Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Installation

Reviews: Foreign in a Domestic Sense at Dazibao and Maison modèle at Centre Clark

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

Review: Undoing Earthwriting at Optica

Last week, I discussed Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa. Part of a feminist biennial, it thematically and structurally foregrounded censorship (or redaction) and confession as forms of created selfhood. This was given an additional (apparently unintentionally comic) dimension since the body of this presented self was depicted as a kind of (extremely familiar) alien object/commodity. These two aspects functioned together to create a mirage of performative depth (largely three-dimensional or durational work in a quasi-domestic space). This was doubled by a makeshift confessional where the participatory “confessions” would be redacted, the exhibitionistic display of their self-censorship an ironic recognition that the self is censorship. Visually this was conveyed by black blots and squares over words. The black square was even applied to an exit sign. Whether intended or not, this had the symbolic suggestion that the self, that repressive and obfuscatory function, b

Review: Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa

When you enter Projet Casa , you are prompted to remove your footwear. Sitting by the door is a selection of slippers that you can put on. Given the theme of the exhibition, this would seem to suggest Hugh Hefner, minus smoking jacket and pipe. But it is not a gag. It is more like visiting a bowling alley and following the rigid signs of decorum and maintenance that oddly go along with it. Utilizing what the accompanying literature references as the domestic “bourgeois” space better than most of the installations that tend to be laid out in it, Delphine Huguet ’s Les corps complexes , curated by Mylène Lachance-Paquin , is part of the international Post-Invisibles : regard sur la place des femme biennial series of shows. Huguet is based in Montréal and France and Lachance-Paquin largely works developing corporate art “democratization” programming. The exhibition notes thank “the Canada Council for the arts for believing in me.” According to the curatorial statement : The exhibi

Reviews: Marie-Danielle Duval at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau and Cindy Dumais at Circa

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Reviews: Leyla Majer at Optica; Jeanie Riddle and Delphine Hennelly at galerie d'Outremont; Clément de Gaulejac at Maison de la culture de Rosemont-Le Petite-Patrie

The three exhibitions this week may only seem very loosely related. In their own ways, they each imagine utopias, and they each do so with an appeal to the childish, whether in the form of illustration or through their “educational” posing. At Optica is Leyla Majer ’s Anticipating Hypersea. The accompanying text by Esther Bourdages states that Majeri is proposing an environment that brings together three bodies of work that showcase her research on the deconstruction and decolonization of prevailing ideas, borrowing themes associated with a kind of fictional ethnography and speculative biology. […] Plants and living things are the artist’s raw material. The exhibited hybrid assemblages are composed of gourds and ceramics. While some varieties of gourds, also called calabashes, are edible, most are not. They are generally cultivated not as food, but to serve as a recipient, an ornament, or a sound box. Their dissemination is the outcome of human migratory activity and natural eleme

Reviews: Group Show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany's Espaces imprévisibles at galerie de l'UQAM

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

Review: Antoine Larocque’s Démissionner de la vie des arts at Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais

This week, I leave Montr é al and travel to Hull to see a show at the Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais . Over the rusting bridges from the purgatory that is Ottawa, Hull is an eccentric mixture of heterogeneous architectural styles that garishly clash with one another thanks to the city’s history of consistently stunted growth, lopsided development, and near collapse. Passing by the rather sad Parc Jean Dallaire (still nowhere near as depressing as  Montréal ’s Parc Prudence Heward), I got lost navigating the circular streets and cul de sacs broken up by green paths and intersected by dead and overgrown rail lines. The university building housing the gallery feels more like a high school, seemingly dropped in at random beyond one of the main stretches, which itself was mostly devoid of people, only boulangeries run from the basements of converted houses and random massage parlours. This exhibition by Antoine Larocque was housed in a blank gallery space at the corner of a