Art in Montreal

If the previous article on MOMENTA addressed the problem of the use of imagery to construct a narrative and the ways in which the image as art undermined its reterritorialization as “culture,” this article looks at this in a more basic way through how a series of exhibitions highlight a much more foundational aspect of the image. This is done both technically and thematically. One of the more blatant means by which this is introduced is a stress on the pixel as a kind of “building block” for the digital image. As a term, pixel comes from popular cinematic discourse (“pix” as plural for motion pictures) that was wedded to “el” (element). As one of the smallest elements of a digital image (raster or dot matrix), it contains a sample of an image (whether indexical or strictly synthetic). In printing or digital imaging, their appearance varies greatly according to resolution and to how they have been gridded. They can be rendered as squares, dots, lines, etc. The stress on the pixel as

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

In an earlier article, I briefly sketched out the birth and death of the original Biennale de Montréal , an event that ran between 1998 and 2011 before it was transformed into an NGO and then went bankrupt a few years later. The transfer from the CIAC to NGO status and affiliation with the MAC also coincided with the death of the triennial . The aim of the biennial in either instance was part of a programme of Montréalisation, a way of re-imagining the city, and of marketing it as a honey-pot for tourists. Foregrounded consistently in the first set of biennials was a narrative of the city’s avant-garde that served both as a kind of historical relativization of the work being shown and a tool for grafting the art to a broader image of Contemporary Art history. Ironically, this also ended in a kind of ungrounding that was part of the event’s consistent advocacy for digital art. The previous three iterations of the MOMENTA Biennale (2017, 2019, 2021) were the product of the expansion