Art in Montreal

A Light That Never Goes Out at Fonderie Darling features the work of Omar Castillo Alfaro , Camille Charbonneau , Jesús Hilario-Reyes , Simon Petepiece , Jeremy Shaw , and James Webb . It was curated by Renaud Gadoury . The exhibition fills both the large and small galleries and contains primarily sculptural and sound works. The large gallery is dimly lit and the small one brightly lit. There is a general expectation that the viewer will interact with the various works, an activity that ranges from holding a soundwork to one’s body to walking through structures or around them. Textual supplements are absent in the gallery spaces. Upon entering, the attendant informed me that it was an exhibition about the status of religion when people no longer attend church or other religious institutions. While this is scarcely accurate, the gist is that it investigates the numerous places where the “sacred” can be witnessed, something that, for whatever reason, seems to involve architecture or i...

  If the previous review examined two very different ways that the “haunted” was presented, this time around is another way of presenting “spirit.” In both of those instances, the mediation of spirit and the performative spiritualization of this mediation were central. And in one of those exhibitions, the hunt for the spirit was expressed largely through a parody of generic church forms, a use of the supposed spiritual significance of monochromes, and the mystique of tourist imagery. In Jeremy Shaw ’s Localize Affect at Bradley|Ertaskiran , something close to this is played out more directly and, importantly, not filtered through romantic mystique but a sense of the demonstrative. Atypically for the gallery, this exhibition spans both of its floors. At the entrance is a series of photos of stuttered bodies which have been manipulated by processes to convey the impression of intense experience. They are rendered in a fashion familiar from high modernist and fashion photography ...