Art in Montreal

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text : This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits. As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joki...

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...

Hannaleah Ledwell's Pour ceux qui mangeait des fleurs at Galerie du Viaduc Hannaleah Ledwell ’s pieces displayed at Galerie du Viaduc seem to continue what she was doing in the last two exhibitions of hers that I have seen (at Popup and Gallery Parfois). But there have also been some significant shifts. Specifically, her palette has altered. It is darker, bluer, more night scene but still in the pastoral vein that she seems to cultivate. The rendering of the bodies is clearer and cartoonishly overlaid to make the gestures more legible while less concrete. The figures are more readable, their distinction from the ground is starker than before. This is also helped by the greater expansion in palette. One of the more interesting things in the show is the inclusion of what appear to be several small mock-ups for paintings that dot across one back wall. It might have been interesting to integrate this aspect more into the display of the more fully worked-out pieces. It will be intere...