Art in Montreal

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

Jocelyne Alloucherie’s Quelques ciels at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert    The works by Jocelyne Alloucherie on display at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert are split between a series of photo/drawing collages and a video. In one room there are diptychs and triptychs. They feature photos of clouds and drawings of them, layered to give a sense of depth and dynamism. These, the accompanying text informs us, are preliminary models for a public work to be shown at Viau metro. In the other room is a video featuring historic gardens. Sparse figures drift through the frame under mostly empty skies. Like the photos, these have been made over time and spliced together with a soundtrack. The video is supposed to be shown simultaneously with another that shares the same soundtrack, projected blind, in a structure suggesting a Greek amphitheatre. There is even a small scale model of this on display.  These works are fragments of a larger body of work that falls under

Volupté , the new group show at Blouin|Division , features the work of 8 artists: Amanda Ba, Geneviève Cadieux, Shona McAndrew, GaHee Park, Elena Redmond, Hiba Schahbaz, Corri-Lynn Tetz, and Chloe Wise. It joins a set of erotic art shows that have been seen in the city over the past year (such as Mia Sandhu , Hannaleah Ledwell , Kara Eckler and Caroline Schub ), although it is notable for being the least ambitious or thoughtful of them, as well as the most uneven in quality. According to its press materials, in [b]ringing together a group of female-identifying artists from various backgrounds, Volupté aims to draw an alternative portrait of pleasure, one that dispels masked fears about the emancipation of female pleasure outside of patriarchal control. [p] The artists brought together in this project are exploring desire in its various expressions, whether it is psychological, physical, sensory, or erotic. Pleasure is represented as complex and multifarious and often posited at a wi

It is the nineteenth iteration of Art Mûr's annual survey of art being produced in graduate programs across the country. 13 institutes are taking part this time, and the work of 33 students pursuing their MFAs is showcased across two floors of the gallery. As usual, there are paintings and sculptures as well as textiles with painting dominating.  One of the more interesting things about this annual event has been the extent to which it tends to deprive artists of the various crutches they rely upon to maintain the "communicative" aspect of their work, namely supplementary text. They are in a certain sense denuded and left more vulnerable, set in potentially strange relations in this space alien from the studios of the artists or their intended fate as the aspect of an exhibition. Unlike most survey exhibitions, there is no justification offered for any of the selections and no clear unifying factor, which can make it all feel rather random. This contextualizatio

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia. The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions

There were three exhibitions focusing on the Torma-Zsako family in the city over the past month or so. One at Robert Poulin ( Métamorphoses ) that featured them heavily, one at Laroche/Joncas ( 1 famille, 4 artistes, 2 expositions ), and this one at Projet Casa ( Flowers, Warriors, Beasts, Hands: Divergences et réciprocité ). Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of overlap between them. The Poulin and Casa shows were, however, the stronger. The Casa show displayed them at their most uneven and Istvan’s and David ’s sculptures dominated. At Poulin it was Balint ’s watercolours and Anna ’s sewn works that overshadowed the others. The Casa show was very much a sculpture show and the Poulin show was a wall art one.

It would be possible to review a show about the end of the world every week and still leave some out. Apocalyptic fantasies seem to be one of the more significant neuroses exploited by Contemporary Art in the city. Once and a while they are humorous (deliberately or not), but they are almost always pretty to the point of flirting with tweeness. This week, two that get a bit more complicated. If nothing else, Inondation maison by Manuel Poitras at Circa is actually entertaining and not especially pretty. Made of a set of distinct stations, each of which contains a convoluted water-circulating mechanism. Cartoonish in form, each of the contraptions consists of very different appropriated materials (books, chairs, shoes, etc.). Rigged up like the elaborate technological gimmicks of the Swiss Family Robinson , their results function like gags from a silent film.

Extrapolations at Art Mûr brings together some of the latest work of Guillaume Lachapelle . It is a mix of the general tendencies in his practice. There are miniatures on the wall -- often resembling humans attached to architectural and technological elements -- and there is the gadgetry of his diorama that play on ghostly optical illusions. There are also some “skeletal” remains of vague creatures hung up like trophies.  Much of the sculptural work in this exhibition was created utilizing photogrammetry, a process with uses photos taken at different angles to their object to construct 3D print-outs. Distortion with the figures suggests digital glitching in the process with the occasional monstrous result.  Over the more than fifteen years that he has been showing, critics have highlighted the supposedly “childlike nature” of works featuring “fantastic” creatures in unlikely scenarios. Or they have stressed a duality in his work between its apparent realism and evident fantasy.

  What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli , this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central. Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing. While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture , whether unders

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