Art in Montreal

In an earlier article, I briefly sketched out the birth and death of the original Biennale de Montréal , an event that ran between 1998 and 2011 before it was transformed into an NGO and then went bankrupt a few years later. The transfer from the CIAC to NGO status and affiliation with the MAC also coincided with the death of the triennial . The aim of the biennial in either instance was part of a programme of Montréalisation, a way of re-imagining the city, and of marketing it as a honey-pot for tourists. Foregrounded consistently in the first set of biennials was a narrative of the city’s avant-garde that served both as a kind of historical relativization of the work being shown and a tool for grafting the art to a broader image of Contemporary Art history. Ironically, this also ended in a kind of ungrounding that was part of the event’s consistent advocacy for digital art. The previous three iterations of the MOMENTA Biennale (2017, 2019, 2021) were the product of the expansion ...

With this year’s biennial coming up and almost everyone lazing for the holiday season, it seemed like a good time to recall the defunct version of the event, which expired in 2011 after which it was revived (twice) and hybridized. The first came as one of the peak achievements of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which, far more than the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), seemed to take the premise that the city needed Contemporary Art seriously. The biennial is one of the most generic forms that Contemporary Art tends to be marketed in. It can have a national orientation, such as the Whitney, or an internationalist one, like the Venice. There are other variations and in Montréal it was a hodgepodge. A lot of ink has been spilled on the difference between these models of biennial and those that have been popping up in the “global south,” and that biennials, as associated as they may be with the “post-colonial turn” and/or with globalizing capital...

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 th...

A Symphony of Untold Depths at Galerie Nicolas Robert features the work of seven artists and Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley|Ertaskiran has work by thirteen. Both group shows are arranged around a broad theme. They pair interestingly since one is largely about projecting a face (or some other body part) onto the world and the other is about a world without faces. The results are a mixture of the sensual and slightly unnerving. The Bradley|Ertaskiran show is broader in scope and this thins it out a bit. A few of the works don’t quite belong and don’t add much, in particular two paintings by Janet Werner . The painting of hers that does fit, Moore , sits at the front of the exhibition. Encountered upon entrance, it is a little nightmarish work: loosely handled figures in a landscape suggesting something between the Historic rape genre that was popular for a while in Salon painting and the earth mother Primitivism popular among Modernists. It’s paired, appropriately enough, with a very d...