Art in Montreal

  Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr . For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well. While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date. While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting. None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated...

Erin Shirreff , Midday dilemma at Bradley Ertaskiran On my way into the Shirreff show on ripped up and mostly vacant Saint-Antoine, two young men pulled up beside me to jovially inform me that Jesus was the messiah. From there, I entered the white noise of the gallery, the textual accompaniment to the exhibition laminated and flatly laying in a corner by the hand sanitizer. At that point, the overwhelming sensation was the stale, sweet smell of forced air. The four wall-works in the exhibition are a mixture of collage and sculptural assemblage constructed from scans of old art anthologies. This imagery was printed on aluminum and cut into shapes then arranged in deep-set frames. Also included are two bronze sculptures inspired by her collages, created using foamcore and hot glue which were then sandcast as single sculptures. These objects are all sparely placed around the large room, most of the space remaining starkly empty and allowing the visitor to circulate, cutting up the r...

Chloe Wise , In Loveliness of Perfect Deeds at Blouin|Division Subjecting whatever Wise’s work supposedly means to criticism is on the same level as making jokes about Boris Johnson. It’s taking the bait of the media image that has been constructed around her (as well as presumably by her) and which allows her to sit comfortably in air-headed profiles for Elle Canada and Interview . However, there is something tantalizing about that, even if it makes you a fool for engaging at all. Instead, it is better to simply look at the work in situ, an object to be stumbled into at the end of the long corridor in the unfortunately designed space of Blouin|Division. If there could be such a thing as twee nostalgia for a past generation of hipster cliche, it would exist here, less in the overt sense of its content, than in the manner in which it is arranged. It’s the arrangement that lingers because the rest is fairly forgettable, presumably a deliberate effect as one scrolls through the pro...

  Erin Shirreff, Midday dilemma at Bradley Ertaskiran from June 8 to July 16, 2022 “The works on view in the exhibition are each grounded in the visual archive of 20th-century Western art history, a source Shirreff has used either directly or indirectly in sculpture, video, and photography for several years. Shirreff uses this material—images of objects meant for contemplation—not for critique or homage, but to explore our experience of looking and the peculiar expressiveness of objects rendered in two dimensions.” Marco Brambilla, Heaven’s Gate at Centre Phi from June 30 to October 24, 2022 “Heaven's Gate is a monumental new work by videographer Marco Brambilla. Seen as a grandiose, satirical and dizzying meditation on Hollywood's dream factory, Heaven's Gate is a psychedelic digital tableau inspired by the Seven Levels of Purgatory that employs the same state-of-the-art digital composition technology as the films it references.” Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Mar...