Art in Montreal

  Previously, I have discussed my reservations around the employment of the role of “narrative” in exhibitions. Specifically, this involves the lack of clarity in how this notion translates to the visual display of work and how interaction with the work actually operates. Unless you stretch the term to its breaking point, very little in the practical visual logic of most exhibitions has any strong narrative content. This just seems like an unnaturally appended term to appeal to concepts that can then (presumably) be projected onto the work when it is not clearly evident. As such, it allows for the set-up of a fantasy of relations that the material reality of the work demonstrates to be absent. As a strategy, it is a way of trying to smuggle things in without doing the work that would make them sensible as visual art (if they can even make sense that way). So, an appeal to narrative is primarily an authoritarian device of enframing, something that tends to be the reserve of curatin...

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text : This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits. As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joki...

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

  Monumentality is a theme that tends to crop up a bit in the city. In the past, we have noted the monument as history’s way of ironizing the present , the monument as the skeletal exhibition of genre clichés , and so on. Two exhibitions currently on at the Belgo follow a comparable line, one explicitly linking this to the matter of monuments and the other not. They each share something in common with another tendency that we have discussed recently, namely a pseudo-religious tendency . This has taken various forms, although notably, it incorporated aspects of the architectural components of religious ritual either as concentrated devices for viewing spiritual ecstasy or as something verging more on a folkish re-enactment from a rural learning centre.  Camille Jodoin-Eng ’s Sun Shrine occupies the rear of Patel|Brown. Two walls are painted in shades of orange and yellow. In the foreground of the space is what amounts to a little gazebo, its walls coated in reliefs made of s...