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Reviews: Catalogue des ruines at Skol and Sébastien Cliche’s La température de l’information at Circa

  Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home. The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home) . If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way. The exhibition’s text describes it thi

Reviews: Marie-Danielle Duval at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau and Cindy Dumais at Circa

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Reviews: Manuel Poitras at Circa | Jannick Deslauriers at 1700 La Poste

It would be possible to review a show about the end of the world every week and still leave some out. Apocalyptic fantasies seem to be one of the more significant neuroses exploited by Contemporary Art in the city. Once and a while they are humorous (deliberately or not), but they are almost always pretty to the point of flirting with tweeness. This week, two that get a bit more complicated. If nothing else, Inondation maison by Manuel Poitras at Circa is actually entertaining and not especially pretty. Made of a set of distinct stations, each of which contains a convoluted water-circulating mechanism. Cartoonish in form, each of the contraptions consists of very different appropriated materials (books, chairs, shoes, etc.). Rigged up like the elaborate technological gimmicks of the Swiss Family Robinson , their results function like gags from a silent film.

Reviews: Christian Messier's Symphonie en brun Van Dyck | Louis Bouvier's La conjugaison des pensées complexes at Circa

The works that make up Christian Messier ’s Symphonie en brun Van Dyck at Masion de la culture Janine-Sutto first showed at L'Œil de poisson in Québec City earlier in the year. Organized as a series of diptychs, it pairs his paintings with his musical compositions. Using a QR code, visitors can listen to the music paired with each painting on their phones. The paintings in oil and the music on synthesizer are intended to “share a common system that creates a tension between the characteristics that unite them and the properties that make them unique.” Effectively, what Messier presents is a kind of visual album, both in the sense of a musical album and a loose album of prints. In a way, they can be experienced like this on his website. The contrast feels a little like what was often displayed in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s, where a lush and haunting score (by Ennio Morricone or Riz Ortolani) was superimposed on scenes of torture, rape, and cannibalism, all usual

Review: Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc at Arprim | Andrée-Anne Carrier and Chloë Charce at Circa

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.