Art in Montreal

When you enter Projet Casa , you are prompted to remove your footwear. Sitting by the door is a selection of slippers that you can put on. Given the theme of the exhibition, this would seem to suggest Hugh Hefner, minus smoking jacket and pipe. But it is not a gag. It is more like visiting a bowling alley and following the rigid signs of decorum and maintenance that oddly go along with it. Utilizing what the accompanying literature references as the domestic “bourgeois” space better than most of the installations that tend to be laid out in it, Delphine Huguet ’s Les corps complexes , curated by Mylène Lachance-Paquin , is part of the international Post-Invisibles : regard sur la place des femme biennial series of shows. Huguet is based in Montréal and France and Lachance-Paquin largely works developing corporate art “democratization” programming. The exhibition notes thank “the Canada Council for the arts for believing in me.” According to the curatorial statement : The exhibi

Last week’s reviews touched on the “poetic” attempt to do what amounts to pseudo-investigative journalism, avoiding the tabloid route by exploiting an arguably brassy form of performative religiosity to market its slim content. This was given an unsurprising phenomenological inflection (the links between phenomenology and the return to a vaguer and more “embodied” religiosity are well-known) through an appeal to attunement. Attunement, as Heidegger once pointed out, tends to go along with boredom, even when it is about looking at shoes. The conflict between boredom and attunement was avoided in the discussion last week and it will not get much play this time either. But there are a handful more incidents of poetic tuning in and out on display.  Something like this was at play in Patrick Beaulieu ’s Transvasements at Art Mûr. The work was created through his interaction with the various landscapes he passed through while aboard a tiny vessel as it “sailed from the Gironde estuary to

There were three exhibitions focusing on the Torma-Zsako family in the city over the past month or so. One at Robert Poulin ( Métamorphoses ) that featured them heavily, one at Laroche/Joncas ( 1 famille, 4 artistes, 2 expositions ), and this one at Projet Casa ( Flowers, Warriors, Beasts, Hands: Divergences et réciprocité ). Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of overlap between them. The Poulin and Casa shows were, however, the stronger. The Casa show displayed them at their most uneven and Istvan’s and David ’s sculptures dominated. At Poulin it was Balint ’s watercolours and Anna ’s sewn works that overshadowed the others. The Casa show was very much a sculpture show and the Poulin show was a wall art one.