Art in Montreal

  The latest show at Blouin|Division, Le temps passe lentement , features work by Tammi Campbell , An Te Liu , Sarah Stevenson , Simon Hughes , Matthew Feyld , and Daniel Langevin . It is a mixture of sculpture and wall art. While exploiting the appearance of being abstract or non-objective, it is not. With its stress on the similar, on miming and homage, it is closer to drag than it is to Modernism. And it is clearly closer to the sort of Pictures art that was fashionable in the 1980s. It shares a lot more with re-photographing photos than it is like the painting that that it borrows its style and imagery from. That kind of work, which is what I assume the accompanying text is very vaguely referring to as “Post-Modern” with all its “arch ( ironique )” qualities, was also quite different. The work of the 80s played against scale more, had a detachedness to it that concentrated on the ways that the work was being re-mediated and tended to question referentiality. It could be caustic

Stephanie Temma Hier ’s Roadside Picnic at Bradley|Ertaskiran consists largely of stoneware sculptures cast from trash found near the artist’s home. These are arranged to suggest A meadow, a picnic, a gathering; apple cores, bottles, cigarette butts, charred remains. This is the scene of the 1971 sci-fi novella Roadside Picnic by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, chronicling familiar items left behind from visiting extraterrestrials, uncanny matter from another world. This is also the stuff of Stephanie Temma Hier’s world: ants, trash, birds of prey, teeth, fish, and bones abound. […] …always straddling a fine line between alluring and grotesque. Beyond the perils of consumption, we find a world where the nostalgia for lost innocence takes on new meanings. And yet, the sheer scope of Hier’s pieces does not lessen the care or sentimentality imbued into each object; sweet, comic relief and personal mementos are sprinkled throughout. The installation features trash

Volupté , the new group show at Blouin|Division , features the work of 8 artists: Amanda Ba, Geneviève Cadieux, Shona McAndrew, GaHee Park, Elena Redmond, Hiba Schahbaz, Corri-Lynn Tetz, and Chloe Wise. It joins a set of erotic art shows that have been seen in the city over the past year (such as Mia Sandhu , Hannaleah Ledwell , Kara Eckler and Caroline Schub ), although it is notable for being the least ambitious or thoughtful of them, as well as the most uneven in quality. According to its press materials, in [b]ringing together a group of female-identifying artists from various backgrounds, Volupté aims to draw an alternative portrait of pleasure, one that dispels masked fears about the emancipation of female pleasure outside of patriarchal control. [p] The artists brought together in this project are exploring desire in its various expressions, whether it is psychological, physical, sensory, or erotic. Pleasure is represented as complex and multifarious and often posited at a wi

Chloe Wise , In Loveliness of Perfect Deeds at Blouin|Division Subjecting whatever Wise’s work supposedly means to criticism is on the same level as making jokes about Boris Johnson. It’s taking the bait of the media image that has been constructed around her (as well as presumably by her) and which allows her to sit comfortably in air-headed profiles for Elle Canada and Interview . However, there is something tantalizing about that, even if it makes you a fool for engaging at all. Instead, it is better to simply look at the work in situ, an object to be stumbled into at the end of the long corridor in the unfortunately designed space of Blouin|Division. If there could be such a thing as twee nostalgia for a past generation of hipster cliche, it would exist here, less in the overt sense of its content, than in the manner in which it is arranged. It’s the arrangement that lingers because the rest is fairly forgettable, presumably a deliberate effect as one scrolls through the pro