Marie-Josée Jean, A renewed Vision for Centre VOX – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Marie-Josée Jean

January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Marie-Josée Jean became director of VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine in 2002, after organizing the sixth and seventh presentations of Mois de la Photo à Montréal. For the last ten years, her research has focused on the theory and practice of image-based and conceptual art. For VOX, she has organized exhibitions by John Baldessari, Bill Vazan, Marcel Duchamp, Maria Eichorn, …

Looking at Places

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Lynne Cohen, Sylvie Readman

[Fall 2011] Being attentive to the environments that one passes through. All these passageways, these enigmatic and inhospitable spaces: entrance halls, waiting rooms, and showrooms with incongruous décors, laboratory rooms with indecipherable functions. All these buildings that one sees on urban access roads, some of them abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment, with no […]

Anne-Marie Ninacs – Regarding Lucidity: Inward Views – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Interviews
Authors: Anne-Marie Ninacs, Jacques Doyon

October 27, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — Anne-Marie Ninacs was the guest curator for the Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011, with the theme Lucidity: Inward Views. From 2002 to 2006, Ninacs was the curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, where she organized the exhibitions Massimo Guerrera. Darboral, L’emploi du temps, Avancer dans le brouillard, and Chimère/Shimmer.

Faces: Beyond Appearances

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: JJ Levine, Martin Schoeller, Tony Fouhse

[Spring/Summer 2011] In this issue, queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a highly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strengths or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. They captivate us, enticing us to stop and study a series of details that prove […]

Narrative Series

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alain Pratte, Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, Yan Giguère

[Winter 2011] The works presented in this issue are characterized by the accumulation of a large number of images and the creation of series that may be systematic, or may be intuitive and fragmentary. In some of these works we can discern an iterative mode that operates in the formal arrangement, the object of investigation, […]

Documents

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2010] by Jacques Doyon MoMA’s major retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović marks museum institutions’ full recognition of the field of performance. In a way, this exhibition is the logical outcome of a movement of reactualization of historic performances that has been underway for more than a decade and to which Abramowic has […]

Representation of conflict

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2010] by Jacques Doyon This issue looks at the representation of conflicts and wars. Whether they are distant battles, terrorist attacks, or riots taking place in the heart of our cities, their communication to the public is often dominated by spectacularization and slanted views. The artists whose works brought together here address situations that […]

Gabor Szilasi, Un certain regard – Martha Langford, Gabor Szilasi : An Appreciation

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Gabor Szilasi

[Spring 2010] Over the years, Gabor Szilasi has assembled a remarkable portrait of Quebecers as a community and of the Montreal urban landscape that earned him the Prix Borduas in 2009. Perhaps it took a com- pletely new eye to tease into visibility the multiple fibres woven into Quebec society. Szilasi’s portraits form a major […]

Faces and Places

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2010] by Jacques Doyon This issue presents portraits of people from all walks of life, most of them photographed in their interiors. There are also views of private places filled with things – décor, furniture – that testify to a presence. It is possible to think that individuality, self-representation, is manifested in a person’s […]

The space of the magazine

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christian Boltanski, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Michael Snow, Ron Terada

[Fall 2009] by Jacques Doyon What do the images in a magazine say? What is revealed by the reiteration of certain types of images – as well as their format, positioning, and grouping? Photographs are central to the definition of magazines, often equal in importance to textual content. For the image, the magazine goes beyond […]

Gaëlle Morel : Guest Curator, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2009 – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Interviews
Authors: Gaëlle Morel, Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2009] Gaëlle Morel, guest curator for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2009, is a member of the board of directors of the Société française de photographie and of the editorial committee of Études photographiques. She has published Le photoreportage d’auteur. L’institution culturelle de la photographie en France depuis les années 1970 (Paris: […]

MAU, Plan large, MAP, Intégration – Jacques Doyon, Institutional Initiatives

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Alexandre Castonguay, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Christophe Beauregard, Clara Gutsche, Denis Farley, Éric Tabuchi, Florian Böhm, Geneviève Cadieux, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer, Josée Pedneault, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Max Wright, Neil Budzinski, Raymonde April, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Ron Terada, Suzanne Opton

[Summer 2009] by Jacques Doyon For several decades, contemporary art has been on display in the public spaces of Quebec’s urban areas, thanks to the creation of public art programs. Photography was long excluded from these programs, and even today it has limited visibility. Some initiatives have been undertaken in recent years, however, that stand […]

Photography as Public Art

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2009] by Jacques Doyon This issue offers some preliminary observations on the presence of art photography in urban public art. When we think of “public art,” the governmental public art programs in effect in Quebec and Montreal for several decades immediately spring to mind. Photography, however, has not been well represented in these programs. […]

Antoni Muntadas, The Construction of Fear – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Antoni Muntadas

[Spring 2009] The internationally known artist Antoni Muntadas will present a new exhibition titled The Construction of Fear at Galerie SBC art contemporain in Montreal, from 28 February to 18 April 2009. Muntadas is interested in social, political, and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and the ways that channels […]

Dusk, storm, flood

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2009] by Jacques Doyon In this issue, we bring together images testifying to the impacts of accelerated modernization in today’s China. The photographers who made them have varying degrees of professional experience linked to commissions for the media, corporations, or advertising. They have nevertheless cultivated a personal vision and produced photographic series based on […]

Angela Grauerholz, about Work + Play, an Internet Project – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Fall 2008] by Jacques Doyon Jacques Doyon : Over the course of a photographic practice spanning more than twenty years, you have shown consistent interest in the archival aspects of images and the architecture of their storage and display. You’ve also produced artist’s books and installations reflecting on museum practices. In 2000, you organized an […]

Visual Literacy

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

by Jacques Doyon The image bank is an archive structured by selection, indexing, and thematic cross-referencing procedures that determine how it is used. Artists appropriate this mechanism to explore the issues in visual culture and the contemporary future of the “virtual museum” prefigured by Malraux. They plead fundamentally for an attentive reading of images and […]

Chantal Pontbriand, On the situation of contemporary-art magazines – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: Chantal Pontbriand, Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2008] For thirty years, Chantal Pontbriand has been the guiding light of the magazine Parachute. From the beginning, she positioned it among the internationally significant magazines. In parallel with its publishing activities, the magazine organized a series of events and conferences that were just as notable. In April 2007, Parachute announced a suspension of […]

Contemporary Flâneurs

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2008] by Jacques Doyon Photographing the street, over time, to record the evolution of the city and how it is used is a strategy that remains current. In these pages, it reveals the survival of small businesses in the era of globalization of markets, it allows us to follow the radical transformation of a […]

Twenty Years of Ciel variable – Part Two – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2008] To complement the first part of our look back at the first twenty years of the magazine, published in our last issue, we want here to emphasize two relatively obscure aspects of our history. The first one is the contribution of photographers to the very first version of the magazine, when its mandate […]

A Few Case Studies

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2008] by Jacques Doyon Photography is becoming an increasingly important component of private collections. Recognition of the wealth and diversity of the photographic tradition, as well as a significant rise in the value of photographs on the art market, have accompanied this evolution. That is why we have chosen, for this issue, to highlight collections […]

TWENTY YEARS OF CIEL VARIABLE: Twenty Years of Photography – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Essays
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2007] by Jacques Doyon This is the first part of our review of twenty years of Ciel variable. It offers an overview of the metamorphoses that the magazine has had over the years as photographic practices evolved, their field of application broadened, they were increasingly recognized by the art world, and their institutional environment […]

A redesign of the magazine for its twenty years

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2007] by Jacques Doyon Ciel variable is twenty years old! Over the years, the magazine has undergone several metamorphoses in order to better reflect the evolution in photographic practice, the broadening of its field of application, its recognition by the art world, and changes in its institutional environment. As the only bilingual photography magazine […]

Joan Fontcuberta, Datascapes – Sylvain Campeau, Sutures et traitements numériques

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta

[Summer 2007] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Joan Fontctuberta’s latest body of work, Datascape, is composed of two series: Orogenesis and Googlegrams. The first series was produced with software intended to produce photorealistic perspectives from topographical maps and […]

Conceptual Mapping

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2007] by Jacques Doyon The works presented in this issue form conceptual mappings of territories in the midst of redefinition: the Internet, the natural environment, and circulation hubs. There is no cartography in the literal sense here; rather, these metaphorical mappings use the tools of cartography for investigations and approaches that examine our relationship […]

Advertising Culture

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2006-2007] by Jacques Doyon It is not surprising that the world of advertising has become an object of investigation and aesthetic appropriation for contemporary artists. Advertising has an important place in Western culture. It is omnipresent in the urban environment, and it literally inundates the communications media, in which it rivals news, entertainment, and […]

Staging Anxiety

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2006] by Jacques Doyon The images brought together in this issue fall under the rubric of the “staged” photography. They are inscribed within a current that has flowed throughout the history of photography, as the exhibition Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre, currently on at the National Gallery of Canada, brilliantly demonstrates. These practices […]

Image as Performance

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2006] by Jacques Doyon Instructions: define a field of operations that is compatible with the camera’s field, determine the procedures for choosing objects and the type of actions to produce, decide on a duration, insert a body into the recording field, perform the planned manipulations or interactions, and then re-evaluate the results of the […]

Image World

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2006] by Jacques Doyon In this issue, we feature works that, in their profusion and scope, offer a glimpse at the condition of the world as it is manifested and revealed through the mechanisms for fabrication and circulation of images. These image systems are of different dimensions, ranging from identity as it is defined […]

That which we cannot see

Ciel variable 70 - MATERIA ET LUMEN | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2005-2006] by Jacques Doyon Seeing better, seeing farther; disrupting the representation, dissolving it: these approaches seem contradictory. Yet, paradoxically, they hew to a single frontier: that of the visible and representable, that of the limit of our capacity to see and our perceptual expectations. They meet in a common exploration of light as a […]