Art in Montreal

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...

For several years, Centre Clark has started spring with the latest edition of their Maison modèle show, which employs their space as if it were a model home. The curators of the year select what the model is and decorate and furnish it with sculptures and other artworks. This fundraising event is usually one of the most elaborate installations of the year for the centre. In this year’s iteration, curators Carolyne Scenna and Jean-Michel Leclerc claim that they wished to reflect on the idea of ruin as a space charged with an equivocal temporality, straddling questions of impermanence and vestige, but also on the notion of work — of reconstruction, transformation, memory, repair — that partial or complete destruction, whether material or not, implies. [p] Maison modèle VI is thus interested in bringing together practices that address these themes in an open-ended way, and by extension, the exhibition evokes the sensation we feel when faced with objects that bear witness to the passi...

If the previous article on MOMENTA addressed the problem of the use of imagery to construct a narrative and the ways in which the image as art undermined its reterritorialization as “culture,” this article looks at this in a more basic way through how a series of exhibitions highlight a much more foundational aspect of the image. This is done both technically and thematically. One of the more blatant means by which this is introduced is a stress on the pixel as a kind of “building block” for the digital image. As a term, pixel comes from popular cinematic discourse (“pix” as plural for motion pictures) that was wedded to “el” (element). As one of the smallest elements of a digital image (raster or dot matrix), it contains a sample of an image (whether indexical or strictly synthetic). In printing or digital imaging, their appearance varies greatly according to resolution and to how they have been gridded. They can be rendered as squares, dots, lines, etc. The stress on the pixel as ...

At Dazibao is the first solo exhibition in Montréal of work by Lori Blondeau, the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. It features a selection of works originally curated by Nasrin Himad. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist, an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and an art bureaucrat. The curation biographs her as follows: Since the 1990s, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada. The first work, Grace (2006), consists of 14 head-shots spread at a right angle across two walls. These images were extracted from a performance involving friends, family, etc. performing as an abstracted self. The face is not visible bu...

Julie Tremble 's Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies at Dazibao consists of two video installations that take up the space of the gallery. The first, Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies , is a four-channel installation of 3D animations offering a set of distinct tableaux depicting the birth of the solar system, pre-life mineral formations, and fossilizations. The second is Luce RTX3090 (2022): This speculative fiction is situated in 2062. A digital rendering of the iconic Québec actress Luce Guilbeault is 127 years old (in reality Luce Guilbeault died in 1991 from cancer). She chronicles how in order to increase workforce productivity every person on the planet now undergoes a mandatory anti-aging treatment that maintains the body as though they are 25 years old. But, in order to control overpopulation, at 65 years old, their bodies turn to dust. Within the same introspective monologue, she also considers how her life as an actress, captured on film, will contribute to her own im...