Stephen Horne - Ciel variable Magazine

Jessica Eaton, Iterations (I) — Stephen Horne, System or Poem?

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Jessica Eaton

[Winter 2019] By Stephen Horne [Excerpt] A number of Montreal artists are proposing ambitious responses to the dissolution of traditional artistic genres in what is clearly a “post-medium world.” Jessica Eaton is one of these, as evidenced by her recent exhibition titled Iterations (I) at Galerie Ertaskiran. In this exhibition, we face a long wall […]

James Welling – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Welling

[Spring-Summer 2017] Chronology Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris January 25–March 2, 2017 by Philippe Guillaume [Excerpt] An initial impression on entering James Welling’s exhibition in the large space of the Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris is that this is a group exhibition. There are several bodies of work, apparently disparate. However, relying on the knowledge that […]

Emanuel Licha – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Emanuel Licha

March 1, 2017 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — With his new feature film, Hotel Machine, artist Emanuel Licha, based in Paris and Montreal, continues his questioning of the place of media and the mediatization of place. His process takes him to the “front lines” of recent warfare – at least, the front lines in the sense of media communications. Taking the relationship between architecture and mass media as a topography, Hotel Machine is a cinematic inquiry into …

Petra Mala Miller – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Petra Mala Miller

[Spring-Summer 2016] Portraits in Light The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge September 25 to November 22, 2015 by Stephen Horne [Excerpt] Walking into a room full of strangers can be a disconcerting experience, exposing us to questions about belonging and difference. In contrast to such an expectation, Petra Mala Miller’s exhibition Portraits in Light offers […]

Isabelle Hayeur, Desert Shores (L’Amérique perdue) – Stephen Horne, Photographing In the Anthropocene

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

[Spring/Summer 2016] [Excerpt] Dead trees, a few dried-up pigeons, some rotting fish, and broken-up cottages: what is the world that these make up? From the perspective of Montreal documentary photographer Isabelle Hayeur, this is a landscape – that is, a space inhabited with suburbs and industrial plants. This wasteland is an image of our overflowing […]

David Goldblatt, Structures of Dominion and Democracy – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: David Goldblatt

February 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — David Goldblatt has been photographing in South Africa for many decades. The acuity with which he has recorded the depths of violence and its specific character both during and after the era of apartheid rests on his observation of violence naturalized…

Tacita Dean, Out of Time: A Seeing that Touches – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Tacita Dean

October 17, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — This was Winnicott’s response to the difficult challenge of reconciling oneself to one’s own temporality, a favoured problem for artists from On Kawara to Ann Hamilton to Tacita Dean. Artists have tended to handle this challenge in one of two ways: through an art practice that cultivates a relationship with the past or, conversely, by exploring new forms of subjectivity…

Lorna Bauer, Grey is a Colour, Gray is a Color – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lorna Bauer

February 21, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — The title of Lorna Bauer’s exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert offers a simple paradigm for what she explores with her series of photographs. Bauer initially sets us up for a documentary-style tour of some storefronts in New York’s celebrated garment district. Storefronts have been a tried-and-true subject for photographers since the early days of the technology…

Les Rencontres d’Arles – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne

May 15, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — The fourty-second edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles adopted the challenge of exploring the image economy, as well as photography’s relationship with the World Wide Web and with social networks, within the ambit of forty-seven diverse exhibitions. “From Here On,” the centrepiece exhibition at the Rencontres, presented photography in the context of the Web, the “digital revolution,” and how they circulate images.

Lynne Cohen, Photographies – Stephen Horne, Rooms of Screens/Screens of Rooms

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

March 27, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Lynne Cohen has been photographing generic architectural interior spaces for several decades. Photographing rooms is, and has always been, her subject. Some of these rooms are health spas, classrooms, and hotel lobbies, while others are more sinister – laboratories, control rooms, and military sites. In a Cohen photograph, however, even an innocent health and relaxation facility can appear in an unusually “posed” mode.

William Kentridge, Five Themes – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: William Kentridge

September 29, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — A resurrection of hand-drawn film animation as a procedure to be presented in museum installations in this era of digital abstraction is a brilliant move. The simplicity of this strategy highlights the delusion resident in the efforts of so many contemporary artists to produce a critical art practice using technologically “advanced” techniques. In many cases, these attempts simply play a role in confirming the cultural status quo.

Living Things, Carte grise à Roy Arden – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Moyra Davey, Roy Arden

June 29, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — True to its title, this exhibition consists of photographic images grouped thematically by way of their subject, “living things.” In this case, the sample extends from images of algae in a pond, to a dog’s foot, to a family portrait. What these photographs all have in common is that they are “of” some “thing,” they all depict a living thing (with the exception of one dead rabbit)…

Emanuel Licha, R for Real & Bagdads – Stephen Horne, Dwelling : A Set-up

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Emanuel Licha

May 24, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — These two works by Emanuel Licha are based on his interest in urban settings re-created for police or military training camps. The intention is to reveal the fully operational role of fiction in the reality of conflicts and in the composition of our portrayals of the foreign.

Lynne Cohen, Cover – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Book Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

[Spring 2010] Lynne Cohen Cover Cherbourg-Octeville : Le point du jour, 2009, 142 pp., col. ills. Bilingual text Cover, recently put out by the French publisher Le Point du Jour, presents the work of Montreal-based photographer Lynne Cohen. Cohen began photographing domestic interiors and has been pursuing a documentary-style description of institutional interior spaces for […]

At Play in the Frame – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Ken Lum, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rebecca Belmore

[Summer 2009] In Montreal, as in many cities around the world, works of art have often been placed in “public” urban spaces. In some cases, the placement of works is accomplished through channels of bureaucratic control or corporate interest, while in other cases artists have thought of their actions as interventions in those spheres, even […]