Art in Montreal

This is the last part of my coverage of MOMENTA. In the previous two articles, I addressed the disparate implications of two of the key shows and how the one undid the other, and I examined how the logic of images , regardless of the framing imposed by artists and curators, tended to complicate or invert the officially sanctioned interpretations of their purported communicative content. In the first article , I looked at how the entire event was framed. This meant both its broader framing in the press through a rhetoric of crisis that exploited various medical metaphors, and the way that MOMENTA was more specifically conceptualized this year by its curator Ji-Yoon Han. In her concluding essay in the MOMENTA catalogue, the curator substantially extends the kind of panic discourse that was already employed as a plea for funding and publicity. She uses this to frame the event with an extraordinary amount of hyperbole. We are told that we live in a “frantic age” in which artists have lo

Jocelyne Alloucherie’s Quelques ciels at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert    The works by Jocelyne Alloucherie on display at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert are split between a series of photo/drawing collages and a video. In one room there are diptychs and triptychs. They feature photos of clouds and drawings of them, layered to give a sense of depth and dynamism. These, the accompanying text informs us, are preliminary models for a public work to be shown at Viau metro. In the other room is a video featuring historic gardens. Sparse figures drift through the frame under mostly empty skies. Like the photos, these have been made over time and spliced together with a soundtrack. The video is supposed to be shown simultaneously with another that shares the same soundtrack, projected blind, in a structure suggesting a Greek amphitheatre. There is even a small scale model of this on display.  These works are fragments of a larger body of work that falls under

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another. Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out.  The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV.  One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan would