Art in Montreal

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

For several years, Centre Clark has started spring with the latest edition of their Maison modèle show, which employs their space as if it were a model home. The curators of the year select what the model is and decorate and furnish it with sculptures and other artworks. This fundraising event is usually one of the most elaborate installations of the year for the centre. In this year’s iteration, curators Carolyne Scenna and Jean-Michel Leclerc claim that they wished to reflect on the idea of ruin as a space charged with an equivocal temporality, straddling questions of impermanence and vestige, but also on the notion of work — of reconstruction, transformation, memory, repair — that partial or complete destruction, whether material or not, implies. [p] Maison modèle VI is thus interested in bringing together practices that address these themes in an open-ended way, and by extension, the exhibition evokes the sensation we feel when faced with objects that bear witness to the passi

Après moi le déluge is Oli Sorenson ’s new show at Art Mûr . Christine Blais’ gallery text frames the theme of the exhibition this way: The phrase coined by Louis XV at the end of his reign, indifferent to the consequences of his extravagant actions, then taken up by Karl Marx to stigmatize the bourgeoisie of his day, ‘Après moi le déluge’ (After me the flood) is used today to highlight the tensions of individual profit on populations and nature, on the precipice of ecological catastrophe. In PR materials, Sorenson tends to cite “remix culture” as an influence, one evidenced the most obviously in his re-tooling of Hollywood films and posters, but also present here in the plucking of work from various series shown elsewhere. The work at Art Mûr mostly seems to come from The Zombie Capitalism series, which itself is an extension of the Anthropocene (2021) and Capitalocene (2022) projects.  Spread over half of the second floor, the exhibition is a mixture of large and small pieces.

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

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

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

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

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