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Showing posts with the label Optica

Review: Undoing Earthwriting at Optica

Last week, I discussed Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa. Part of a feminist biennial, it thematically and structurally foregrounded censorship (or redaction) and confession as forms of created selfhood. This was given an additional (apparently unintentionally comic) dimension since the body of this presented self was depicted as a kind of (extremely familiar) alien object/commodity. These two aspects functioned together to create a mirage of performative depth (largely three-dimensional or durational work in a quasi-domestic space). This was doubled by a makeshift confessional where the participatory “confessions” would be redacted, the exhibitionistic display of their self-censorship an ironic recognition that the self is censorship. Visually this was conveyed by black blots and squares over words. The black square was even applied to an exit sign. Whether intended or not, this had the symbolic suggestion that the self, that repressive and obfuscatory function, b

Reviews: Leyla Majer at Optica; Jeanie Riddle and Delphine Hennelly at galerie d'Outremont; Clément de Gaulejac at Maison de la culture de Rosemont-Le Petite-Patrie

The three exhibitions this week may only seem very loosely related. In their own ways, they each imagine utopias, and they each do so with an appeal to the childish, whether in the form of illustration or through their “educational” posing. At Optica is Leyla Majer ’s Anticipating Hypersea. The accompanying text by Esther Bourdages states that Majeri is proposing an environment that brings together three bodies of work that showcase her research on the deconstruction and decolonization of prevailing ideas, borrowing themes associated with a kind of fictional ethnography and speculative biology. […] Plants and living things are the artist’s raw material. The exhibited hybrid assemblages are composed of gourds and ceramics. While some varieties of gourds, also called calabashes, are edible, most are not. They are generally cultivated not as food, but to serve as a recipient, an ornament, or a sound box. Their dissemination is the outcome of human migratory activity and natural eleme

Reviews: MOMENTA (Part III): Annette Rose, Bianca Baldi, Maya Watanabe, Shaheer Zazai, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Morgan Legaré

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

Review: Goose Village at Occurence | Where Were You in '92? at Optica | Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place at Artexte

Before making a series of generalizing statements about these three exhibitions, it is incumbent on me to provide you with their statements of rationalization, each of which avoids any justification for their mode of display, at best vaguely waving it off as “ experimentation”:

Review: Maryam Eizadifard’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica

  According to the accompanying text by Catherine Barnabé, Maryam Eizadifard ’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica “attempts to sense the effects that spaces have on the body. Specifically, in places where the body has no reference point. She is attentive to the imprint of the body’s memory that can be awakened by theses spaces. A smell, a familiar atmosphere, the handling of an object can arouse a buried memory and, suddenly, a new environment becomes a point of reference.” The exhibition uses a few different tactics to approach this. The text goes on to explain that the artist ritualistically cut herself off from “the outside world” and stayed in a basement in Terrbonne which, by environmental analogy, reminded her of her childhood in Iran. It was here, under these experimental conditions, that she made the drawings that form the base of the work. Eizadifard has created three distinct areas: spanning two walls are a series of glass pieces with photos suspended in them; on another

Review: Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf at Occurrence

At Occurrence , Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf, deuxième itération , follows on from the first’s “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition.” This time, The Empty S(h)elf engages the archive in a more direct reflection on the role of language and subjectivity: here concerned with how the acquisition of language defines one’s sense of self and simultaneously separates self and other—the primordial being that exists outside of language. In this instance, the “other” is represented by the main character in a story by Franz Kafka entitled “A Report to an Academy”: an ape recounts how he survived and escaped life in a zoo by mimicking human actions, eventually adopting speech to become a circus performer. An analogy to the construction of the self and even the “escape” into becoming an artist might be suggested. Created in collaboration with graphic designer Réjean Myette and with sound elements by Melissa Grey and David Morn