Art in Montreal

This week we look at the two exhibitions running at galerie de l’UQAM: the group show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany ’s Espaces imprévisibles . Both are mostly interesting as genre exercises. They are pleasant there is not that much else at play. Each exhibition consists of running through a gambit of genre clichés, one by way of a group curated by a gender category and one by an individual assuming a symbolic role as the derivation of a genealogy. Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre was curated by Elise Anne LaPlante and involves the work of artists Caroline Boileau , Mimi Haddam , the collective Ikumagialiit (Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo), Daze Jefferies , Helena Martin Franco , Dominique Rey , and Winnie Truong . This is the third stop for the group exhibition. The works are in a variety of media (video, sculpture, watercolour, performance records, stenciled poetry, etc.) which are spread around the

MOMENTA has opened. While I have only seen about two-thirds of it so far, it does seem to be better than past instances. I have already written an introductory preamble examining the self-contextualization and curatorial claims that have accrued around this iteration. In this, and a few future articles, I will examine some of the actualized exhibitions. There are, from the outset, a series of interesting clashes amid a number of the exhibitions. I will only deal with a couple of them here, but they seem neatly in line with the general theme of masquerades. The two discussed here were directly funded by MOMENTA so this should not be surprising. One of the three exhibitions on at Galerie de l’UQAM is The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval by the collective Marion Lessard (Marie Cherbat-Schiller, Alice Roussel, Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Claude Romain, and Élisabeth M. Larouine). According to its official gloss: Marion Lessard appropriate