Reviews: Radar at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau; Honorer le bois, révéler l’intime at Circa; Off the Grid at McBride Contemporain; Monument politique poème performatif at Skol; Alexis Gros-Louis at Galerie B-312
The group show Radar at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau does not have much unity. It is figurative and not; it contains painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. There is some extremely loose representational concern, but resonance between the works is hardly laboured, even though some can be detected. It is also uneven, so I will focus on the better work.
Marie Danielle Duval is back with more of the same of what she has shown there and elsewhere. She continues her obsessive attention to pattern and the melding of the figure to décor. The fusion of figure and detail comes through more here than before and the heads of her figures continue to have a floating quality, as though she can’t commit to a full-on mimetism between figure and ground. These themes are coincidentally suggested in titles for Kimberly Orjuela’s sculptures, which are a mixture of figures and objects, with the former far superior to the latter.
The two stand-outs in the show are the pieces by Karam Arteen and Mallora Lowe Mpoka. Self-taught, Arteen’s work, presumably deliberately, is nested in the idioms common to a lot of folk or “outsider” art. Drawing on found historical and film imagery, he works up either crude but quite effective small-scale drawings with a strong sense of humour. Or he presents larger painted works which are broken up into different types of linear blocks and patterns on which are superimposed the contours of faces and clothes (the figures register as clothes and heads and barely seem to have living bodies). The heads are not in the mode of caricature, which stresses individual characteristics to an extreme, but something closer to a vague resemblance that is distorted until it takes on an animated and depersonalizing quality.
Mpoka, meanwhile, presents a trio of works that concentrate on the collapse between the support and the image. Set on black plinths are various cracked tiles which have some minor variations in tones (blues, brown, greys) that prevent them from becoming monochrome, unlike the flat black of the base, they are reflective of light, and this allows for gleaming puddles on their surface beneath the almost monochromatic engraved cameos, the figures of which are opaquely rendered to give them a ghostly quality.
At Circa Honorer le bois, révéler l’intime (co-curated by Émilie Granjon et Mariana Jiménez), features the work of Mathieu Gotti, Myriam Simard-Parent, and Ingrid Syage Tremblay. While wood may be the central focus, what tends to trump this is the matter of supports. The painted plinths of Tremblay, the ashy ground that Gotti places under his figures, and the lack of any distinction between the support and the object in many of Simard-Parent pieces are what give the exhibition most of its weight. The works of Gotti and Tremblay take away from the potential power of the supports as autonomous objects by weighing them down with less interesting sculptures.
The work of Simard-Parent is an indexing of her coming to age, largely through anecdotal shapes like socks and ice cream cones. It is the richness of the play of wood grains and the elongation of shapes that the lengthy or stuttered bases offer that prevents this from sliding into corniness and also allows the blatant humour of the “faces” in wood to come through more effectively.
Meanwhile, the stand-outs in the exhibition Off the Grid at McBride Contemporain are the pieces by Lewis & Taggart, which do what a lot of the work in the show at Circa seemed to be striving for with substantially more precision. Gridded out along two walls, the small works are elegant and condensed, almost perfectly playing the variations of grain against one another, with the slightest disturbance to its smooth transitions taking on added intensity.
The accompanying text, which applies the most persuasively to the work of Barry Allikas, states
The grid armature has been among the most common and dominant compositional strategies in modern and contemporary art, the go-to underpinning of visual organization for movements as disparate as cubist figuration and all-over abstraction. It can be claimed as a central symbol of art in our time. It is also commonly understood to represent society as such, a synecdoche for civilization and its industrial energy network, ‘The Grid.’ Conversely, to be ‘off the grid’ has come to mean to be an outsider, deliberately outside of convention and potentially even modernity per se. As such, the phrase carries significant social power, and a certain tongue in cheek humour, a wise joke, a knowing element of critique and protest.
Another interesting set of comparisons can be drawn between two other shows currently on at the Belgo, that of Alexis Gros-Louis at Galerie B312 and the group show Monument politique poème performatif at Skol. [The group is made of Julie-Isabelle Laurin, Félipe Goulet-Letarte, Marilou André, and Kristel Tremblay.] Whatever they are ostensibly about, both shows are rigidly gridded in terms of strategies and discursive framing, and about as conventional as possible, often to the point that it feels almost like self-parody (I assume it is not). Indeed, the notion of the grid that the McBride show used as its frame could be more fruitfully applied to these two exhibitions.
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Guy Sioui Durand’s critique applies to both the B312 and Skol exhibitions, namely that the instrumentalization of art that they employ is its political logic and content and this is identical to that of the state. The strategies and tropes employed by both are a laundry list of standards of institutional art. The Skol show even has a little pile of academic books in the corner as an appeal to authority.
The exhibition at Skol is an extension of a series of workshops which seem to be about embodying the most generic terms of Contemporary Art practice possible:
In addition to presenting the living archive of the Monument politique poème performatif, Skol members participating in the workshop will be invited to reflect together on the themes running through the Monument poème: systemic racism, legitimacy, identity, responsibility, and action art in public space. [p] With four non-indigenous artists, historical material and performance art will be used as a medium to explore new ways of transmitting memory through the performative monument and its documentation. This will allow participants to develop alternative narratives rooted in lived experience and grounded in a territory.
The show, a kind of Jungle Jim update for Kidults, is a hodgepodge (it follows the compulsory edict of interdisciplinarity) and features video, text print-outs, some loose satire, some found object collages, a use of reproduced texts in a grid formation, bio-abstract symbolic blood to obvious signify violence, “participation” in the street to stress social functionality, documentation and educational modules in line with the norms of “neolib” style, and so on.
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The interesting thing about the show is the extent to which it correctly (if perhaps unconsciously) recognizes Indigenous art as just another genre that can be appropriated, trivializes its supposed content, and abstracts it all into a fairly rote set of aesthetic strategies. It partakes of the general prop quality that is common to art in the city, especially among the younger, and most often among those who show in artist-run centres. Its politics match its style, priggish, clichéd, and utilitarian, and are cast in an enjoyably kitschy set of forms that give it an overall cartoon quality. I am not deriding it when I suggest that its primary strength is its dumb formulaic quality, that it has all the aesthetic wealth of birthday party decorations from Dollarama.
The show 978-0816630288 at Galerie B312 is more complicated, much prettier, less funny. It is cooler in tone and more austere in general. To put it differently, it is more academic (he is a graduate student). While his exhibition is also primarily a spectacle with a dubious referent, the methodology seems more circuitous and the reference even dimmer.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a black sculpture/structure created by the artist which is included at the far end of the space and echoed throughout by a series of monochromes. The title evidently comes from the ISBN for a book about Gilles Deleuze (that this is a paratextual reference is important since it indicates the absence of the philosopher and the incursion of institutional mediation and domestication over intimacy).
…this scale model of a building whose original, overlooking the city of Scarborough, reproduces a medieval tower in the vocabulary of consumerist modernity. The artist is interested in the misunderstandings produced by life-size dreams, such as stitching past and present together by associating progress and profitability, many of which are present in the treatment of First Nations culture. According to philosopher Gilles Deleuze, all dreams contain a terrible will to power: “Beware the dreams of others.” Against the nightmare of culture becoming folklore, Gros-Louis takes the side of degrowth. Reducing a strong urban sign to a toy, he places it in a garden and paints it black.
Complementary monochromes pop up elsewhere, set beside bits of minerals, and all set in contrast to a series of illuminated boxes in which the barely legible white on yellow-white of various historical/archival bits and pieces have been placed. While this stark strategy (interrupted to reinforce it by two large, more colourful pieces that suggest the minerals) gives a fair amount of unity to the wall works, the floor pieces are mostly integrated thanks to stark blacks and strict shapes which intensify the tactile qualities (fur, etc.) within them.
As a set of visual strategies (the monochrome as historical pathos, the fusion of abstraction and traditional work, the use of archival materials and minimal installation, monoliths, the employment of “found nature”), this is all completely generic Aboriginal Contemporary Art. It is better in terms of its consistency and effectiveness than a lot of other work that has crossed comparable territory lately. As with the show at Skol, it is entirely possible to view it on a surface level and discard the referential gestures, which at B312 are a great deal less self-evident.
The exhibition statement highlights a few things. Essentially a portrait of the artist, it presents him as a “paradox[ical]” figure, identifying him with broader “contemporary Aboriginal life and culture.” The paradox seems to come from the “contradiction” between his role in institutions and his desire for their reformation.
While this work shows how the land can be a powerful narrative tool, it also reveals how this science was founded on the certainty of settlers’ rights to native lands. Thus, many artifacts are deemed ‘problematic’ because they have been removed from their cultural context, creating significant historical gaps and leaving room for a range of interpretations regarding their potential functionality.
Relying on an appeal to the problem of “decontextualized artifacts,” the text suggests that we “shouldn't be afraid to sit with the discomfort and uncertainty that such an approach proposes.” It seems to fit snugly into a very familiar set of claims (de/contextualization) that are as institutionally dominant as the ones that he claims to be reforming and which are not any more credible. What would “discomfort and uncertainty” and “paradox” be implying here?
The strength of the Gros-Louis exhibition is that it ends up embodying the collapse of the potential meaningfulness of its gestures in a way that comparable shows tend to try much harder to run away from.
*Circa photos and second B312 photo are my own. The others come from the official gallery pages linked above.