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Review: Antoine Larocque’s Démissionner de la vie des arts at Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais

This week, I leave Montr é al and travel to Hull to see a show at the Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais . Over the rusting bridges from the purgatory that is Ottawa, Hull is an eccentric mixture of heterogeneous architectural styles that garishly clash with one another thanks to the city’s history of consistently stunted growth, lopsided development, and near collapse. Passing by the rather sad Parc Jean Dallaire (still nowhere near as depressing as  Montréal ’s Parc Prudence Heward), I got lost navigating the circular streets and cul de sacs broken up by green paths and intersected by dead and overgrown rail lines. The university building housing the gallery feels more like a high school, seemingly dropped in at random beyond one of the main stretches, which itself was mostly devoid of people, only boulangeries run from the basements of converted houses and random massage parlours. This exhibition by Antoine Larocque was housed in a blank gallery space at the corner of a

Reviews: Louise Robert at Simon Blais | Didier Morelli at Skol

  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

Review: Sophie Jodoin's d’un seul souffle at Artexte

Sophie Jodoin ’s d’un seul souffle exhibit is the product of a research residency at Artexte during which she examined the various documents collected under the names of female artists in the 410 sector of the institute. From them she photographed, scanned, and photocopied images and texts, integrating these into two works. One, a video, d’un seul souffle , and the other, a book. They occupy (more or less) separate spaces. The video has its own white room with a bench. The book sits on a shelf suspended from a brutalist surface. It can be flipped through. Facing it is a wall of names, arranged alphabetically like the dead at a cenotaph, of the artists that she examined. A book of her own, fastened so it cannot be leafed through, provides an additional joining point, sitting at the entrance to the video like a prop for a staged memorial.

Reviews: Benoit Blondeau at Galerie COA | Marie-Andrée Gill at Galerie UQAM

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

Review: Anne-Marie Proulx's Être jardin at Vox

Anne-Marie Proulx's Être jardin at Vox was curated by Marie J. Jean with Dominique Mousseau and Claudine Roger. It is the latest part of a photo/installation project by the artist that dates to 2015. Proulx's project involves a complex relationship with Anne Hébert 's Premier jardin (1988). The novel, in part, deals with an actress in a thinly veiled Québec City. Filled with theatrical referencing (from Molière to Beckett), this was transformed by Proulx into a book of photographs and appropriated texts in four acts, furthering the underlying theatrical aspect of the source novel. 

Review: Félipe Goulet Letarte's Political Poem 3 at Galerie Popop.

Félipe Goulet Letarte 's Le Poème politique 3 at Galerie Popop is the third part of a series of paintings/performances. According to the artist, "Political Poem 3 is a conceptual painting series following the score: paint the phrase ‘I am ashamed to be white’ in a different language on each painting’’ It would be easy to dismiss it as crude agit-prop or trolling but there’s a little more to it, either deliberately or not, than something that asinine. And as easy as it would be to dismiss the gesture as exploitative and narcissistic, it’s interesting as a particularly naked instance of some of the tendencies in the city’s Contemporary Art. Letarte claimed that the idea for the works occurred to him in 2014, which means these have been gestating for nearly a decade. This may be true or defensive. It seems eerily too much an appropriation of the meme moral panic associated with the “It’s Okay to be White” posters from a few years ago to be coincidental.

Review: Maryam Eizadifard’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica

  According to the accompanying text by Catherine Barnabé, Maryam Eizadifard ’s Fragment-s de silence I at Optica “attempts to sense the effects that spaces have on the body. Specifically, in places where the body has no reference point. She is attentive to the imprint of the body’s memory that can be awakened by theses spaces. A smell, a familiar atmosphere, the handling of an object can arouse a buried memory and, suddenly, a new environment becomes a point of reference.” The exhibition uses a few different tactics to approach this. The text goes on to explain that the artist ritualistically cut herself off from “the outside world” and stayed in a basement in Terrbonne which, by environmental analogy, reminded her of her childhood in Iran. It was here, under these experimental conditions, that she made the drawings that form the base of the work. Eizadifard has created three distinct areas: spanning two walls are a series of glass pieces with photos suspended in them; on another