Art in Montreal

They are more interesting for making explicit something that has been implicit in a number of shows over the last while, namely a general ambivalence about the destruction of the world. This is not the sort of thing that seems to be curatorially admitted, even if it is logically implied in many of the works included in such shows. Dante Guthrie , Lindsay Lion Lord , William Mora , Andrew Rutherdale , and Cléo Sjölander are the artists showing under the banner of Annihilation at Galerie Laroche/Joncas . Sparely placed around the room, the show is dominated by the work of Rutherdale, who presents various insect reliquaries and some Chapmanesque gag about the Enlightenment. There is a hodgepodge of over-ornamentation that suggests the Spanish Baroque recast in more decorative than religious form. These are nicely complemented by the sculptures in stoneware and clay by Mora, which have the quality of dilapidated outsider art rescued from an abandoned farmhouse. Framed in explicitly the

Benoit Blondeau ’s work on exhibition at COA is part of a two-person show with Vinna Begin. Although their works complement each other reasonably in terms of colour and even to some degree thematically, his work overshadows hers with its more substantive material presence. Combining painting and quilting, his work brings together a variety of fabrics and patterns, sewn into what often resemble the areal views of land allotments. The fabrics can be suggestive in their tactility or evocative in their selected details, such as the appearance of part of a buttoned shirt. There is not much of a rationale presented for Blondeau’s work. On his website, he couches it in vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, referencing rhizomes and insisting on a sort of territoriality in the work. The work is taken to be an expression of the specific material qualities of Laval, filtered through the phenomenal recollections of his childhood (sheets, grandmother’s quilts) and trash. Although he divorces his wo