Art in Montreal

This week, I leave Montr é al and travel to Hull to see a show at the Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais . Over the rusting bridges from the purgatory that is Ottawa, Hull is an eccentric mixture of heterogeneous architectural styles that garishly clash with one another thanks to the city’s history of consistently stunted growth, lopsided development, and near collapse. Passing by the rather sad Parc Jean Dallaire (still nowhere near as depressing as  Montréal ’s Parc Prudence Heward), I got lost navigating the circular streets and cul de sacs broken up by green paths and intersected by dead and overgrown rail lines. The university building housing the gallery feels more like a high school, seemingly dropped in at random beyond one of the main stretches, which itself was mostly devoid of people, only boulangeries run from the basements of converted houses and random massage parlours. This exhibition by Antoine Larocque was housed in a blank gallery space at the corner of a

Antoine Larocque ’s Acheter une maison, l’assurer et calicer le feu d’dan s at Galerie Laroche|Joncas is one of the more startling things I’ve seen in a Montréal gallery for some time. This is primarily down to how explicitly and aggressively Québécois it is, a trait that is increasingly rare in contemporary art in the province (not that it has been common since the 1970s). Unsurprisingly then, the works displayed explicitly link to the province in the 1970s, to the October Crisis ( Leur police attrapent un Chaoin radical ) and up to the presence of Legault ( François Legault ), as well as the marginal lives of the rural populace.