Art in Montreal

At Dazibao is the first solo exhibition in Montréal of work by Lori Blondeau, the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. It features a selection of works originally curated by Nasrin Himad. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist, an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and an art bureaucrat. The curation biographs her as follows: Since the 1990s, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada. The first work, Grace (2006), consists of 14 head-shots spread at a right angle across two walls. These images were extracted from a performance involving friends, family, etc. performing as an abstracted self. The face is not visible bu

It would be possible to review a show about the end of the world every week and still leave some out. Apocalyptic fantasies seem to be one of the more significant neuroses exploited by Contemporary Art in the city. Once and a while they are humorous (deliberately or not), but they are almost always pretty to the point of flirting with tweeness. This week, two that get a bit more complicated. If nothing else, Inondation maison by Manuel Poitras at Circa is actually entertaining and not especially pretty. Made of a set of distinct stations, each of which contains a convoluted water-circulating mechanism. Cartoonish in form, each of the contraptions consists of very different appropriated materials (books, chairs, shoes, etc.). Rigged up like the elaborate technological gimmicks of the Swiss Family Robinson , their results function like gags from a silent film.

Extrapolations at Art Mûr brings together some of the latest work of Guillaume Lachapelle . It is a mix of the general tendencies in his practice. There are miniatures on the wall -- often resembling humans attached to architectural and technological elements -- and there is the gadgetry of his diorama that play on ghostly optical illusions. There are also some “skeletal” remains of vague creatures hung up like trophies.  Much of the sculptural work in this exhibition was created utilizing photogrammetry, a process with uses photos taken at different angles to their object to construct 3D print-outs. Distortion with the figures suggests digital glitching in the process with the occasional monstrous result.  Over the more than fifteen years that he has been showing, critics have highlighted the supposedly “childlike nature” of works featuring “fantastic” creatures in unlikely scenarios. Or they have stressed a duality in his work between its apparent realism and evident fantasy.

  What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli , this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central. Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing. While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture , whether unders