Art in Montreal

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text : This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits. As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joki...

  Heart On is a retrospective of the work of Toronto artist Joyce Wieland. It was co-produced by Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Art Gallery of Ontario and is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in several decades. The last, nearly 40 years ago, contained much of the same work. The museum’s ad text (most of which is duplicated at the entrance to the exhibit) informs us that: This ambitious career retrospective … is also the most comprehensive, and positions Wieland as a critical international figure of 20th-century art and film. […] Spotlighting the concerns that informed Wieland’s creative output, namely her engagement with feminism, social justice and ecology, this exhibition explores her unique approach to art-making and the enduring relevance of her oeuvre to contemporary issues. The current retrospective cleverly opens with Wieland’s oil painting Time Machine Series (1961), which, typical for that period of her work, combines abstract imagery with vibr...

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...

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...