Reviews: Three at Eli Kerr; Cynthia Girard-Renard at Galerie Cache; Cindy Phenix at Hughes Charbonneau; Kuh Del Rosario at Galerie B-312; Steffie Bélanger at Circa; and Marion Schneider at UQAM
Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts. This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...