Vikky Alexander, Nordic Rock — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Vikky Alexander

[Winter 2021] Nordic Rock Darling Foundry, Montreal February 27–August 29, 2020 By James D. Campbell Vikky Alexander’s Nordic Rock is a rare extravaganza of the literal and the metaphorical, the real and the surreal. It provokes a counterpoint to and reappraisal of the massive scale of the imposing Darling Foundry Main Hall in which it […]

Robert Walker, Griffintown / Montréal en mutation — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Robert Walker

[Summer 2020] An Interview by James D. Campbell Robert Walker was born in Montreal in 1945. He graduated in visual arts from Sir George Williams University in the late 1960s. In 1975, he attended a workshop given by American photographer Lee Friedlander that would be transformative, and he embraced colour street photography as an aesthetic […]

Traces of Virgil as a Chalk Giant: Ewa Monika Zebrowski’s Meditations on Cy Twombly — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Readings
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Cy Twombly, Ewa Monika Zebrowski

August 11, 2022 [originally published in CV114 in Winter 2020] — By James D. Campbell. Since 2014, noted Canadian artist Ewa Monika Zebrowski has been exploring the universe of artist Cy Twombly on both sides of the Atlantic…

Intimate Portraits — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Andrea Szilasi

April 23, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By James D. Campbell. Intimate Portraits brought together works by four artists whose preoccupation with the human body is a longstanding one: Donigan Cumming, JJ Levine, George Steeves, and Andrea Szilasi. Their works interrogate the nature of portraiture itself…

Julian Rosefeldt — James Campbell

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Julian Rosefeldt

April 19, 2023 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By James Campbell. Whether playing a senior CIA agent (Hanna, 2011), Elf Queen Galadriel (The Lord of the Rings, 2001 2002, 2003), or a formerly rich New York socialite on the move (Blue Jasmine, 2013), Cate Blanchett has demonstrated her acting chops and established herself as one of the wiliest and most brilliant chameleons in contemporary cinema…

Regards critiques et nouvelle photographie — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

November 9, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — This compelling exhibition of the works of Isabelle Hayeur, Thomas Kneubühler, Jean-François Lemire, Valerian Mazataud, and Andreas Rutkauskas was notable for the trenchant criticality of its thematic engagement with sundry social and environmental issues…

Bert Danckaert, True Nature — James D. Campbell, Strange Oases of the Seen: Images of the Built World

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Bert Danckaert

June 21, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — By James D. Campbell. The photographs of Belgian artist Bert Danckaert have been likened to abstract paintings, but the family resemblance resides more in the facture than in the finished work of art…

In Pursuit of the Afterlife – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Afterlife

February 9, 2022 [originally published in CV110 in Fall 2018 ] — In a remarkable group exhibition at Optica, Raymonde April, one of Canada’s finest living photographers, marshalled the talents of an intrepid group of itinerant fellow travellers – and to radiant effect…

Natascha Niederstrass, Behind Closed Doors: Body of Evidence | Le point aveugle – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Natascha Niederstrass

September 21, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 2018] — Over the last several years, at exhibitions in Montreal and elsewhere, Montreal-based photographic artist Natascha Niederstrass has earned a strong reputation for informing her work with forensic-photography aesthetics and infusing it with a full measure of chilling, even spine-tingling, premises and implications…

ENTR’ACTE
. A Collective Portrait of the Royal Victoria Hospital – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Chih-Chien Wang, Gabor Szilasi, Luc Courchesne, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Michel Campeau, Raymonde April, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Serge Clément, Yan Giguère, Yann Pocreau

Octobre 19, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — This round-robin exhibition featured powerful and evocative images of the original site of the recently abandoned Royal Victoria Hospital. Eleven Montreal artists were invited by the RBC Art and Heritage Centre of the McGill University Health Centre to tour the original site…

Sylvie Readman, À contretemps II : site spécifique – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Sylvie Readman

April 20, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] — In this photographic essay, Sylvie Readman brilliantly addresses the strange topography of the abandoned military base at Saint-Hubert, Quebec, in terms of non-place and liminal space. Her fortuitous discovery of this site has resulted in some of her most memorable images to date…

Vide et Vertige – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Ivan Binet, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Mathieu Cardin

November 10, 2020 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — This exhibition of works by Jocelyne Alloucherie, Ivan Binet, and Mathieu Cardin was brilliantly dovetailed in terms of theme and installed with consummate finesse in mortise-and-tenon fashion from floor to floor in all the gallery spaces.

Fiona Annis, Les révolutions sidérales – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Fiona Annis

June 9, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — In the photoworks in this exhibition, Fiona Annis dilated with poetic acuity on the clockwork of the heavens. She mined resources as varied and recondite as the first spectroscopic data on the trajectory of Halley’s Comet, recorded in 1910, and Binary Stars: A Pictorial Atlas, 1992…

Jessica Eaton, Colour Is a Verb – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Eaton

April 30, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Jessica Eaton, a fast-rising star in the photographic world, has for some time now explored the notion of “colour is a verb” with rare verve, intensity, and thematic abandon. In her recent dovetailing series of works shown at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal as part of an exhibition aptly titled Transmutations, Eaton, already celebrated as a doyenne of colour theory…

Marisa Portolese, Belle de jour III: Dialogues with Notman’s Portraits of Women – James D. Campbell, More than Meets Her Eye: A Dimensional Portraiture

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

March 5, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Montreal-based fine-art photographer Marisa Portolese has garnered well-deserved acclaim for the clarity and lush chromatic and emotional dimensionality of her images. The third instalment of her photographic series of portraits of women and girls titled Belle de jour marks something…

Kate Hutchinson, The Park – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Kate Hutchinson

November 6, 2019 [originally published in Spring 2016] — Sometime in the early twenty-third century, a sealed copper box is found interred at the foot of the excavated cross on top of Montreal’s estimable Mount Royal. Once opened, archaeologists and sundry forensic experts find a fulsome sheaf of what seem to be vernacular images…

Jessica Auer, January – James D. Campbell, Bluer than Blue

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Auer

January 13, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Who better than a seasoned photographer to explore the phenomenology of light? Jessica Auer’s recent series January, created during a 2015 residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, is a thematic work of great visual poetry…

Alain Lefort, PEQUOD (‘pi:’kwad) – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Alain Lefort

June 20, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Lefort fittingly cribs his title from American author Herman Melville’s 1851 magnum opus Moby Dick: the Pequod is a fictitious nineteenth-century Nantucket whaling ship that appears in the novel as an instrument of revenge…

Kathleen Ritter, Camoufleurs – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Kathleen Ritter

April 24, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — This captivating exhibition of work by Kathleen Ritter is aptly and enticingly titled Camoufleurs. A camoufleur was a person – usually an artist, usually a woman – who designed and installed military camouflage in one of the world wars of the last century. The term relates to all First and Second World War specialists in the art of camouflage…

À louer / For Rent : UMA, various venues, Montreal – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

October 4, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — UMA, Montreal’s estimable Maison de l’image et de la photographie, has taken a valuable and highly laudatory initiative in seeking out vacant commercial spaces throughout Montreal and installing photographic works in their windows. What was once a forlorn blank slate of the inner city becomes a vibrant forum for the photographic image. The works remain on view until the spaces are rented or sold…

Scott Chandler, Fordlândia – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Scott Chandler

August 2, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Scott Chandler’s recent work opens a window on a place and a time unknown to us. With an “under-the-radar” documentary ethic and his cumbersome camera equipment, he travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to photograph eloquent ruins hidden for generations from the outside world.

Chih-Chien Wang, Short Sentences – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang

February 9, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — In Short Sentences, an aptly titled show of recent photographic and video work, Chih-Chien Wang offers a moving photographic journey that is also a poetic reverie on words and things, life and death. The show is fittingly bracketed by an image of the artist’s son asleep, and another of his son being breastfed by his partner, Yushan. In the former, Shaore Lies on Futon, a photograph of his son lying prone on a futon in deep sleep, Wang evokes the fragility of young life.

Marisa Portolese – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

September 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — While acclaimed Montreal-based photographic artist Marisa Portolese has always used people she knows as subjects in her work, her new photographic series, Dream Weavers (of which this show, “Pietà,” is a stand-alone excerpt), marks something of a departure. Here, she turns inwards, essaying an up-close-and-personal narrative involving members of her own family while constructing a poetic meta-narrative that is rife with feelings, memories, and the numinous.

Péripéties – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Bettina Hoffmann, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Chih-Chien Wang, Eve K. Tremblay, Milutin Gubash

June 23, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — This exhibition highlights narrative disruption and its consequences in five mature bodies of photographic and video work, and demonstrates how the uncanny seeps in and out of those ruptures in an auratic and seismic way, even as meaning and dénouement are delayed. Works by Bettina Hoffman, Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Milutin Gubash, Eve K. Tremblay, and Chih-Chien Wang…

Raymonde April, Equivalences 1-4 – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Raymonde April

April 6, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — Why is it that Raymonde April’s art always occupies the foreground of my consciousness when I think about photography – about what it is and what it can be ? Even as flashier and more graphically cinematographic photography rules the proverbial roost in the art world right now, April, a maverick artist, has long since staked out her territory and made it her wholly and uniquely her own.

Guido Guidi, Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion: Photographs by Guido Guidi, 1997–2007 – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Guido Guidi

[Spring 2010] CCA, Montreal September 11, 2009, to January 10, 2010 Nestled within the CCA’s Octagonal Gallery in conceptually elegant fashion, this thematic body of photographic work by the Italian photographer Guido Guidi paid tribute to an architectural masterwork while highlighting his own various strengths and idiosyncrasies as a creative artist preoccupied, for the last […]

Manon De Pauw, Intrigues – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Manon De Pauw

[Fall 2009] Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal February 27 to March 28, 2009 Manon De Pauw practices a corporeal poetics as inventive and involute in its physical articulation as it is varied and inviting in its philosophical approach. Her manner of thinking the body – the “universal thing” – sheds light on the meaning of corporeality […]

Thomas Corriveau, Autofictions – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Thomas Corriveau

[Summer 2009] Galerie Graff November 13 to December 20, 2008 We are living in a telematically attuned present tense. We are bombarded, even besieged, by endless streaming images and data feeds coming in from all sides, all the time. How we fend off the barrage or negotiate détente with it shapes the condition of our […]

Emmanuelle Léonard, L’Annonciation – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard

[Fall 2008] Donald Browne Galery, Montreal April 19–May 24, 2008 In her new exhibition at Galerie Donald Browne, Emmanuel Léonard made her consummately subversive voice heard from the outset. Her singular art of juxtaposition, theatricality, gathered “evidence,” and narrative layering once again adumbrated an environmental volume that radically exceeded the sum of its parts. The […]

Luis Jacob, Album IV – James D. Campbell, I.O.U. (Intersubjectivity, Optimism, Utopia): Reflections on Luis Jacob’s Image Archive

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Luis Jacob

[Fall 2008] By juxtaposing images of people interacting, architectural facades, works of art, pieces of furniture, and other motifs, Jacobs has woven a microcosm of humanity at work and at play. This album is a living portrait of the world, at the heart of which he has placed inter-subjectivity, exploration, and inventiveness. This grouping of […]

Charles Gagnon – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Charles Gagnon

[Summer 2008] Galerie Roger Bellemare, Montreal October 6 – October 27, 2007 The stark elegance of Charles Gagnon’s photographic oeuvre is one of its defining characteristics. It is always, however, underscored by powerfully enigmatic markers. Those indexical markers are like fingers pointing to unseen presences – or a transcendent reality. Gagnon was always a champion […]

Susan Bozic, The Dating Portfolio – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Susan Bozic

[Spring 2008] Galerie Art Mur, Montreal August 18 – September 22, 2007 Susan Bozic’s latest series, The Dating Portfolio, elicits easy, involuntary smiles but poses a serious question or two that leave the viewer in an interrogatory frame of mind. Bozic appears in each of these medium-to-large-scale photographs in the company of a plastic (clothed) […]

Montreal Collects, Contemporary Photography: The LaRochelle and Taillefer collections – James Campbell

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Edward Burtynsky, Geoffrey James, Janita Eyre, Loretta Lux, Louis Joncas, Marion Landry, Matthieu Brouillard, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin, Pablo Ferrer, Pablo Zutela Zahr, Pascal Grandmaison, Richard Misrach, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Rodney Graham, Sarah Morris, Scott McFarland, Stephanie Schneider, William Christenberry

[Spring 2008] by James Campbell Interest in contemporary photography has reached a fever pitch. In 2006, at Sotheby’s in New York, a huge colour print by Andreas Gursky (dating from 1999) went on the block and sold for $2,256,000. Six months earlier, Richard Prince’s seminal work Untitled (Cowboy), a 1989 Ektacolor print of the Marlboro man, […]

Ève K. Tremblay, Postures scientifiques – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Eve K. Tremblay

[Fall 2007] Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal, April 7 – May 12, 2007 The photographic speculative fictions that Eve K. Tremblay exhibited at Galerie Donald Browne bore the same enigmatic hallmark as has all her earlier work. Set in some day-after-tomorrow but finally in an indeterminate tense, these works challenge the viewer, who must interpret what […]

Lynne Cohen and Denis Farley, Access Points – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Denis Farley, Lynne Cohen

[Summer 2007] Parisian Laundry, Montréal January 12 – February 24, 2007 This welcome, timely, and provocative exhibition of photographic works by Lynne Cohen and Denis Farley shed considerable light on their respective oeuvres in a truly dialogical fashion. Lynne Cohen’s photographs have never looked more seductive and unsettling than they do in the present exhibition. […]

Janieta Eyre, What I haven’t told you – James D. Campbell, Her own private spectres, Janieta Eyre’s “Melancholy Grotesque”

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Janita Eyre

[Fall 2006] With this recent series of photographs, Janieta Eyre continues her phantasmic exploration of her inner world, her psychic fantasies, and the twists and turns of her personality, distancing herself from the self-portrait and transposing her mises en scene into models. The torments and fears of childbirth are portrayed, with the shame of the […]

Angela Grauerholz, Reading Room for the Working Artist – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Summer 2006] VOX image contemporaine, Montreal January 28–March 18, 2006 There are two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos and achievement. ⎯ Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine1 The archive unfolds in a lush, moving and […]

Jennifer Long, Doubt – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jennifer Long

[Summer 2006] La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal 20 January–26 February 2006 The nine medium-scale colour photographs of women in this exhibition are akin to a searchlight focused on a troubling affliction of the heart that few today have not experienced at first hand: lover’s doubt. The images are powerfully interrogatory, offering an up-close and personal […]

Diana Thorneycroft – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Diana Thorneycroft

[Spring 2006] The Canadiana Martyrdom Series Galerie Art Mûr, Montreal November 17 – December 21, 2005 I make of Her an image of Death so as not to be shattered through the hatred I bear against myself when I identify with Her. . . . Thus the feminine as image of death is not only […]

Michael Flomen, Photograms – James D. Campbell, A Palimpsest of Pale Fire: The Fabulist Photography of Michael Flomen

Ciel variable 70 - MATERIA ET LUMEN | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Michael Flomen

[Winter 2005-2006] Michael Flomen’s works encompass an abstract, oneiric space that we cannot easily reference, for it is openly ambiguous, hovering somewhere between the dream and the waking moment. Whether rain and snowfalls registering at night on handmade photograms (Teeming), the evidentiary bioluminescence of fireflies caught on photographic flypaper in the dead of night as […]