Art in Montreal

If the previous article on MOMENTA addressed the problem of the use of imagery to construct a narrative and the ways in which the image as art undermined its reterritorialization as “culture,” this article looks at this in a more basic way through how a series of exhibitions highlight a much more foundational aspect of the image. This is done both technically and thematically. One of the more blatant means by which this is introduced is a stress on the pixel as a kind of “building block” for the digital image. As a term, pixel comes from popular cinematic discourse (“pix” as plural for motion pictures) that was wedded to “el” (element). As one of the smallest elements of a digital image (raster or dot matrix), it contains a sample of an image (whether indexical or strictly synthetic). In printing or digital imaging, their appearance varies greatly according to resolution and to how they have been gridded. They can be rendered as squares, dots, lines, etc. The stress on the pixel as

MOMENTA has opened. While I have only seen about two-thirds of it so far, it does seem to be better than past instances. I have already written an introductory preamble examining the self-contextualization and curatorial claims that have accrued around this iteration. In this, and a few future articles, I will examine some of the actualized exhibitions. There are, from the outset, a series of interesting clashes amid a number of the exhibitions. I will only deal with a couple of them here, but they seem neatly in line with the general theme of masquerades. The two discussed here were directly funded by MOMENTA so this should not be surprising. One of the three exhibitions on at Galerie de l’UQAM is The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval by the collective Marion Lessard (Marie Cherbat-Schiller, Alice Roussel, Jean-Nicolas Léonard, Claude Romain, and Élisabeth M. Larouine). According to its official gloss: Marion Lessard appropriate

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

At Dazibao is the first solo exhibition in Montréal of work by Lori Blondeau, the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. It features a selection of works originally curated by Nasrin Himad. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist, an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and an art bureaucrat. The curation biographs her as follows: Since the 1990s, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada. The first work, Grace (2006), consists of 14 head-shots spread at a right angle across two walls. These images were extracted from a performance involving friends, family, etc. performing as an abstracted self. The face is not visible bu

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.

Julie Tremble 's Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies at Dazibao consists of two video installations that take up the space of the gallery. The first, Abiogenèse: des étoiles aux momies , is a four-channel installation of 3D animations offering a set of distinct tableaux depicting the birth of the solar system, pre-life mineral formations, and fossilizations. The second is Luce RTX3090 (2022): This speculative fiction is situated in 2062. A digital rendering of the iconic Québec actress Luce Guilbeault is 127 years old (in reality Luce Guilbeault died in 1991 from cancer). She chronicles how in order to increase workforce productivity every person on the planet now undergoes a mandatory anti-aging treatment that maintains the body as though they are 25 years old. But, in order to control overpopulation, at 65 years old, their bodies turn to dust. Within the same introspective monologue, she also considers how her life as an actress, captured on film, will contribute to her own im

  Eddy Firmin 's Orgueil et préjugés spans two substantial rooms at Art Mûr , employing installations of appropriated items, sculptures, video, and photography. Stylistically, these suggest regional museum aesthetics, installation art, advertising, jewellery display cases, video essays and so on. The eclecticism of strategies does not suggest museographic critique so much as artistic egoism, consistently returning to images of the artist. The performative heterogeneity of its material resources ironically only points to the homogeneity of its polemical references and techniques. Together they blur the viability of any kind of point.

At Occurrence , Angela Grauerholz’s The Empty S(h)elf, deuxième itération , follows on from the first’s “exploration into concepts of subjective experience and the role of language in self-definition.” This time, The Empty S(h)elf engages the archive in a more direct reflection on the role of language and subjectivity: here concerned with how the acquisition of language defines one’s sense of self and simultaneously separates self and other—the primordial being that exists outside of language. In this instance, the “other” is represented by the main character in a story by Franz Kafka entitled “A Report to an Academy”: an ape recounts how he survived and escaped life in a zoo by mimicking human actions, eventually adopting speech to become a circus performer. An analogy to the construction of the self and even the “escape” into becoming an artist might be suggested. Created in collaboration with graphic designer Réjean Myette and with sound elements by Melissa Grey and David Morn

Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain involves two sets of monotypes. One series ( Danser ) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other ( Lignes ) is more visually stimulating. Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual. As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p