Art in Montreal

If you have the misfortune of reading these posts regularly, you may have noticed the frequency with which I refer to propism , a term I do not think I have ever defined. The following is a deliberately crude and short essay that sets out to do so. As the “prop” in the term would indicate, this revolves around notions borrowed from the logic of the theatrical medium. Anthropomorphism Probably the most canonical discussion of theatricality in visual art comes from Michael Fried. 1967’s still highly controversial “Art and Objecthood” sought to delineate what he took to be two warring sensibilities, one that he associated with Modernist painting and sculpture and the other with the grey area between art and non-art that he associated with literalist (or more commonly termed Minimalist) art. He took literalism as defining itself as a position taken against Modernism. At bottom, this was a war of sensibilities and experience more than one of any deep ideological convictions. It was an op...

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...

  This week we deal with three shows that play with different types of fetish imagery. Unlike the more commonplace fetish imagery about “culture,” these are more overt in tackling eroticism. This is not to suggest that the culture fetish is not present, in fact, in two of the shows it is explicitly foregrounded. At Art Mûr is Diana Thorneycroft ’s exhibition of coloured drawings, Sing Into my Mouth . Thorneycroft has consistently changed strategies across her career. Her work divides easily into distinct directions and models that she has pursued for several years at a time. There have been thematic and stylistic consistencies within this. Her current drawings share something with her earlier ones depicting murdering one’s lovers and continue her interest in the perverse, whether that is taken as content or strategy. Throughout her career, there has also been a concern with either esoteric mythologies or more global ones subjected to various sorts of subversion. The more obviou...

The fall season is here and galleries are opening their doors again. The art spaces at the Gaspé relaunched last week with the halls including a poster declaring the ongoing panic about the decline of culture and its potential ruination. The point comes across with a certain degree of ambiguity in the wording and this provides a useful backdrop to what will be discussed in this article. This selection of reviews is organized in a more or less thematic manner. The theme is primarily monumentality and secondarily some other, maybe more interesting things. Monumentality is a pretty standard theme in art discourse, localized in discussions of its earliest iterations in religious art and territorial markings. Monuments are one clear way to leave a trace or mark-up a landscape. The term tends to conjure the sculptural but certainly is not limited to it. A monument often indicates and memorializes the passage of some historical event, standing in for it as a kind of presence that may cast a...