Art in Montreal

This time around, I highlight a set of interrelated concerns in four seemingly disparate exhibitions. Part of the Post-Invisibles Biennale , Histoires de disparition by Judith Bellavance was at Galerie DÈS . The exhibition involved a series of approximately life-sized photos of clothing that once belonged to the departed. Not as austere as mourning or typical funereal display garments, they were everyday or nightwear, which added to their diaphanous quality and the muted sense of illumination their production treatment infused them with. These were displayed hanging horizontally in the middle of the gallery space, suspended in clusters. Images were set back-to-back, and their presentational hanging doubled the image of the clothes hanging.  Bellavance framed it all as a counterpart to her work as an embalmer: To engage with my creative themes of loss and disappearance, I have been working in the funeral sector since 2019. This proximity constantly heightens my awareness o...

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia. The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions...