Art in Montreal

MOMENTA has opened. While I have only seen about two-thirds of it so far, it does seem to be better than past instances. I have already written an introductory preamble examining the self-contextualization and curatorial claims that have accrued around this iteration. In this, and a few future articles, I will examine some of the actualized exhibitions. There are, from the outset, a series of interesting clashes amid a number of the exhibitions. I will only deal with a couple of them here, but they seem neatly in line with the general theme of masquerades. The two discussed here were directly funded by MOMENTA so this should not be surprising. One of the three exhibitions on at Galerie de l’UQAM is The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval by the collective Marion Lessard (Marie Cherbat-Schiller, Alice Roussel, Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Claude Romain, and Élisabeth M. Larouine). According to its official gloss: Marion Lessard appropriate

At Dazibao is the first solo exhibition in Montréal of work by Lori Blondeau, the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. It features a selection of works originally curated by Nasrin Himad. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist, an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and an art bureaucrat. The curation biographs her as follows: Since the 1990s, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada. The first work, Grace (2006), consists of 14 head-shots spread at a right angle across two walls. These images were extracted from a performance involving friends, family, etc. performing as an abstracted self. The face is not visible bu

It would be possible to review a show about the end of the world every week and still leave some out. Apocalyptic fantasies seem to be one of the more significant neuroses exploited by Contemporary Art in the city. Once and a while they are humorous (deliberately or not), but they are almost always pretty to the point of flirting with tweeness. This week, two that get a bit more complicated. If nothing else, Inondation maison by Manuel Poitras at Circa is actually entertaining and not especially pretty. Made of a set of distinct stations, each of which contains a convoluted water-circulating mechanism. Cartoonish in form, each of the contraptions consists of very different appropriated materials (books, chairs, shoes, etc.). Rigged up like the elaborate technological gimmicks of the Swiss Family Robinson , their results function like gags from a silent film.

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 fantasy.

  What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli , this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central. Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing. While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture , whether unders

Sophie Jodoin ’s d’un seul souffle exhibit is the product of a research residency at Artexte during which she examined the various documents collected under the names of female artists in the 410 sector of the institute. From them she photographed, scanned, and photocopied images and texts, integrating these into two works. One, a video, d’un seul souffle , and the other, a book. They occupy (more or less) separate spaces. The video has its own white room with a bench. The book sits on a shelf suspended from a brutalist surface. It can be flipped through. Facing it is a wall of names, arranged alphabetically like the dead at a cenotaph, of the artists that she examined. A book of her own, fastened so it cannot be leafed through, provides an additional joining point, sitting at the entrance to the video like a prop for a staged memorial.

The works that make up Christian Messier ’s Symphonie en brun Van Dyck at Masion de la culture Janine-Sutto first showed at L'Œil de poisson in Québec City earlier in the year. Organized as a series of diptychs, it pairs his paintings with his musical compositions. Using a QR code, visitors can listen to the music paired with each painting on their phones. The paintings in oil and the music on synthesizer are intended to “share a common system that creates a tension between the characteristics that unite them and the properties that make them unique.” Effectively, what Messier presents is a kind of visual album, both in the sense of a musical album and a loose album of prints. In a way, they can be experienced like this on his website. The contrast feels a little like what was often displayed in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s, where a lush and haunting score (by Ennio Morricone or Riz Ortolani) was superimposed on scenes of torture, rape, and cannibalism, all usual

Benoit Blondeau ’s work on exhibition at COA is part of a two-person show with Vinna Begin. Although their works complement each other reasonably in terms of colour and even to some degree thematically, his work overshadows hers with its more substantive material presence. Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt. There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash. Although he divorces his wo

  What follows is a review of three different exhibitions. They are presented here because they have significant thematic/conceptual overlap and demonstrate different strategies of approach in a wide variety of media. Although the first and second approach the spectre of colonialism loosely, the last exploits it as its central feature. Mathieu Gotti’s La grande Liquidation tout doit disparaître at Art Mûr This is a repackaging of much the same work by Mathieu Gotti that was shown at the Centre d’art Jacques et Michel Auger in Victoriaville in 2021, although the scaling here is more confined. It involves a set of painted wood carvings, primarily of animals, but also of weaponry, gas cans etc. Carving marks are prominent and the paint application is crude if never garish. In general, they have the sense of inflated toys. Spread around the front of the gallery, they also give the impression of being more accumulated like a snow drift than thoughtfully placed. If they are toyish, t

Before making a series of generalizing statements about these three exhibitions, it is incumbent on me to provide you with their statements of rationalization, each of which avoids any justification for their mode of display, at best vaguely waving it off as “ experimentation”:

Anne-Marie Proulx's Être jardin at Vox was curated by Marie J. Jean with Dominique Mousseau and Claudine Roger. It is the latest part of a photo/installation project by the artist that dates to 2015. Proulx's project involves a complex relationship with Anne Hébert 's Premier jardin (1988). The novel, in part, deals with an actress in a thinly veiled Québec City. Filled with theatrical referencing (from Molière to Beckett), this was transformed by Proulx into a book of photographs and appropriated texts in four acts, furthering the underlying theatrical aspect of the source novel. 

Julie Tremble 's Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies at Dazibao consists of two video installations that take up the space of the gallery. The first, Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies , is a four-channel installation of 3D animations offering a set of distinct tableaux depicting the birth of the solar system, pre-life mineral formations, and fossilizations. The second is Luce RTX3090 (2022): This speculative fiction is situated in 2062. A digital rendering of the iconic Québec actress Luce Guilbeault is 127 years old (in reality Luce Guilbeault died in 1991 from cancer). She chronicles how in order to increase workforce productivity every person on the planet now undergoes a mandatory anti-aging treatment that maintains the body as though they are 25 years old. But, in order to control overpopulation, at 65 years old, their bodies turn to dust. Within the same introspective monologue, she also considers how her life as an actress, captured on film, will contribute to her own im

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.

{I will preface this by stating that I don’t think I enjoyed another show in the city so much this past year.} According to the exhibition essay for Mia Sandhu 's Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You at Patel|Brown : It's not just the earthly colour palette that triggers olfactory hallucinations of musty shag-carpets, smokey floral upholstery, and dusty rattan furniture. All elements in Sandhu's drawings come together to produce a synaesthetic reaction — you can smell, hear, taste, and feel her staged environments. And you do so in the position of voyeur. However, the aesthetics of the exhibition as a whole have far less to do with pornography in the 1970s – particularly in its North American form (it looks more British/Scandinavian) – than with the aesthetics of sitcoms and game shows. There is far more The Price is Right than Penthouse on display.

  Eddy Firmin 's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr , employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on. The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.

  According to the accompanying text by Catherine Barnabé, Maryam Eizadifard ’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica “attempts to sense the effects that spaces have on the body. Specifically, in places where the body has no reference point. She is attentive to the imprint of the body’s memory that can be awakened by theses spaces. A smell, a familiar atmosphere, the handling of an object can arouse a buried memory and, suddenly, a new environment becomes a point of reference.” The exhibition uses a few different tactics to approach this. The text goes on to explain that the artist ritualistically cut herself off from “the outside world” and stayed in a basement in Terrbonne which, by environmental analogy, reminded her of her childhood in Iran. It was here, under these experimental conditions, that she made the drawings that form the base of the work. Eizadifard has created three distinct areas: spanning two walls are a series of glass pieces with photos suspended in them; on another