Art in Montreal

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

I intended to publish this a few weeks ago as a kind of year-end summary of some of the themes I drew out across reviews over the past twelve months or so. Time got away from me and I did not get around to it, so here it is. It comes in the form of a meta-commentary/review concerning two books published in the last few years. Both texts were attempts to resuscitate cultural theory. While that is hardly rare, they were unique for being a bit more inventive in their discussion of emergent forms and acknowledging how increasingly difficult it is to make the cultural premise appear sound. I am only highlighting a few of the themes they address and channelling them to extrapolate on the issues most relevant to the broader discussions on this site. Two recent books have attempted to salvage the notion of culture when confronted with the spectre that its material basis has clearly become unstuck. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism an...

Not long ago we reviewed a show at UQAM that took as its broad concern issues of “fake news” and the schisms between different types of knowledge. While it emphasized the dubious role of the university’s mediation in the evaluation of these different regimes of knowledge, none of these things were formulated in a way that made much sense, either within the works themselves or their collective curation. As a result, the exhibition testified more to the irrelevance of knowledge than anything else and demonstrated the absurdity of its conceptual categories and strategies. At Circa is another show that dances around a topic peripheral to fake news and alternative epistemologies, conspiracy theory. Jacinthe Loranger ’s Conspiritualité, pastel Q et autres cabales is something of an aesthetic departure from her earlier work. According to the accompanying essay by Galadriel Avon, the installation …examin[es] codes that stem from conspiracy theories. Although popular for centuries, recent...

  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 ...

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