Art in Montreal

“Au Québec, le mot le plus souvent recherché sur Pornhub est… « Québec » !” It would be difficult to legitimately object to the premise that pornography has been one of the central and most important aspects of artistic production in Québec since la Révolution tranquille . It was the success of the films de cul of the 1960s and 70s that established a Québécois film market, both at home and internationally, as viable. And many of the province's most significant directors - Carle, Héroux, Arcand, Fournier among them - worked within and against this tendency. There was a wealth of erotic visual art and music also created in that period, providing one of the strongest and most intellectually complex counter-directions to the more generically internationalist art contemporain that attained institutional hegemony in the 1970s and 80s. The complexity and wealth of the erotic material created in those two decades petered out somewhat in those that followed, in no small part thanks

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another. Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out.  The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV.  One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan would

  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 (an

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