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

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 between medi

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

  Three different shows of mostly painting this week. One of these was quite good while the others were not to widely varying degrees. They are all settled in vague mythological spaces. Both Leong and Jaouich’s shows are afflicted with a hysterical form of reactionary humanism while Daigneault’s is an admirably concise rendering of pessimistic comedy.

One of the more consistently interesting artists to pass through the city over the past fifteen years or so, Nicolas Grenier crosses into some new territory in his current exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran , Esquisses d’un inventaire . His work has frequently tied ideas of urbanism, disaster, paranoia, and social decay together through the appropriating of high-end corporate design, itself heavily indebted to the work of non-objective painting. (Coincidentally, Grenier is also currently showing work in a group exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari .) This was approached in a range of cascading warm and cool colours and juxtaposed with various texts and occasional interpolated imagery to suggest the sorts of scenarios that typically get termed dystopian or utopian . I have always found them more ambiguous than these terms suggest and something far closer to the ambivalence one can see at play in the work of novelist J.G. Ballard. The English author was always explicit about his deb

Jessica Eaton ’s Mariphasa lupine lumina at Bradley-Ertaskiran takes its title from the imaginary flower central to the old horror movie Werewolf Of London (Stuart Walker, 1935). In the film, a British botanist travels to Tibet to find the rare flower which only blooms by moonlight. Blooming is also equated with the botanist becoming a werewolf. Murder (especially of what one loves) is the only means to avoid full “transvection.” The flower is thought to be the only antidote for those who suffer from lycanthropy, a disease that makes one neither man nor wolf but some demonic creature, described as “the grotesquely familiar.” The film is littered with references to the collapse of distinctions between the plant and animal kingdom, the erosion of sleep and waking states, and the world as a carnivorous zoo. Much of its first third concerns the botanist deploying all manner of lights on the plant, Charles J. Stumar’s cinematography giving the whole thing a mysterious silvery glow. It

Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. - Gilles Deleuze  Occupying three rooms in the basement space of Bradley Ertaskiran , Mathieu Beauséjour’s Demi-monde operates through three distinct stations. The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced image

Erin Shirreff , Midday dilemma at Bradley Ertaskiran On my way into the Shirreff show on ripped up and mostly vacant Saint-Antoine, two young men pulled up beside me to jovially inform me that Jesus was the messiah. From there, I entered the white noise of the gallery, the textual accompaniment to the exhibition laminated and flatly laying in a corner by the hand sanitizer. At that point, the overwhelming sensation was the stale, sweet smell of forced air. The four wall-works in the exhibition are a mixture of collage and sculptural assemblage constructed from scans of old art anthologies. This imagery was printed on aluminum and cut into shapes then arranged in deep-set frames. Also included are two bronze sculptures inspired by her collages, created using foamcore and hot glue which were then sandcast as single sculptures. These objects are all sparely placed around the large room, most of the space remaining starkly empty and allowing the visitor to circulate, cutting up the r