Art in Montreal

At Occurrence , Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf, deuxième itération , follows on from the first’s “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition.” This time, The Empty S(h)elf engages the archive in a more direct reflection on the role of language and subjectivity: here concerned with how the acquisition of language defines one’s sense of self and simultaneously separates self and other—the primordial being that exists outside of language. In this instance, the “other” is represented by the main character in a story by Franz Kafka entitled “A Report to an Academy”: an ape recounts how he survived and escaped life in a zoo by mimicking human actions, eventually adopting speech to become a circus performer. An analogy to the construction of the self and even the “escape” into becoming an artist might be suggested. Created in collaboration with graphic designer Réjean Myette and with sound elements by Melissa Grey and David Morn

Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain involves two sets of monotypes. One series ( Danser ) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other ( Lignes ) is more visually stimulating. Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual. As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.

Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. - Gilles Deleuze  Occupying three rooms in the basement space of Bradley Ertaskiran , Mathieu Beauséjour’s Demi-monde operates through three distinct stations. The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced image

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.

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p

  These two exhibitions at Occurrence are both architecture-heavy. It is an interesting juxtaposition with each set suggesting something quite different, not necessarily complementary. Noémie Weinstein, Solariums A set of paintings, they are controlled exercises in clashing modes of abstraction knit together through a clear set of intersecting parts that each offer a different mode of painterly articulation. Based on found and personal source material, these images are readily legible as solariums and other spaces where wet and light intersect, rich in patterning. Instantly, deliberate or not, in terms of imagery and colour scheme, Weinstein’s warm-cool graded paintings are reminiscent of the aesthetics associated with vaporwave and comparable slightly melancholy nostalgia nods to the 1980s. Thematically, Weinstein’s suite of images deals with the threshold where interior and exterior meet. This is done in a lot of very blatant ways. Almost everything in her figurative selection

Chloe Wise , In Loveliness of Perfect Deeds at Blouin|Division Subjecting whatever Wise’s work supposedly means to criticism is on the same level as making jokes about Boris Johnson. It’s taking the bait of the media image that has been constructed around her (as well as presumably by her) and which allows her to sit comfortably in air-headed profiles for Elle Canada and Interview . However, there is something tantalizing about that, even if it makes you a fool for engaging at all. Instead, it is better to simply look at the work in situ, an object to be stumbled into at the end of the long corridor in the unfortunately designed space of Blouin|Division. If there could be such a thing as twee nostalgia for a past generation of hipster cliche, it would exist here, less in the overt sense of its content, than in the manner in which it is arranged. It’s the arrangement that lingers because the rest is fairly forgettable, presumably a deliberate effect as one scrolls through the pro