Art in Montreal

  Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home. The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home) . If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way. The exhibition’s text describes it thi

  Clint Neufeld ’s All hat No cattle at Art Mûr contains pieces of glassware, serving plates and furniture in various vague period styles that roughly suggest the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On them, whether resting on pillows or seemingly growing from or embracing them, are various industrial implements. The ways his work has been talked about have been rather boring and predictable, seeing in it some sort of statement about gender or defamiliarization . An almost identical set of strategies were employed with Cal Lane in the same space just a month ago. Neufeld falls into this sometimes but usually seems to just tell anecdotes about his life. In a way, this is the far better way to approach the works.