Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth’s exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery brought together photographs from the last fifteen years, including those from his visits to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a place marked by the measurement of time.
Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Francis Alÿs
[Summer 2024] Outside/Elsewhere by Stephen Horne There is no need to understand it, only to contemplate it, to be struck with wonder and laugh with the universal laugh of creation. – Octavio Paz In his video series Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), the Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs documents the creation of place by children – a space […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen
[Fall 2023] By [Excerpt] Centre Pompidou, Paris 12.04.2023 — 28.08.2023 “It’s not that I don’t care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning.” — James Welling The exhibition Laboratories/Observatories comprises large bodies of work by two contemporary photographers: the late American/Canadian Lynne Cohen (1944– 2014) and the French Marina […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Thomas Demand
[Fall 2023] Second Seeing Stephen Horne [Excerpt] I must be getting mixed, confusing here and there, now and then, just as I confused them then, the here of then, the1then of there. — Samuel Beckett What is this “confusion” of which the playwright Beckett speaks? He wrote this some seventy years ago, before electronic media […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Christian Marclay
[Summer 2023] By Stephen Horne Centre Pompidou, Paris 16.11.2022 — 22.02.2023 [Excerpt] There is a song written and performed by Paul McCartney in 1968 that provides a succinct introduction to the work and career of Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay (b. 1955). It’s simple lyric, repeated – “Why don’t we do it in the road” – […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne
[Fall 2022] By Stephen Horne Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 12.02.2022 — 29.05.2022 [Excerpt] The exhibition takes its title, Heliotropo 37, from the street address of the artist’s studio in Mexico City. The artist is Graciela Iturbide, and the studio transposed to the Fondation Cartier in Paris was created by Mauricio Rocha, who also […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Coleman
[Winter 2022] By Stephen Horne “A being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past two footprints perpetually obliterating one another toe to heel, heel to toe.” – W. B. YEATS 1 [Excerpt] James Coleman´s complex cinematic installations disclose the beauty and pleasure of “looking.” The aesthetic experience to which I refer […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Luigi Ghirri
February 6, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Stephen Horne. The Map and The Territory is a large and intricate exhibition of colour photographs by the late Italian artist Luigi Ghirri at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.1 No doubt the curator of the exhibition, James Lingwood, adopted this title following up on a note that Ghirri wrote in 1970 in which he explained that “his aim was not to make photographs, but rather charts and maps.”2…
Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Jessica Eaton
June 21, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — By Stephen Horne. 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..
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Welling
June 16, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — This exhibition presented a selection of work from Welling’s early days in the 1970s and from recent production. The artist’s principal interests lie in the area of photographic materiality and some of its attendant themes – colour, technologies, and abstraction – and to the social relations inherent in the production and circulation of photographs…
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 …
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Petra Mala Miller
November 20, 2019 [originally published in Spring 2016] — 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 a welcoming embrace, perhaps one that recognizes our commonality as strangers.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
January 6, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — 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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)…
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.
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 […]
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 […]