Reviews: Inés Fernández-Shaw at Duran; Anne-Renée Hotte at Centre Clark; Jessica Houston at Art Mûr; Klaus Scherübel at Fondation Molinari

* For a change, I have given the poor souls who write exhibition statements a break and not engaged with them.

Inés Fernández-Shaw, Objects in the Mirror May Are Closer Than They Appear at Duran Contemporain

The gallery walls are dotted with a baker’s dozen of paintings. The imagery mostly involves faceless nude female bodies, the different elements of the anatomy recombined in biologically impossible ways, or arranged in cropped clumps. When not heaped in a barely defined landscape, the bodies are placed in architectural or mirror-like frames. The flesh is rendered with a cosmetic finish and contrasted with the flat rendering of moon faces and birds.

There is a playful eroticism to the work, but there is also a forced aspect that either highlights or subtracts from it, depending on the painting. That is her treatment of various other figurative elements, whether birds or the moon. Cast in a different style than the flesh, the contrast, I assume, should be jarring and give it an edge. Instead, it feels forced and too easy, in the same way this has become a generic technique employed in a lot of the post-colonial genre as a way of illustrating “trauma” through a style index dubiously attached to history, but accidentally demonstrating the lack of it. 

 

The more interesting visual tension in the work is between the treatment of flesh and the frames within the work. The obvious thing would be to do the latter in a hard way to make the distance between the two rhetorics stark, intensifying the flesh as an object. Instead, they are treated in a thin and sketchy way, so the flesh retains a more indeterminate grounding.

It looks like the Magritte-inspired neo-pop surrealism that trended in the early 70s. The treatment of flesh is quite effective; the sensuality plays nicely with the distortion. If the manneristic treatment is familiar to the point that it ceases to be mannerism, at least it is more effective than the even more generic supplemental framing that the work receives in the exhibition text. 

I bring up this recently closed exhibition by a promising painter because it provides a nice contrast to the three shows described below, which share a fair amount in terms of their overall concepts and curatorial devices. They are variations on the mix-and-match game I have described previously, whereas the exhibition at Duran was essentially about not mixing and matching.

Anne-Renée Hotte, Les rencontres ne savent pas qu’elles ont lieu at Centre Clark

Hotte, who is one of the more intriguing artists of her generation in the province, has painted the larger exhibition space black. The floor remains a polished grey, and the space is broken up by screens on which videos are shown. They are all in black and white. They include a video of a crowd, various images of clouds set in a grid that is echoed by a grid of faces kissing, wrestlers, a baby drinking milk from a breast, close-ups of eyes in which the apparatus of the camera can clearly be seen reflected, and a woman dancing at a venue. There are also videos of insects flying and collecting around lights that nearly resemble planets in the darkness. 

There is an effective use of silence where many would have used drones or other ambient sounds. Taken collectively, the videos suggest some probing of collective union and isolation within collective union, of a poetic and vaguely cosmic unity between the insect world and that of the human. There is a sort of analogy at play, given either pathos by its staring eyes and quiet dirge-like movements, or a kind of frenzied depersonalization in the crowds or swarms. This provides it with a mix-and-match challenge, a game of charting out possible resemblances.

On a practical level, one wonders whether sealing the room off and covering the floor in black as well would have significantly intensified the experience of viewing the work, giving it a nearly hallucinatory quality. (Displays at Clark have gone so far in the past.) As is, it seems interrupted by the incursion of light and the distractions beyond its armatures. In fact, it is this aspect of display, more than the content of the work, that leaves an impression, seemingly stressing that it is an exhibition which enacts detachment while simultaneously implying that the viewer hovering around its screens is an insect. 

 

Jessica Houston, Water, Water, Everywhere | Nor Any Drop to Drink at Art Mûr

Spanning two rooms of the second floor of the gallery, Houston’s exhibition employs a variety of strategies to investigate themes and images from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), intersecting it deftly with Houston’s more general concerns with the issues (political, geological, aesthetic) related to the Arctic. [For a very different and entertaining probing of Coleridge, see Ken Russell’s Clouds of Glory] 

There is a video, several photographs, and numerous monochrome or minimalist pieces spread across the two spaces. Notably, the clusters these are placed in are framed distinctly, sometimes to the point of the theatrical. One space is left white, and the other is mostly painted blue. Some of it feels like Snowflakes: A Chapter from the Book of Nature (1863), if it were updated through some of the clichés of Contemporary Art.

The more interesting thing about it is how bookish it all comes across. In practice, the exhibition is a form of literary adaptation no less than any translation of a novel into a film. It comes off either like a set of footnotes or an adaptation of a text for children. Indeed, the legend format employed seems to be evolving as its own micro-genre in the city, with numerous instances of it regularly detectable for the past six or seven years. 

Essentially, it is another mix-and-match game where text and object are indexed to one another. There is something performatively childish (in the sense of a pedagogical orientation) about it all, whether in the works based on eight geometric forms on the south wall that suggest the shapes of old-block toys, or the nearly cartoonish quality of the blue space. In the latter case, this seems to make more sense given the underlying theme she’s outlining (down to the vials of too neat pigment). Although the more of her work I see, the less convinced I am that it is happily housed within the logic of gallery installation. The installation she had on the makeshift and clearly weathered walls around the development along Rue Molson and Espace Angus seemed to be pivoting toward something new.

Klaus Scherübel, Venise 1968: la Biennale de la contestation VOL. 30, curated by Marie-Eve Beaupré et Yun Wang at Fondation Guido Molinari

The Fondation continues to be one of the better curated spaces in the city. Whatever its failures in execution, it at least proposes interesting questions about what it means to construct a display. This is another of its experiments with micro-historical presentation. It deals with the controversies over the Venice Biennale of 1968, occurring amid student protests and political violence. Molinari and Ulysse Comtois were selected as representatives of Canada at the pavilion (the curator does an impressive job excising how controversial a figure of “the establishment” Molinari was in Montreal art circles). 

There are simultaneously historical objects “themselves” (paintings and sculptures) and a staging of their exhibition history in the form of large, blown-up photos which are propped up, exposed like pieces of the set on a soundstage. Leaning against one another, they suggest the “tepee” form that inspired the Biennale pavilion as well as the encased tree within it. Each object is numbered, and these numbers correspond to a grid of notes on the south wall of the space. A legend format is at play here, operating differently from the more narrative one the two video pieces, set to the side of the central exhibition, employ. The results are quite striking and evocative, although it’s less clear what they evoke. If the other instances of mix-and-match encouraged forms of analogical thinking, here it is more the disjunction between the elements than their mating that becomes stressed.

In the vault is a projection with a curatorial voiceover that contextualizes the Biennale in fairly generic terms within the norms of soixante-huitard mythology and categories. More interesting than the loose and superficial attempt to narrate the material is the way that these materials have been photographed. Unlike the clippings and letters placed in glass vitrines, the photographing of the documents intensifies the appearance of their material quality, making the contrasts and colours more vibrant, the clash of textures more evident, and their function as forms in a composition overriding their information value.

At the end of the legend/grid, we do get a remarkably short list of references to research to make the exhibition appear historicizing. But is it, or is it just the appropriation of a superficial rhetorical device (used naively) to make the exhibition appear like it is making a historical statement? In fact, all of the evidence tends to cast doubt precisely on the referential value of historical narrative as a marked contrast between the visual logic of the exhibition, which tends to collapse the distinction between object and form.

The Comtois and Molinari works are not simply presented “as-is”; they have been no less altered by the use of the space than the historical photos. Retaining their original colouring, they are stranded as something distinct from the grey functioning of narrative construction, presented as a non-unified armature. In both cases, you have spatialization working against the privileging of time (one of the basic prejudices of the historical imagination). The grid of notes and the use of number/labels only adds to the undermining of a persuasive narrativization. The legend game, of course, is closer to geography than history.

* Photos are from the official Instagram accounts of the galleries and artists. The photos from Fondation Molinari are my own.