Art in Montreal

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

  If the previous review examined two very different ways that the “haunted” was presented, this time around is another way of presenting “spirit.” In both of those instances, the mediation of spirit and the performative spiritualization of this mediation were central. And in one of those exhibitions, the hunt for the spirit was expressed largely through a parody of generic church forms, a use of the supposed spiritual significance of monochromes, and the mystique of tourist imagery. In Jeremy Shaw ’s Localize Affect at Bradley|Ertaskiran , something close to this is played out more directly and, importantly, not filtered through romantic mystique but a sense of the demonstrative. Atypically for the gallery, this exhibition spans both of its floors. At the entrance is a series of photos of stuttered bodies which have been manipulated by processes to convey the impression of intense experience. They are rendered in a fashion familiar from high modernist and fashion photography ...

This week we will look at two current exhibitions that overlap in framing and style, one stressing the elliptical and the other softness. At Blouin|Division is Ellipses by Angela Grauerholz , featuring work that spans from the 1980s until a couple of years ago. The retrospective quality reinforces the retrospective content of the images, both of which tend to suggest an indifferent (or at least foggy) temporality. While there have been some distinct tangents in her career, there is not much indication of them here. What is on display is the kind of thing she has been best known for (and which has been central to her other more or less retrospective shows), namely photos of display spaces (galleries, museums, gardens) and the various windows to the world that they echo (door and window frames as stand-ins for the frames around art or their devices of capture and vice versa). The gallery frames it this way : Grauerholz’s images have the preternatural ability to be experienced as fra...

  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 caus...

In the bunker of Bradley|Ertaskiran is Joseph Tisiga’s exhibition, It was God the whole time . Consisting of ten paintings and five sculptures, these are framed by the accompanying text this way: Tisiga indulges in our perceived expectations of his paintings; interrupting familiar scenes or genres with critical or comedic relief. These disruptions are often shocking or amusing, like an inside joke or personal musing only the artist is privy to. […] Tisiga’s work oscillates between the recognizable and the uncanny, the real and the absurd. [np] A recurring character in Tisiga’s work, the seemingly simple mask doubles as an exercise in language making. Tisiga, a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation, reflects on how Kaska do not have a readily apparent visual aesthetic for objects or imagery. Within his works, Tisiga contemplates the construction of different modes of signifying as a necessary preservation tool for future Kaska. Yet, despite his commitment to unpacking visual identity...

  This week it is several different shows from Pictura . Louis-Philippe Côté ’s La chambre aux miroirs at Simon Blais consists of two quite different bodies of work. This is a strategy that seems to be in keeping with his general practice over the past few years. To one side are these hazy, warm-toned canvases that seem packed with art historical allusions and are loosely divided in patterns that suggest frames within frames. As such, they tend to suggest a form of analyzing the image, dissecting it, but in a way that does not clarify its constitutive aspects but blurs them.  To the other side are a series of collage/abstract paintings. A warm, flat colour falls in the background upon which a more pastel ground is built. Squares are set at each extreme of the canvas and images are added. This kind of visual combination, quite common among painters within the city in the late 1960s and early 70s, seems imbued with a different quality by Côté, within which this encounter bet...

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...

A Symphony of Untold Depths at Galerie Nicolas Robert features the work of seven artists and Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley|Ertaskiran has work by thirteen. Both group shows are arranged around a broad theme. They pair interestingly since one is largely about projecting a face (or some other body part) onto the world and the other is about a world without faces. The results are a mixture of the sensual and slightly unnerving. The Bradley|Ertaskiran show is broader in scope and this thins it out a bit. A few of the works don’t quite belong and don’t add much, in particular two paintings by Janet Werner . The painting of hers that does fit, Moore , sits at the front of the exhibition. Encountered upon entrance, it is a little nightmarish work: loosely handled figures in a landscape suggesting something between the Historic rape genre that was popular for a while in Salon painting and the earth mother Primitivism popular among Modernists. It’s paired, appropriately enough, with a very d...