely related. In their own ways, they each imagine utopias, and they each do so with an appeal to the childish, whether in the form of illustration or through their “educational” posing. At Optica is Leyla Majer ’s Anticipating Hypersea. The accompanying text by Esther Bourdages states that Majeri is proposing an environment that brings together three bodies of work that showcase her research on the deconstruction and decolonization of prevailing ideas, borrowing themes associated with a kind of fictional ethnography and speculative biology. […] Plants and living things are the artist’s raw material. The exhibited hybrid assemblages are composed of gourds and ceramics. While some varieties of gourds, also called calabashes, are edible, most are not. They are generally cultivated not as food, but to serve as a recipient, an ornament, or a sound box. Their dissemination is the outcome of human migratory activity and natural eleme

This week we look at the two exhibitions running at galerie de l’UQAM: the group show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany ’s Espaces imprévisibles . Both are mostly interesting as genre exercises. They are pleasant there is not that much else at play. Each exhibition consists of running through a gambit of genre clichés, one by way of a group curated by a gender category and one by an individual assuming a symbolic role as the derivation of a genealogy. Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre was curated by Elise Anne LaPlante and involves the work of artists Caroline Boileau , Mimi Haddam , the collective Ikumagialiit (Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo), Daze Jefferies , Helena Martin Franco , Dominique Rey , and Winnie Truong . This is the third stop for the group exhibition. The works are in a variety of media (video, sculpture, watercolour, performance records, stenciled poetry, etc.) which are spread around the

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Refus global , that signature event that has been consistently taken as the harbinger of the province’s modernity, the icon of the passage from the mythical Grande noirceur to the equally mythical Révolution tranquille, that sign of the origin of multidisciplinary and the first moment of a proto-feminist art, etc. To reflect on this, here is a review of Sophie Dubois’ Refus global: Histoire d'une réception partielle (2017), based on her award-winning dissertation, and one of the most admirably anti-lyrical depictions of the function of Automatism in the province’s intellectual (or spiritual) life that has been published. Dubois’ basic concern is what allowed the original collection, possessed and read by so few initially (or subsequently), to reach the point that it could become a generic referent in pulp fiction by the end of the millennium. She asserts that “The survival of the work does not depend on internal factors

Last week’s reviews touched on the “poetic” attempt to do what amounts to pseudo-investigative journalism, avoiding the tabloid route by exploiting an arguably brassy form of performative religiosity to market its slim content. This was given an unsurprising phenomenological inflection (the links between phenomenology and the return to a vaguer and more “embodied” religiosity are well-known) through an appeal to attunement. Attunement, as Heidegger once pointed out, tends to go along with boredom, even when it is about looking at shoes. The conflict between boredom and attunement was avoided in the discussion last week and it will not get much play this time either. But there are a handful more incidents of poetic tuning in and out on display.  Something like this was at play in Patrick Beaulieu ’s Transvasements at Art Mûr. The work was created through his interaction with the various landscapes he passed through while aboard a tiny vessel as it “sailed from the Gironde estuary to