Art in Montreal

  In the space at the back of Galerie Nicolas Robert is a series of works by Chris Kline . Untitled and unnumbered, they fall under the general exhibition title, La Manche. Central to the works is their history as a medium that indexes the shifts in his working space. According to the framing statement : Nearly ten years ago Chris Kline began a process of reconfiguring his paintings. By deposing finished canvases from their stretchers, interposing them between the walls and floor in his studio, interleaving them between sheets of glass, plywood, raw canvas, and layers of gesso, an image appeared in a matrix of indirect ‘brush-strokes’: traces of the geometries of the absented stretcher-frame; the factures of cut, stretched, primed, painted cloth; and the surfaces of concrete and gypsum-board. Reframed and repositioned inside the expanded perimeters of new supports, this image was submerged under applications of paint; the palimpsest of second-hand brush-work dissolved. Indica...

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...