Art in Montreal

  The Autumn season began with the city's second-funniest exhibition this year. It was at MICA and part of the multi-venue exhibition, Une assemblée pour le cosmos , which spreads across  Galerie de l’UQAM , the Institut d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Adélard . (I attended the first two and did not make it to the Frelighsburg exhibition, which extends one of the works at UQAM.) According to one of the official exhibition statements The project invites viewers to take a renewed look at the cosmos, which has always captivated our imaginaries and shaped our relationship with the world. While the ambitions for space conquest dominate the current context, the participating artists bring forward a diversity of forms of knowledge and sensibilities through works that draw on affectively charged materials such as meteorites, stones, and sealskin, and a variety of media, such as sculpture, beadwork, installation, video, and sound. «Making Assembly» thus becomes a way to fos...

Lynda Gaudreau’s “Romances” at Centre Vox There are half a dozen basic elements to Gaudreau' s show. At the entrance is a wall of staggered images in a dark, makeshift alley. Once you walk through that, there is a little table with coloured lights and some magazines covered in plastic you can flip through. In the anteroom is a prop version of the type of press kiosk that once existed in Montréal, filled with stacks of tabloids, or the “yellow press.” There are two trailers projected for a giallo film (one at a time): one from the perspective of the investigation and one from the victims'. And there is a sound installation, consisting of fragments of music, dialogue, gasps, etc.   According to the accompanying text : The storyline, inspired by the aesthetics of Italian giallo cinema, proceeds through a series of crimes in which the victims’ eyes are mutilated. This motif references the drive and desire to see that is integral to cinema and visual culture. In both the giallo...

  Miles Rufelds ' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations. It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art histor...

Taking up the entirety of Centre Vox’s exhibition spaces is Greek artist Janis Rafa ’s Landscape Depressions . It is part of Vox’s Chronopolitics programming, the aim of which is “to provide a forum for artists advocating ethical stances on the future, and to prompt critical reflection on the social and political issues around the notion of time.” A slightly different version of the exhibition under the title Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me ran at the Eye Filmmuseum. At the entrance is the introductory text and the video, A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer , in which dead birds fly through the sky again thanks to an explosion. The remainder of the exhibition spans four distinct spaces. The first space shows The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth . It involves three screens, each of which tends to be dominated by light in a specific colour. On each screen is a different view of horses being trained for racing. They have metallic bits stuck in their mouths, they run on treadmills,...

Occupying the gallery facing the street on the second floor of Art Mûr is Mohadese Movahed ’s Voices of Feathers, Voices of Daggers. The show consists of a series of paintings that focus primarily on walls of various kinds. Some are brick, some stone, some are barrier walls, some shops walls, house walls, and so on. These walls are typically framed by or juxtaposed with windows, doorways, and other architectural implements and elements. Occasionally, a fragmented or obscured body part will be seen, but most of the time the presence of the human figure comes in the form of shadows cast on the walls. Within the grids of the walls appear bits of graffiti, posters, and the occasional flower. According to the accompanying text by Sara Trapara , this work is rooted in the artist’s identity as an Iranian and relates the “psychological complexities of life under oppression.” This series explores how the built environment is altered by memories and experiences of trauma, oppression and vio...

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...