Art in Montreal

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.

Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert have complementary exhibitions on the work of Betty Goodwin. The eponymous show has works in several media (prints, proofs, works on mylar, etc.) spanning a few decades and showing different aspects of her practice. It has a condensed retrospective quality. The other show consists mostly of photos taken by Geoffrey James of her studio for Canadian Art in 1994. Although there are a few colour works, almost everything in the two shows tends to black and white. This is not stark, but highly textured. Everything becomes about gradients and minute details. The James photos concentrate on all the objects of her practice, either seemingly carefully or haphazardly arranged on various surfaces, and given structure by the architecture that seems to hem them in. Aside from the rather underwhelming colour mylar pieces, most of the work was created when Goodwin was moving away from typical Pop style imagery to something more “personal.” The vest works tha

  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.

Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic. At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques , and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion. To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.

Molinari, the 1960s at the fondation Guido Molinari displays 9 of his acrylic paintings, 2 seriagraphs, 1 sculpture, a collage, and some preliminary sketches. It takes up the entire exhibition space, including the vault. Some remnants of the artist’s studio are maintained in a corner and can be peered into. While the juxtaposition of differentiated areas gives the show a very loose developmental narrative, not much else helps it along. The wall texts are primarily quotations from reviews and catalogues which provide a broad suggestion of the theoretical undepinnings of some of the work. The small historicizing texts and images, displayed by dates as in a ledger, provide an extremely vague context. But it is context that seems otherwise absent. The 60s were a crucial period in his work and the mechanics of the art world in Canada at the time go some way to explaining why he became one of the country’s few high-profile artists.