Art in Montreal

Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert have complementary exhibitions on the work of Betty Goodwin. The eponymous show has works in several media (prints, proofs, works on mylar, etc.) spanning a few decades and showing different aspects of her practice. It has a condensed retrospective quality. The other show consists mostly of photos taken by Geoffrey James of her studio for Canadian Art in 1994. Although there are a few colour works, almost everything in the two shows tends to black and white. This is not stark, but highly textured. Everything becomes about gradients and minute details. The James photos concentrate on all the objects of her practice, either seemingly carefully or haphazardly arranged on various surfaces, and given structure by the architecture that seems to hem them in. Aside from the rather underwhelming colour mylar pieces, most of the work was created when Goodwin was moving away from typical Pop style imagery to something more “personal.” The vest works tha

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

There is a curious affinity between two shows on at the Belgo. Both exhibitions involve games of distances, projections of bodies, whether they are human, celestial, or the guts of houses. Le murmure d'une empreinte by Caroline Mauxion (with Céline Huyghebaert and Elise Anne LaPlante) at Arprim attempts to capture the subtle and ephemeral traces of the body in space, heightening its suggestiveness to a poetic density through abstracting it into fragmented and de-familarized aspects of flesh and simplified sculpture renderings.