Art in Montreal

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

Covering the “legendary period in Québec” of 1967 to 1977, Anithe de Carvalho’s Art rebelle et contre-culture (2015) seeks to “demystify” the myths around the Underground (or counterculture) and its role in the expanding apparatus of the Canadian government in the period. “I will try to demonstrate,” she writes, “Contrary to what some authors have claimed, that the politicised neo-avant-garde has not succeeded in its bet to remain on the fringe of the establishment and to work outside the system or the institutional field of art.” [9] Not only did it not succeed in staying “marginal,” but it has remained central to the state production of art since that period. She uses an array of works to examine the “de-compartmentalization [décloisonnement] of the paradigm of the democratization of culture and …the beginnings of the cultural democracy model.” [55] Among these is: Les Mécaniques, Les Mondes parallèles and Le Pavillon du synthétiseur ; Jean-Paul Mousseau’s Le Crash discotheque; Se

Art is free, or it is not. It invents, expresses itself and explores in all directions, or commits suicide by serving causes that are not its own. It is plural, diverse, crazy; or doctrinaire, intolerant and terribly serious. It asks questions to which we are fed answers everywhere. It stimulates the imagination, awakens utopias, and offers man the only game that rules do not hinder. And in this way, art energetically calls the whole environment into question. [29] Published in 1983, Guy Robert’s Art actuel au Québec: depuis 1970 provided an extensive survey of the art produced in the province in the 70s and early 80s (most of the art reproduced in the text is from 1980-1982.) It is a follow-up to his L'Art au Québec depuis 1940 of 1973 and examines what he takes to be the diversity of the plastic arts, under numerous names and tendencies, since the 1970s.  Robert insists on it as an essay or interrogation attentive to the role of the "socio-cultural" in art since t

Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. - Gilles Deleuze  Occupying three rooms in the basement space of Bradley Ertaskiran , Mathieu Beauséjour’s Demi-monde operates through three distinct stations. The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced image

Fruit bowls, dolls and their dismembered limbs, stickers, and what look like renderings of film stills are what make up the minimal contents of Alexis Lavoie ’s latest show at Simon Blais . Childhood imagery has long been part of his work. This used to be theatricalized in a deliberate way, working on larger canvases with architectural settings. There were also clear and consistent nods to Francis Bacon and to media events like Abu Ghraib, all slit in amid the birthday decorations for a kid’s party. These paintings (selected from work made between 2019-2022) don’t have that scope of content. Lavoie’s latest oils follow the direction to greater minimalism that he seems to have been going in over his past few shows. This is true in terms of his treatment of surfaces, his range of referents, and his use of scale. The imagery primarily consists of doll limbs, fruit, and bowls. There is a studied sense of painting plastic while flattening the plasticity of the paint application as much

In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read. - Bruce Chatwin Diyar Mayil ’s Houseguest at Centre Clarke contains a series of objects that conjure a domestic space. Its loosely legible objects (a clock, a broom, a medicine cabinet, a table etc.) are obscured by being covered with a thin, textured material that vaguely resembles skin. More explicitly, it seems like a representation of skin. Before entering the narrow room where these objects are stationed, there is an accompanying text by Mojeanne Behzadi that provides a welter of trite cliches to guide you through: Mayil invites you into a space of tension and vulnerability. She asks you, its guest, to consider your positionality and relationship to home, land,

Jessica Houston, The Long Haul   Jessica Houston ’s exhibition Over the Edge of the World offers a set of alternative history narratives constructed around polar exploration. It relies upon a set of different material approaches (collage, video, objects, oil painting, and ink), each discretely investigating a different perspective on the space. This includes a feminist alternative history of exploration, surrealist imagery of exploration that takes on a nearly mystical quality, maps, and collages fashioned largely from National Geographic magazine. In this respect, the show makes many of the same rhetorical gestures, and probes some of the same issues as Patrick Bérubé’s more enigmatic and humorous Mother Rock! exhibition in the same space a few months ago (March-April). Spanning two large rooms and broken into half a dozen distinct sections, Houston’s exhibition is sprawling, each aspect adding a different spin to her basic theme. Presumably, the scale is intended to convey

Rose-Marie Arbour’s L’art qui nous est contemporain (1999) was one of the first extended attempts to conceptualize what the Contemporary Art that developed in Québec consisted of. In examining this issue, she set the province against models that had been established in the United States and Europe. {All quotations are my translation.} Arbour’s examination of Contemporary Art as it evolved in Québec is situated between two key statements. First: “This essay is rather an attempt to historically link artistic aims of the relatively recent past with others that are current, for the purpose of reflecting on the links that can be sketched that could mutually illuminate them.” [Arbour, 137] Second: “Today, the international is based in part on the local, contrary to what prevailed in the days of modernism when universal values were advocated in opposition to particularities and singularities. The contemporary is, in this respect, post-modern.” [Arbour, 138] These two contentions are c

  Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr . For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well. While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date. While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting. None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated (an

Erin Shirreff , Midday dilemma at Bradley Ertaskiran On my way into the Shirreff show on ripped up and mostly vacant Saint-Antoine, two young men pulled up beside me to jovially inform me that Jesus was the messiah. From there, I entered the white noise of the gallery, the textual accompaniment to the exhibition laminated and flatly laying in a corner by the hand sanitizer. At that point, the overwhelming sensation was the stale, sweet smell of forced air. The four wall-works in the exhibition are a mixture of collage and sculptural assemblage constructed from scans of old art anthologies. This imagery was printed on aluminum and cut into shapes then arranged in deep-set frames. Also included are two bronze sculptures inspired by her collages, created using foamcore and hot glue which were then sandcast as single sculptures. These objects are all sparely placed around the large room, most of the space remaining starkly empty and allowing the visitor to circulate, cutting up the r

Chloe Wise , In Loveliness of Perfect Deeds at Blouin|Division Subjecting whatever Wise’s work supposedly means to criticism is on the same level as making jokes about Boris Johnson. It’s taking the bait of the media image that has been constructed around her (as well as presumably by her) and which allows her to sit comfortably in air-headed profiles for Elle Canada and Interview . However, there is something tantalizing about that, even if it makes you a fool for engaging at all. Instead, it is better to simply look at the work in situ, an object to be stumbled into at the end of the long corridor in the unfortunately designed space of Blouin|Division. If there could be such a thing as twee nostalgia for a past generation of hipster cliche, it would exist here, less in the overt sense of its content, than in the manner in which it is arranged. It’s the arrangement that lingers because the rest is fairly forgettable, presumably a deliberate effect as one scrolls through the pro