Art in Montreal

Not long ago we reviewed a show at UQAM that took as its broad concern issues of “fake news” and the schisms between different types of knowledge. While it emphasized the dubious role of the university’s mediation in the evaluation of these different regimes of knowledge, none of these things were formulated in a way that made much sense, either within the works themselves or their collective curation. As a result, the exhibition testified more to the irrelevance of knowledge than anything else and demonstrated the absurdity of its conceptual categories and strategies. At Circa is another show that dances around a topic peripheral to fake news and alternative epistemologies, conspiracy theory. Jacinthe Loranger ’s Conspiritualité, pastel Q et autres cabales is something of an aesthetic departure from her earlier work. According to the accompanying essay by Galadriel Avon, the installation …examin[es] codes that stem from conspiracy theories. Although popular for centuries, recent...

The fall season is here and galleries are opening their doors again. The art spaces at the Gaspé relaunched last week with the halls including a poster declaring the ongoing panic about the decline of culture and its potential ruination. The point comes across with a certain degree of ambiguity in the wording and this provides a useful backdrop to what will be discussed in this article. This selection of reviews is organized in a more or less thematic manner. The theme is primarily monumentality and secondarily some other, maybe more interesting things. Monumentality is a pretty standard theme in art discourse, localized in discussions of its earliest iterations in religious art and territorial markings. Monuments are one clear way to leave a trace or mark-up a landscape. The term tends to conjure the sculptural but certainly is not limited to it. A monument often indicates and memorializes the passage of some historical event, standing in for it as a kind of presence that may cast a...

Hannaleah Ledwell's Pour ceux qui mangeait des fleurs at Galerie du Viaduc Hannaleah Ledwell ’s pieces displayed at Galerie du Viaduc seem to continue what she was doing in the last two exhibitions of hers that I have seen (at Popup and Gallery Parfois). But there have also been some significant shifts. Specifically, her palette has altered. It is darker, bluer, more night scene but still in the pastoral vein that she seems to cultivate. The rendering of the bodies is clearer and cartoonishly overlaid to make the gestures more legible while less concrete. The figures are more readable, their distinction from the ground is starker than before. This is also helped by the greater expansion in palette. One of the more interesting things in the show is the inclusion of what appear to be several small mock-ups for paintings that dot across one back wall. It might have been interesting to integrate this aspect more into the display of the more fully worked-out pieces. It will be intere...

Originally launched in 2012, the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone ( BACA ) was established “to promote Aboriginal art and to raise awareness and educate the public about First Nations cultural issues.” BACA is produced in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Québec (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Fonds d’investissement pour le rayonnement de la Métropole, Secrétariat des affaires autochtones), the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and Tourisme Montréal. The biennial runs from March until September at several locations within the province (DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville, Galerie d’art Stewart Hall, Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, La Guilde, Maison de la culture Verdun, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, Musée McCord Stewart, and Musée Rimouski). This, the seventh iteration of the biennial, involves the work of more than sixty artists. Keeping within the generic aspects of biennials, it is organized by curators Lori Beavis, Emma H...

Once again Pangée is a uniquely good host for the two exhibitions that it currently has on. The creaking floors of the old mansion, perched on the mountain and seemingly detached while sitting aside the swelling roadways and pathways that cross its side tend to do far more for the works it displays than the bland rectangles of the rest of the city. Generally, Projet Casa still feels too homey but Pangée feels like an artificially maintained leftover from a dead society. It also tends to stress the works it puts on display as functions of décor. Grace Kalyta’s Hall of Mirrors is basically a painting show bleeding into sculpture. The various works depict furnishings and fabrics for the most part. Their ostensible subject matter is the surfaces of stuff, which here tends to be dealt with in two broad ways. One is the painterly depiction of light and texture and the other extends this surface concern to a more literal kind of objectification where the depiction of the surface and the surf...