Art in Montreal

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...

Occupying the central space of Galerie Nicolas Robert, Kelly Jazvac ’s exhibition Le désir et le matriarcat has silver-toned lightboxes set around average eye level, cords running out of them and down along the floor. The boxes contain backlit transparencies of cropped and collaged body parts and blank fabric from magazine ads to suggest landscapes. Spanning a curve with various tangents are a series of carved display plinths, which are mostly open and have a sort of rib structure. Sculptural objects — hybridized from photos that have been woven combined with found waste objects and other scavenged materials — are alternately placed in or on top of them. The surfaces of the plinths are smoothed down to the point that they look more like veneer and are blankly stained for a “naturalistic” (in the sense of cosmetic foundation) look. The sculptural objects are vaguely reminiscent of various banal items (purses, burgers, computer gadgets, etc.). By the entrance is a stack of “bricks” wit...

Taking up the entirety of Centre Vox’s exhibition spaces is Greek artist Janis Rafa ’s Landscape Depressions . It is part of Vox’s Chronopolitics programming, the aim of which is “to provide a forum for artists advocating ethical stances on the future, and to prompt critical reflection on the social and political issues around the notion of time.” A slightly different version of the exhibition under the title Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me ran at the Eye Filmmuseum. At the entrance is the introductory text and the video, A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer , in which dead birds fly through the sky again thanks to an explosion. The remainder of the exhibition spans four distinct spaces. The first space shows The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth . It involves three screens, each of which tends to be dominated by light in a specific colour. On each screen is a different view of horses being trained for racing. They have metallic bits stuck in their mouths, they run on treadmills,...

  Monumentality is a theme that tends to crop up a bit in the city. In the past, we have noted the monument as history’s way of ironizing the present , the monument as the skeletal exhibition of genre clichés , and so on. Two exhibitions currently on at the Belgo follow a comparable line, one explicitly linking this to the matter of monuments and the other not. They each share something in common with another tendency that we have discussed recently, namely a pseudo-religious tendency . This has taken various forms, although notably, it incorporated aspects of the architectural components of religious ritual either as concentrated devices for viewing spiritual ecstasy or as something verging more on a folkish re-enactment from a rural learning centre.  Camille Jodoin-Eng ’s Sun Shrine occupies the rear of Patel|Brown. Two walls are painted in shades of orange and yellow. In the foreground of the space is what amounts to a little gazebo, its walls coated in reliefs made of s...