Art in Montreal

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...

  This week we deal with three shows that play with different types of fetish imagery. Unlike the more commonplace fetish imagery about “culture,” these are more overt in tackling eroticism. This is not to suggest that the culture fetish is not present, in fact, in two of the shows it is explicitly foregrounded. At Art Mûr is Diana Thorneycroft ’s exhibition of coloured drawings, Sing Into my Mouth . Thorneycroft has consistently changed strategies across her career. Her work divides easily into distinct directions and models that she has pursued for several years at a time. There have been thematic and stylistic consistencies within this. Her current drawings share something with her earlier ones depicting murdering one’s lovers and continue her interest in the perverse, whether that is taken as content or strategy. Throughout her career, there has also been a concern with either esoteric mythologies or more global ones subjected to various sorts of subversion. The more obviou...

  If the previous review examined two very different ways that the “haunted” was presented, this time around is another way of presenting “spirit.” In both of those instances, the mediation of spirit and the performative spiritualization of this mediation were central. And in one of those exhibitions, the hunt for the spirit was expressed largely through a parody of generic church forms, a use of the supposed spiritual significance of monochromes, and the mystique of tourist imagery. In Jeremy Shaw ’s Localize Affect at Bradley|Ertaskiran , something close to this is played out more directly and, importantly, not filtered through romantic mystique but a sense of the demonstrative. Atypically for the gallery, this exhibition spans both of its floors. At the entrance is a series of photos of stuttered bodies which have been manipulated by processes to convey the impression of intense experience. They are rendered in a fashion familiar from high modernist and fashion photography ...

For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay. Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphori...