Art in Montreal

  The latest show at Blouin|Division, Le temps passe lentement , features work by Tammi Campbell , An Te Liu , Sarah Stevenson , Simon Hughes , Matthew Feyld , and Daniel Langevin . It is a mixture of sculpture and wall art. While exploiting the appearance of being abstract or non-objective, it is not. With its stress on the similar, on miming and homage, it is closer to drag than it is to Modernism. And it is clearly closer to the sort of Pictures art that was fashionable in the 1980s. It shares a lot more with re-photographing photos than it is like the painting that that it borrows its style and imagery from. That kind of work, which is what I assume the accompanying text is very vaguely referring to as “Post-Modern” with all its “arch ( ironique )” qualities, was also quite different. The work of the 80s played against scale more, had a detachedness to it that concentrated on the ways that the work was being re-mediated and tended to question referentiality. It could be caustic

Having undertaken this iteration of my critical project for nearly two years, I think it is time to clarify a few things about my general position. Reasonably, one might ask what the value of art criticism is. I have known more than one artist who would argue that the role of the critic is irrelevant since Contemporary Art is already self-critical. I would respond that this often mistakes both what art is and what criticism is, for whatever is generally present has little to do with criticism and has more to do with a recycling of terms that are imbibed through either the art press or (typically) badly taught university seminars. Over a few articles, I will speculate on what else criticism might do, something I will attempt largely through the critical evaluation of a series of theoretical texts. But for this, the first instance, I will only make some very general remarks, some of which are quite obvious, and some even stupid, but which will serve to frame a little of the ground for

Once again Pangée is a uniquely good host for the two exhibitions that it currently has on. The creaking floors of the old mansion, perched on the mountain and seemingly detached while sitting aside the swelling roadways and pathways that cross its side tend to do far more for the works it displays than the bland rectangles of the rest of the city. Generally, Projet Casa still feels too homey but Pangée feels like an artificially maintained leftover from a dead society. It also tends to stress the works it puts on display as functions of décor. Grace Kalyta’s Hall of Mirrors is basically a painting show bleeding into sculpture. The various works depict furnishings and fabrics for the most part. Their ostensible subject matter is the surfaces of stuff, which here tends to be dealt with in two broad ways. One is the painterly depiction of light and texture and the other extends this surface concern to a more literal kind of objectification where the depiction of the surface and the surf

  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

For several years, Centre Clark has started spring with the latest edition of their Maison modèle show, which employs their space as if it were a model home. The curators of the year select what the model is and decorate and furnish it with sculptures and other artworks. This fundraising event is usually one of the most elaborate installations of the year for the centre. In this year’s iteration, curators Carolyne Scenna and Jean-Michel Leclerc claim that they wished to reflect on the idea of ruin as a space charged with an equivocal temporality, straddling questions of impermanence and vestige, but also on the notion of work — of reconstruction, transformation, memory, repair — that partial or complete destruction, whether material or not, implies. [p] Maison modèle VI is thus interested in bringing together practices that address these themes in an open-ended way, and by extension, the exhibition evokes the sensation we feel when faced with objects that bear witness to the passi

Après moi le déluge is Oli Sorenson ’s new show at Art Mûr . Christine Blais’ gallery text frames the theme of the exhibition this way: The phrase coined by Louis XV at the end of his reign, indifferent to the consequences of his extravagant actions, then taken up by Karl Marx to stigmatize the bourgeoisie of his day, ‘Après moi le déluge’ (After me the flood) is used today to highlight the tensions of individual profit on populations and nature, on the precipice of ecological catastrophe. In PR materials, Sorenson tends to cite “remix culture” as an influence, one evidenced the most obviously in his re-tooling of Hollywood films and posters, but also present here in the plucking of work from various series shown elsewhere. The work at Art Mûr mostly seems to come from The Zombie Capitalism series, which itself is an extension of the Anthropocene (2021) and Capitalocene (2022) projects.  Spread over half of the second floor, the exhibition is a mixture of large and small pieces.

In the bunker of Bradley|Ertaskiran is Joseph Tisiga’s exhibition, It was God the whole time . Consisting of ten paintings and five sculptures, these are framed by the accompanying text this way: Tisiga indulges in our perceived expectations of his paintings; interrupting familiar scenes or genres with critical or comedic relief. These disruptions are often shocking or amusing, like an inside joke or personal musing only the artist is privy to. […] Tisiga’s work oscillates between the recognizable and the uncanny, the real and the absurd. [np] A recurring character in Tisiga’s work, the seemingly simple mask doubles as an exercise in language making. Tisiga, a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation, reflects on how Kaska do not have a readily apparent visual aesthetic for objects or imagery. Within his works, Tisiga contemplates the construction of different modes of signifying as a necessary preservation tool for future Kaska. Yet, despite his commitment to unpacking visual identity