Art in Montreal

  Miles Rufelds ' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations. It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art histor...

Extrapolations at Art Mûr brings together some of the latest work of Guillaume Lachapelle . It is a mix of the general tendencies in his practice. There are miniatures on the wall -- often resembling humans attached to architectural and technological elements -- and there is the gadgetry of his diorama that play on ghostly optical illusions. There are also some “skeletal” remains of vague creatures hung up like trophies.  Much of the sculptural work in this exhibition was created utilizing photogrammetry, a process with uses photos taken at different angles to their object to construct 3D print-outs. Distortion with the figures suggests digital glitching in the process with the occasional monstrous result.  Over the more than fifteen years that he has been showing, critics have highlighted the supposedly “childlike nature” of works featuring “fantastic” creatures in unlikely scenarios. Or they have stressed a duality in his work between its apparent realism and evident ...