Art in Montreal

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

Not long ago we reviewed a show at UQAM that took as its broad concern issues of “fake news” and the schisms between different types of knowledge. While it emphasized the dubious role of the university’s mediation in the evaluation of these different regimes of knowledge, none of these things were formulated in a way that made much sense, either within the works themselves or their collective curation. As a result, the exhibition testified more to the irrelevance of knowledge than anything else and demonstrated the absurdity of its conceptual categories and strategies. At Circa is another show that dances around a topic peripheral to fake news and alternative epistemologies, conspiracy theory. Jacinthe Loranger ’s Conspiritualité, pastel Q et autres cabales is something of an aesthetic departure from her earlier work. According to the accompanying essay by Galadriel Avon, the installation …examin[es] codes that stem from conspiracy theories. Although popular for centuries, recent...

  If the previous review examined two very different ways that the “haunted” was presented, this time around is another way of presenting “spirit.” In both of those instances, the mediation of spirit and the performative spiritualization of this mediation were central. And in one of those exhibitions, the hunt for the spirit was expressed largely through a parody of generic church forms, a use of the supposed spiritual significance of monochromes, and the mystique of tourist imagery. In Jeremy Shaw ’s Localize Affect at Bradley|Ertaskiran , something close to this is played out more directly and, importantly, not filtered through romantic mystique but a sense of the demonstrative. Atypically for the gallery, this exhibition spans both of its floors. At the entrance is a series of photos of stuttered bodies which have been manipulated by processes to convey the impression of intense experience. They are rendered in a fashion familiar from high modernist and fashion photography ...

For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay. Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphori...

This week we will look at two current exhibitions that overlap in framing and style, one stressing the elliptical and the other softness. At Blouin|Division is Ellipses by Angela Grauerholz , featuring work that spans from the 1980s until a couple of years ago. The retrospective quality reinforces the retrospective content of the images, both of which tend to suggest an indifferent (or at least foggy) temporality. While there have been some distinct tangents in her career, there is not much indication of them here. What is on display is the kind of thing she has been best known for (and which has been central to her other more or less retrospective shows), namely photos of display spaces (galleries, museums, gardens) and the various windows to the world that they echo (door and window frames as stand-ins for the frames around art or their devices of capture and vice versa). The gallery frames it this way : Grauerholz’s images have the preternatural ability to be experienced as fra...

Originally launched in 2012, the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone ( BACA ) was established “to promote Aboriginal art and to raise awareness and educate the public about First Nations cultural issues.” BACA is produced in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Québec (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Fonds d’investissement pour le rayonnement de la Métropole, Secrétariat des affaires autochtones), the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and Tourisme Montréal. The biennial runs from March until September at several locations within the province (DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville, Galerie d’art Stewart Hall, Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, La Guilde, Maison de la culture Verdun, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, Musée McCord Stewart, and Musée Rimouski). This, the seventh iteration of the biennial, involves the work of more than sixty artists. Keeping within the generic aspects of biennials, it is organized by curators Lori Beavis, Emma H...