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Review: Joseph Tisiga It was God the whole time at Bradley | Ertaskiran

In the bunker of Bradley|Ertaskiran is Joseph Tisiga’s exhibition, It was God the whole time . Consisting of ten paintings and five sculptures, these are framed by the accompanying text this way: Tisiga indulges in our perceived expectations of his paintings; interrupting familiar scenes or genres with critical or comedic relief. These disruptions are often shocking or amusing, like an inside joke or personal musing only the artist is privy to. […] Tisiga’s work oscillates between the recognizable and the uncanny, the real and the absurd. [np] A recurring character in Tisiga’s work, the seemingly simple mask doubles as an exercise in language making. Tisiga, a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation, reflects on how Kaska do not have a readily apparent visual aesthetic for objects or imagery. Within his works, Tisiga contemplates the construction of different modes of signifying as a necessary preservation tool for future Kaska. Yet, despite his commitment to unpacking visual identity

Review: Undoing Earthwriting at Optica

Last week, I discussed Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa. Part of a feminist biennial, it thematically and structurally foregrounded censorship (or redaction) and confession as forms of created selfhood. This was given an additional (apparently unintentionally comic) dimension since the body of this presented self was depicted as a kind of (extremely familiar) alien object/commodity. These two aspects functioned together to create a mirage of performative depth (largely three-dimensional or durational work in a quasi-domestic space). This was doubled by a makeshift confessional where the participatory “confessions” would be redacted, the exhibitionistic display of their self-censorship an ironic recognition that the self is censorship. Visually this was conveyed by black blots and squares over words. The black square was even applied to an exit sign. Whether intended or not, this had the symbolic suggestion that the self, that repressive and obfuscatory function, b

Review: Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa

When you enter Projet Casa , you are prompted to remove your footwear. Sitting by the door is a selection of slippers that you can put on. Given the theme of the exhibition, this would seem to suggest Hugh Hefner, minus smoking jacket and pipe. But it is not a gag. It is more like visiting a bowling alley and following the rigid signs of decorum and maintenance that oddly go along with it. Utilizing what the accompanying literature references as the domestic “bourgeois” space better than most of the installations that tend to be laid out in it, Delphine Huguet ’s Les corps complexes , curated by Mylène Lachance-Paquin , is part of the international Post-Invisibles : regard sur la place des femme biennial series of shows. Huguet is based in Montréal and France and Lachance-Paquin largely works developing corporate art “democratization” programming. The exhibition notes thank “the Canada Council for the arts for believing in me.” According to the curatorial statement : The exhibi

Reviews: Raphaël Guillemette at COA and Jessica Peters at Simon Blais

  Last week we looked at two shows that were prop-heavy. Whether painting or multi-media installation, the result was a stress on objectification that bypassed their literary inspiration. They ended up concentrating on props that were not reducible to theatricality. If anything, they foregrounded a kind of anti-theatricality, or a theatre in the absence of drama, a theatre of properties rather than performances. This week, we look at two shows where the use of the medium would also seem to suggest a prop quality, like steam-rolled dioramas. They also have something more closely approximating the documentary, and, notably, not the kind of documentary “ neoliberal ” aesthetic that tends to crop up. In these two shows, there is a stress, both thematic and formal, on localization and the sense in which the intensive quality of an aspect can be delineated by divergent rendering. They both frequently employ visual strategies that suggest cloisonné and are usefully seen as types of relief p

Reviews: Marie-Danielle Duval at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau and Cindy Dumais at Circa

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Reviews: Leyla Majer at Optica; Jeanie Riddle and Delphine Hennelly at galerie d'Outremont; Clément de Gaulejac at Maison de la culture de Rosemont-Le Petite-Patrie

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

Reviews: Group Show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany's Espaces imprévisibles at galerie de l'UQAM

This week we look at the two exhibitions running at galerie de l’UQAM: the group show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany ’s Espaces imprévisibles . Both are mostly interesting as genre exercises. They are pleasant there is not that much else at play. Each exhibition consists of running through a gambit of genre clichés, one by way of a group curated by a gender category and one by an individual assuming a symbolic role as the derivation of a genealogy. Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre was curated by Elise Anne LaPlante and involves the work of artists Caroline Boileau , Mimi Haddam , the collective Ikumagialiit (Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo), Daze Jefferies , Helena Martin Franco , Dominique Rey , and Winnie Truong . This is the third stop for the group exhibition. The works are in a variety of media (video, sculpture, watercolour, performance records, stenciled poetry, etc.) which are spread around the

Reviews: Patrick Beaulieu at Art Mûr; Comme un bruit de métal at Projet Casa; Émilie Allard at Centre Clark

Last week’s reviews touched on the “poetic” attempt to do what amounts to pseudo-investigative journalism, avoiding the tabloid route by exploiting an arguably brassy form of performative religiosity to market its slim content. This was given an unsurprising phenomenological inflection (the links between phenomenology and the return to a vaguer and more “embodied” religiosity are well-known) through an appeal to attunement. Attunement, as Heidegger once pointed out, tends to go along with boredom, even when it is about looking at shoes. The conflict between boredom and attunement was avoided in the discussion last week and it will not get much play this time either. But there are a handful more incidents of poetic tuning in and out on display.  Something like this was at play in Patrick Beaulieu ’s Transvasements at Art Mûr. The work was created through his interaction with the various landscapes he passed through while aboard a tiny vessel as it “sailed from the Gironde estuary to