Art in Montreal

Taking up the entirety of Centre Vox’s exhibition spaces is Greek artist Janis Rafa ’s Landscape Depressions . It is part of Vox’s Chronopolitics programming, the aim of which is “to provide a forum for artists advocating ethical stances on the future, and to prompt critical reflection on the social and political issues around the notion of time.” A slightly different version of the exhibition under the title Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me ran at the Eye Filmmuseum. At the entrance is the introductory text and the video, A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer , in which dead birds fly through the sky again thanks to an explosion. The remainder of the exhibition spans four distinct spaces. The first space shows The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth . It involves three screens, each of which tends to be dominated by light in a specific colour. On each screen is a different view of horses being trained for racing. They have metallic bits stuck in their mouths, they run on treadmills,...

  Monumentality is a theme that tends to crop up a bit in the city. In the past, we have noted the monument as history’s way of ironizing the present , the monument as the skeletal exhibition of genre clichés , and so on. Two exhibitions currently on at the Belgo follow a comparable line, one explicitly linking this to the matter of monuments and the other not. They each share something in common with another tendency that we have discussed recently, namely a pseudo-religious tendency . This has taken various forms, although notably, it incorporated aspects of the architectural components of religious ritual either as concentrated devices for viewing spiritual ecstasy or as something verging more on a folkish re-enactment from a rural learning centre.  Camille Jodoin-Eng ’s Sun Shrine occupies the rear of Patel|Brown. Two walls are painted in shades of orange and yellow. In the foreground of the space is what amounts to a little gazebo, its walls coated in reliefs made of s...

Occupying the gallery facing the street on the second floor of Art Mûr is Mohadese Movahed ’s Voices of Feathers, Voices of Daggers. The show consists of a series of paintings that focus primarily on walls of various kinds. Some are brick, some stone, some are barrier walls, some shops walls, house walls, and so on. These walls are typically framed by or juxtaposed with windows, doorways, and other architectural implements and elements. Occasionally, a fragmented or obscured body part will be seen, but most of the time the presence of the human figure comes in the form of shadows cast on the walls. Within the grids of the walls appear bits of graffiti, posters, and the occasional flower. According to the accompanying text by Sara Trapara , this work is rooted in the artist’s identity as an Iranian and relates the “psychological complexities of life under oppression.” This series explores how the built environment is altered by memories and experiences of trauma, oppression and vio...