Carol Sawyer, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive – Ariane Noël de Tilly, Between Fiction and Reality: How to Shed Light
on Artists Who Have Been Left in the Shadows

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Carol Sawyer

November 10, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — For twenty years, Vancouver artist Carol Sawyer has constructed a speculative history around her character Natalie Brettschneider, through whom she has introduced the art practices of a number of previously overlooked artists who developed within alternative circles…

Charles Gagnon | Emmanuelle Léonard, Le huitième jour – Pierre Dessureault, Expo 67: The Christian Pavilion and Le huitième jour

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Charles Gagnon, Emmanuelle Léonard

November 17, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — At Expo 67, a huge celebration of human progress and great festival of the image in all of its technological and expressive possibilities, the Christian Pavilion designed by Charles Gagnon offered a counterpoint to the event’s sea of triumphant optimism….

Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics, Freedom Rocks: The Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall – Jill Glessing, The Mobile Ruin and The Labour of Commemoration

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Blake Fitzpatrick, Vid Ingelevics

December 1, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — Movement is elemental to existence. Since we made our slow crawl from sea to land we’ve been “on the road” seeking better environments. But another force – territorialism – counters that drive and stems our free flow with walls, great and small…

Revisit

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios

[Spring-Summer 2019] The works brought together in this issue look back at significant phenomena and events in recent history to bring them back to memory and assess their current relevance. These are prolific works, with multiple iterations, that take forms as complex as their subjects: an entire field of artistic practices, pioneering works and pivotal […]

Iran, Année 38, Rencontres d’Arles – Claudia Polledri, « Persian Letters »

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kowsari, Arash Khamooshi, Azadeh Akhlaghi, Azin Haghighi, Babak Kazemi, Behnam Zakeri, Gohar Dashti, Kaveh Kazemi, Morteza Niknahad, Newsha Tavakolian, Shadi Ghadirian, Sina Shiri, Solmaz Daryani

[Winter 2018] By Claudia Polledri Written in Farsi on a white box abandoned on the black asphalt of Pahlavi Avenue in Tehran, the day after the Islamic revolution prevailed – on February 11, 1979 – is “The nation is victorious.” This is the first image in the exhibition Iran, Année 38,1 presented at the most […]

Gabor Szilasi, The Art World in Montreal, 1960‒1980 – Zoë Tousignant, On Emotion and the Photographic Archive

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Gabor Szilasi

June 29, 2021 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — Photographer Gabor Szilasi was born in Hungary in 1928 and immigrated to Canada in 1957. Soon after settling in Montreal, Szilasi began to photograph the many art openings that he and his wife, artist Doreen Lindsay, regularly attended…

Justin Wonnacott, Pictures of Art – Laurent Vernet, An Oblique Gaze at Artworks in Public Spaces

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Laurent Vernet | Artists: Justin Wonnacott

July 6, 2021 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — “Obsession”: that’s the word that photographer Justin Wonnacott uses to explain his ambitious project Pictures of Art (Images d’art). The subject of this series, which numbers 350 images to date, is the artworks found in public spaces and sites (monuments, works of public art and works integrated with architecture, graffiti) in the National Capital Region….

Going Public

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios

[Winter 2018] This issue’s thematic section shows works that come from a wide variety of places and times, but all are marked by the notion of public visibility. These three bodies of work cover a wide spectrum of what defines the public space for artistic expression, ranging from the societal and cultural context that circumscribes […]

Joan Fontcuberta, Trauma – Sylvain Campeau, Autopsy of a Disappearance

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta

January 11, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — In his work, Joan Fontcuberta explores the effects of the real and the capacity for truth generated by the technological image, in order to denounce the authoritarian discourses regarding information and knowledge. His other subjects include nature and the functions of the image in digital culture.

André Barrette, Fin de Siglo – Alexis Desgagnés, Fin de siècle in Cuba

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: André Barrette

January 18, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — André Barrette likely never wanted his art in the spotlight. That is why, outside of the community of artist-run centres in Quebec City, relatively little is known about his discreet but important contribution to Quebec photography landscape in recent decades.

Michel Campeau, The Donkey that Became a Zebra : histoires de chambre noire – Joan Fontcuberta, Fire, Prayers and the Place of Photography

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Joan Fontcuberta | Artists: Michel Campeau

January 25, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — Just when we thought we had all the answers to the enigma of our memory fixed in silver salts, life – without so much as a by-your-leave – changed the questions. Perhaps because life is not a problem to be solved, as Søren Kierkegaard said, but a reality to be experienced…

Ruins

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Artists: André Barrette, Joan Fontcuberta, Michel Campeau

[Fall 2017 ] — Thematic Introduction

Denis Farley, Espaces aériens – Daniel Fiset, Photographs Like Clouds

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Denis Farley

September 1, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Espaces aériens marks a turning point in Farley’s aesthetic, developed since the 1980s, of working mainly in documentation of landscape and architecture. In this series, he gradually abandons horizontal composition and aims his lens upward, letting layers of clouds dictate the composition and perturb the unified reading…

Alain Lefort, Eidôlon – Francine Paul, Hunting for Landscapes in the Spring of Glacial Figures

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Francine Paul | Artists: Alain Lefort

September 8, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Since 2010, Lefort’s photographic series have evidenced his desire to go to increasingly remote regions alone to photograph natural phenomena; most recently, he has been intrigued by icebergs, huge in both dimensions and appeal…

Jocelyn Philibert, Arbres – Franck Michel, The Depths of the Landscape

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert

September 15, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — For more than ten years, Jocelyn Philibert has been photographing trees at night. This near-obsession was triggered during a summer spent in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, on the bank of the St. Lawrence River. Having just acquired a small digital camera, he decided to go out and explore the vicinity of his cottage, photographing everything around him, after the sun went down…

TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert

At first glance, the works presented here might seem to be simply about work on a motif. A more attentive look, however, shows that what is indicated here, in this focus on trees, or icebergs, or clouds, is the shaping of natural elements by human action on a landscape that has become an environment. Jocelyn […]

Images of Montreal. Some notable projects on Montreal neighbourhoods – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Roger Charbonneau

May 12, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Over the years, Montreal has been the subject of a number of major documentary projects. We might think of Gabor Szilasi’s prolific production – in particular, as he recorded development in the city, his photographs of St. Catherine Street (1977–79) in which he immortalized the configuration of the stores along the street…

Robert Walker, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Observations and Recollections – Pierre Dessureault, Looking at Hochelaga-Maisonneuve

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker

February 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — For ten years, Robert Walker has been working on a project called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve: Observations and Recollections. The subtitle conveys the two aspects of his approach…

Montrealities

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Robert Walker, Roger Charbonneau

[Winter 2017] Over the years, many photographers have explored Montreal and its neighbourhoods. Their images have captured portraits of residents, the colour and composition of the streets and commercial arteries, and the mixture of cultures that contribute to the quality and diversity of a city, as well as the commitment of residents who create the […]

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…

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s
 – Jill Glessing. Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and a Few Others . . .

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Garry Winogrand

March 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The title that brings together the wild and woolly works in Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s1 is worthy of consideration. The word “outside” depends on its semiotic partner in crime – “inside.” . . .

Yoanis Menge, HAKAPIK – Mona Hakim, Countering the Negative Image

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Yoanis Menge

March 12, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — HAKAPIK did not go unnoticed during its presentation at Occurrence. The subject was an attention-grabber: a report on the seal hunt by Yoanis Menge, a photographer from Îles de la Madeleine who totally immersed himself in the lives of groups of hunters off the coast of the Canadian North…

From Another Angle

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain […]

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

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…

Geneviève Chevalier, Mon boisé, phase II – John K. Grande, My Woodland, or the Developers’?

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier

January 8, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — So pervasive have the interventions become that they challenge the stereotype of nature as an ongoing and seemingly inexhaustible eternal backdrop to all that we do. Our era is all about the intertwining of the human built landscape and the natural world…

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…

Nature

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Artists: Geneviève Chevalier, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer

[Spring/Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of a […]

Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers – Isa Tousignant, From the Northern to the Southern Suburbs

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena

October 21, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — In the storybook that is Alejandro Cartagena’s oeuvre, Carpoolers is the chapter that comes between Suburbia Mexicana and What We Fight For. The artist, who works and lives in Monterrey, Mexico, has been researching and imaging urban sprawl and its impact for the last decade in photographs that mix a luscious kind of composed beauty with deep human interest…

Julian Germain, The Future is Ours, Classroom Portraits – Johanna Mizgala, Between Portraiture and the Documentary

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Julian Germain

October 23, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — It started off in the northeast U.K., where I am based. I had received funding at the time to photograph in six particular schools. I realized pretty soon that it would be interesting to expand to other schools in different parts of the country, in that it was a way to make a portrait of the population…

Raymonde April, Near You No Cold – Charles Guilbert, To Photograph to Understand

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Raymonde April

October 28, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — For a Westerner travelling, it’s quite easy to take striking pictures of India. But what is being portrayed in these images is simply culture shock. One stays at a distance. Since I was in Mumbai to work, what was urgent for me was not so much to take pictures as to understand…

Far Away, So Close

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April

[Winter 2016]   Globalization is making us more aware of the realities of the entire planet through news, visits, and business travel. In addition, urbanization and consumer markets are tending to bring cultures and lifestyles ever closer to each other. Even so, and fortunately, diversity and differences remain. What is more, the most radical forms […]

Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Études préparatoires (dessins d’explosions) – Charles Guilbert, Logic of Excess

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf

August 7, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Since 2012, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf has been working on a series of artworks titled Études préparatoires (dessins d’explo­sions), which he has presented in various venues and contexts. As he has often done in the past, Phaneuf revives found objects by inscribing them in a system of his own making.

Moyra Davey, Copperheads – Isa Tousignant, Heads of State of the Art of Money

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Moyra Davey

August 12, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Moyra Davey’s Copperheads series has had a few existences. It was born in 1990, soon after the Canadian-born artist moved to New York, where she still resides. In those early days it was a project that lived a practically private life…

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin. Scarti – Paul Paper, Reason for photography in Dustbin

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Paul Paper | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin

August 15, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Scarti is a recent photographic series, and a book of the same title, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The project revives the photographers’ 2003 series Ghetto. It is, however, by no means a straight reprint. The title – Italian for “scraps” – gives away an important aspect of this reuse…

Strates | Strata

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Moyra Davey, Oliver Chanarin

In geology, the concept of stratification refers to a process during which sediments accumulate in layers, which eventually form more or less heterogeneous sedimentary ensembles but nevertheless remain distinct units of meaning. We often find such ensembles on the edges of paths or roads; they offer the possibility of a simultaneous reading of many strata […]

Althea Thauberger, Marat, Sade, Bohnice / Geneviève Chevalier, The Revolution of Marat, Sade, Bohnice

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Althea Thauberger

May 21, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — From the opening credits, the title of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade as Performed by the Prague-based Experimental Theatre Company Akanda for the Patients and Staff of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital announces the work’s device….

Chuck Samuels, The Photographer – Chuck Samuels, The Ventriloquist’s Dummy: Another interview

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

May 22, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — Chuck Samuels: In Before the Camera, you presented yourself in drag to look at the female nude in the history of photography; in Psychoanalysis, you appeared as both the Norman Bates and the Marion Crane characters; in Before Photography, you assumed the roles of photographers in film stills from a specific era…

Adad Hannah & Denys Arcand, Les Bourgeois de Vancouver – Sébastien Hudon, The People of Bronze

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Denys Arcand

May 28, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — As far back as 2002, multidisciplinary artist Adad Hannah was citing a work by French sculptor Auguste Rodin in his own work. It has been thirteen years since he produced Stills, composed of video captures of Rodin’s first bronze, The Age of Bronze (1877). At the time, no one would have guessed that this was the first manifestation of Hannah’s unique and constant fascination with the Parisian master…

Replay

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Chuck Samuels, Denys Arcand

Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire: here, a sculpture by Rodin, self-portraits of famous photographers, and a play whose writing is attributed, as part of the fiction, to an author of another era. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and […]

Normand Rajotte, Le chantier – Caroline Loncol Daigneault, In the Eye of the Beaver

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Loncol Daignault | Artists: Normand Rajotte

March 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Le chantier: the first image. Through marks and lines – green, taupe, orange – a wet woodlands glistens. In the foreground, three black tree trunks. The one in the centre is cut open at the base, showing freshly gnawed yellow flesh. It partially hides a pile of branches arranged in an outwardly spreading form – the key, the sun of the image…

Allison Tweedie, Cutting Sunsets – Gentiane La France, Domesticated Landscapes

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Allison Tweedie

March 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The series Cutting Sunsets is composed of small-format collages portraying scenes of daily life around affluent dwellings on the American west coast. A few people, here and there, quietly tend to their land, do maintenance, contemplate, walk around, and converse…

Steve Veilleux, Projections – Sébastien Hudon, An Achievable Dystopia

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Steve Veilleux

March 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — One can easily imagine the scene, so banal that it is universal. On a moonless night, its highbeams blazing, a new car, with a new couple inside, rolls down a remote road, far from the bustle of the city. The passengers, the nuclear family of the post-atomic era, already see themselves there, deluded by the illusion of an extraordinary suburb – one of a thousand similar suburbs…

Stephen Gill, Pigeons – Iain Sinclair, Bridge Fishing

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Iain Sinclair | Artists: Stephen Gill

March 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Our expeditions usually begin at first light. This time, Stephen explained, we would be better to hold off until the worst of the rush hour had burnt itself out. I sat on the church porch and waited, admiring a procession of those bright-red sculptural interventions held long enough at the traffic lights to catch the appreciative eye, the new Stagecoach buses with the NOT IN SERVICE destination windows…

Habitat

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Allison Tweedie, Normand Rajotte, Stephen Gill, Steve Veilleux

So, here we are, humans and animals (the same thing, really), perforce engaged in the concrete and naked fact of existing. We are – the verb says it with the force of law – sunk into being like a foundation is sunk into the ground. For as long as the few hours, days, or decades […]

Henri Venne, Somewhere in Between – Sylvain Campeau, Painting Indebted to Photography

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Henri Venne

January 14, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Henri Venne is a painter. It is painted matter that interests him. It is in this medium that he was educated, and it is also how he defines himself. Henri Venne is also a photographer, as the works that emerge from his creative process are photographs. He is also interested in how images are imbued with visual effects, places for various reflections…

Lorna Bauer | Jon Knowles – Jacinthe Lessard-L. / Charles Guilbert, Images in the Void (and Vice Versa)

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer

January 16, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — It is quite uncommon for the association of two exhibitions to create a dialogue that becomes an artwork in itself. Yet, this is what Dazibao did by bringing together works by Jacinthe Lessard-L. and by the duo formed of Lorna Bauer and Jon Knowles. Their respective works, although different in tonality and look, intertwine to lead viewers into a surprising reflection on darkness…

Thomas Ruff, Photograms – Jacinto Lageira, Gradations of Reality

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Thomas Ruff

January 21, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Given the impossible computer-made “photograms” in Thomas Ruff’s recent series – thus in line with Moholy-Nagy’s idea that one can make photographs without a camera (he made his own photograms) – we must immediately consider either a broadening of the notion of photography or its being subsumed, pure and simple…

Abstraction

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff

These abstract works involving simple forms evoke methods of analogue photography to challenge the degree of veracity of the image. Imprint, inversion, and casting are some of the components transposed into other artistic media to re-evaluate our capacity to apprehend the real. THOMAS RUFF Photograms Thomas Ruff’s images, made with 3D digital imaging software, are […]

Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, The Way of the Willows – Claire Moeder, A New Wrinkle in Portraiture

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Gabriel Coutu-Dumont

October 29, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — In Glasgow, the artist Gabriel Coutu-Dumont set up a minimal photography studio on Sauchiehall Street, a street frequented by the city’s night owls. For several nights, he drew these passersby away from the tumult of the street and asked them to pose in front of an analog camera for a twenty-minute session. The result was The Way of the Willows, a gallery of eighty anachronistic portraits in which the classical composition contrasts with the signs of the models’ contemporary lives…

Christian Tagliavini, 1503 | Dame di cartone – Johanna Mizgala, Mannerism, Medici, and Madmen: Christian Tagliavini’s Photographic Mise-en-scène

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Christian Tagliavini

November 2, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Portraits are deceptively alluring: we are immediately attracted to admiring the faces of others. As we are drawn under their spell, the images reveal themselves to be carefully crafted manifestations that must be decoded to be fully understood…

Pierre Gonnord, Portraits – Pierre Rannou, The Intensity of the Gaze

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Pierre Gonnord

November 5, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Pierre Gonnord’s photographic portraits are fascinating for the experience that they offer us. The models gaze straight at the photographer’s lens, and we are taken aback: we feel like they are staring at us…

Portrait Gallery

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord

Three approaches to the portrait sustained by pictorial references and knowledge manifested in chiaroscuro, framings and poses, texture and draping of fabrics, head positions, and, above all, the gazes. And techniques that ennoble their subjects. PIERRE GONNORD Portraits Strong presences with imposing gazes, and yet revealed with a sort of humility. Pierre Gonnord approached anonymous […]

Kim Waldron, Beautiful Creatures – Sonia Pelletier, On the Job or in the Work

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Kim Waldron

August 20, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Over the years, it has been possible to observe a strong trend in Kim Waldron’s photographic work  – a central theme or modus operandi that has been evident in her projects since the very beginning. The artist usually appears in her images, but although she is the central subject, she is not really performing a “spectacle of the self.” …

Marisa Portolese, Antonia’s Garden – Isa Tousignant, Tending the Garden

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Marisa Portolese

August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Walk around in early winter and you may just spot a dash of colour peeking through from under the first coats of snow that blanket the front gardens. That’s a carnation. Long after the peonies, lilies, and daffodils have gone, this sturdy flower still shines its bright hues, in defiance of the season of death…

Jacynthe Carrier, Les Eux – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, The Function of the Gaze in the Work of Jacynthe Carrier

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier

August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Up to now, a certain conception of painting came to mind when I thought of Jacynthe Carrier’s photographic and videographic work, not only because of the emphasis that she places on composition and narration in the creation of her works, but especially because of the type of gaze that these works draw…

Performing for the image

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese

These three montreal artists have in common the performative dimension of the images in their works. Bodies are staged in situations of intimacy, intrusion, or sacrifice to highlight how loved ones, strangers, and animals help to form our identity. JACYNTHE CARRIER Les Eux Here, we are as close as possible to bodies, in an interwoven […]

Land/Slide, An exhibition on possible futures – Janine Marchessault, Activating the Archives

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Janine Marchessault | Artists: Dave Colangelo, Jean-Michel Crettaz, Jennie Suddick, Mark-David Hosale, Michael Snow, Patricio Davila, Philip Hoffman

May 22, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Images are connected to our physical environments more dramatically than ever before – literally opening up new spaces of interactivity and connection that transform the experience of being in the city, its semiotic forms, and its modes of public gathering, navigation, and movement…

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Alter Bahnhof Video Walk – Christine Ross, The Affective Historicization of Public Spaces

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christine Ross | Artists: George Bures Miller, Janet Cardiff

May 23, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Since the 1990s, spatial art – a category that has broadened to include installation, architectural environments, relational interventions, (…) – has led to a major redefinition of the relationship between art and the public space…

Karen Elaine Spencer, Hey! Mike – Daniel Fiset, Textualizing Space, Spatializing Discourse

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Karen Elaine Spencer

May 28, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In the autumn of 2012, a large brown envelope addressed to me arrived at my apartment. Inside it was a signed inkjet print of a colourful typographic exercise, announcing via an enigmatic sentence – hey mike please wipe up any spills that may occur – the genesis of the latest project by Montreal artist Karen Elaine Spencer…

Jon Rafman, 9 eyes – Christelle Proulx, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christelle Proulx | Artists: Jon Rafman

May 30, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — The “nine eyes” in Jon Rafman’s project refer to the photographic device mounted on the roofs of Google cars. These cars have been travelling the world’s roads since 2007, equipped with cameras with nine lenses, taking pictures of streets – images automatically in street view – for use with the Google Maps tool…

Dominic Gagnon, La trilogie du Web – Élène Tremblay, Cameraless remote documentaries

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Élène Tremblay | Artists: Dominic Gagnon

June 4, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In his Web trilogy – the films RIP in Pieces America, Pieces and Love All to Hell, and Big Kiss Goodnight (2009–13) – Dominic Gagnon finds video excerpts on the Internet, which he describes as a cinémathèque or film archive, and recombines them to produce what he calls “films about people who film themselves.”

Reciprocities: Some Reflections on Not-so-illogical Conjunctions – Suzanne Paquet

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet

June 6, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Roland Barthes once attempted to define the nature of photography as “a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.” In the photograph, he wrote, was produced “an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.” Some thirty years later, Francis Jauréguiberry remarked that there is always a great deal of elsewhere in our here; he was talking about the portable telephone…

Guest editor: Suzanne Paquet

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet

With essays by Suzanne Paquet, Élène Tremblay, Christelle Proulx, Daniel Fiset, Christine Ross, Janine Marchessault and works by Dominic Gagnon, Jon Rafman, Karen Elaine Spencer, Janet Cardiff et George Bures Miller and the exhibition Land/Slide: Possible Futures Even though, in the view of many authors, it seems that we are now living only in the […]

Patrick Dionne et Miki Gingras, Identité Centre-Sud – Pierre Rannou, Beyond a Neighbourhood, a Community

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

March 21, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Far from fitting the image of picture chasers and big-time reporters, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras seem, rather, to present themselves as pedagogues of photography, as their projects are intended both to document the contemporary world and to teach the rudiments of photography…

Dominique Auerbacher, Scratches – Emmanuel Hermange, Through a Tramcar Window-Screen

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Emmanuel Hermange | Artists: Dominique Auerbacher

March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Dominique Auerbacher’s early career was bound up in the emergence of photographic commissions devoted to landscape in Europe, starting with the Mission photographique de la Datar, which brought her to the public eye in the mid-1980s. She sparked a lively debate by choosing, against all expectations, to photograph a number of major European cities…

Nicolas Baier, Autoportrait – Sylvain Campeau, Transiting through Photography

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Nicolas Baier

March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — To judge by his works, Nicolas Baier has never been anything but a photographer, as these works are replete with all the potentialities, components, and mechanisms of the medium. This is so even when the works he creates are not photographic…

Public Art

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Artists: Dominique Auerbacher, Miki Gingras, Nicolas Baier, Patrick Dionne

[Spring/summer 2013] A thematic section on public art featuring the works of nicolas baier, dominique auerbacher, and patrick dionne and Miki gingras, highlighting the issues of community affirmation in the public space and the revelation, or contestation, of its customs and regulations. Somewhere between group portrait, “objective” self-portrait, and urban anti-aesthetic . . . NICOLAS […]

Phil Chadwick, Creative Scene Investigation – Bénédicte Ramade, Tom Thomson in the Light of Forensic Meteorology

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Phil Chadwick

December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Meteorology is a science of prediction. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are analyzed in order to anticipate precipitation, predict temperatures, and so on.¹ The weather report, on tv or radio, has become an indispensable barometer, and there are now countless weather “aps” available…

Emmanuelle Léonard, Homicide, Détenu Vs Détenu, Archives Du Palais De Justice De La Ville De Québec – Gaëlle Morel, Opening Up Forensic Photography

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Gaëlle Morel | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard

December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After devoting a number of projects to the world of work, Montreal photographer and videographer Emmanuelle Léonard investigates the notions of visual traces and information in her most recent works…

William E. Jones, Tearoom. The Trial of the Incriminating Image – Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: William E. Jones

January 10, 2018 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio, police department, convinced that homosexual practices created a predisposition to perpetrate serious predatory crimes, decided to put the public restroom in a large park in its town under surveillance. The site was suspected of being the scene of clandestine sexual activities…

Paul Vanouse, Suspect Inversion Center – Marianne Cloutier, The Imaginary of Forensics

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Marianne Cloutier | Artists: Paul Vanouse

January 15, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — The American artist Paul Vanouse, known for his collaboration with the collective Critical Art Ensemble, has had a practice involving diversion since the early 1990s. He appropriates techniques, tools, materials¹ , and knowledge from the techno-sciences in order to better examine what is at stake in those disciplines…

Corinne May Botz, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death – Alexis Lussier, A Residue of Uneasiness

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Lussier | Artists: Corinne May Botz

January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Ever since Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) first took his metric photographs, in which he tried to produce accurate maps of crime scenes, legal photography has always been, in spite of itself, a “photography of interiors.” This involved considerable technical constraints (cramped quarters with no place to pull back, poor of insufficient lighting, and so on), as Rodolphe Reiss (1875–1929) often demonstrated…

Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure – Susan Schuppli, Probative Images

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Susan Schuppli | Artists: Errol Morris

January 22, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris, offers a concise example of a methodological shift – what we (in the European Research Council project that I am affiliated with) have elsewhere called a forensic turn – within the investigation of human rights violations and war crimes…

Forensics: Representations and Regimes of Truth – Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: Taryn Simon

January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — On 6 June 1985, the international press was invited to the small Embu das Artes cemetery in Brazil to witness an extraordinary discovery. A team of police officers and medico-legal experts had just exhumed the presumed remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. A series of photographs taken on this occasion by reporter Robert Nickelsberg show the press’s infatuation with this event…

Guest editor: Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie

Since the 1990s, there has been a rise to pre-eminence of forensic imaginaries. This phenomenon can be observed in contemporary literature, as in novels by Kathy Reichs (Déjà Dead, 1997), herself a forensic anthropologist by profession, and in television series (Crime Scene Investigation, 2000; Forensic Files, 2000; Bones, 2005) that promulgate a belief in the […]

Eamon Mac Mahon, Landlocked – Isa Tousignant, The View from Up Here : Perspective on the Wild

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Eamon Mac Mahon

October 23, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — My first encounter with Canadian photographer and artist Eamon Mac Mahon was when I worked as an editor for a travel magazine, at which he was the stuff of local legend. He had shot a story about the Bahamas for which he’d risked life and limb: on a tiny, rickety plane with, lore dictates, more holes than a fisherman’s net, he hung out of the main cavity – tied in place with only a rope – to capture aerial shots of the turquoise swirling waters. The story won awards.

Andreas Rutkauskas, Virtually There – Geneviève Chevalier, Hiking the Trails of What Is to Come

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas

October 25, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — I found out about the Virtually There project in 2009 during a brief visit to the Gushul Studio, which offers a residency program run by the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. At the time, Andreas Rutkauskas was staying there and preparing to make another of his outings in the mountains. The Gushul Studio is located in the small town of Blairmore, in the Crowsnest Pass area of the Rocky Mountains in the southwest part of Alberta…

Thomas Kneubühler, Under Currents – Pierre Dessureault, Currents

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler

October 30, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Thomas Kneubühler’s Under Currents takes us through the hydroelectric installations at James Bay and the complex network of exchanges between North and South that their construction has established. What is initially striking in this coherent whole is the rigorous organization of various elements in a series of groupings to form a well-marked path that is constructed bit by bit, in successive layers, with each of the carefully defined and delimited components opening new perspectives and adding a stratum of meaning to the plural discourse that has been set in motion.

True North

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Eamon Mac Mahon, Thomas Kneubühler

Three experiences of the north, real or perceived, that bring us face to face with the realities of a little-known region undergoing accelerated transformation. The north is at once home to a sparse population, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast resource base that is in the sights of developers as ever […]

Jacky Georges Lafargue et Louis Couturier, Resolute Bay : Voyage du jour dans la nuit – Sonia Pelletier, A Wall of Snow, or Northern Studies Visited

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier

August 21, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Jacky Georges Lafargue and Louis Couturier’s project Resolute Bay – Voyage du jour dans la nuit finds a way to take viewers on a sort of voyage to the far reaches of our country and an encounter with people who live in a remote Inuit village with only about two hundred inhabitants…

Tendance Floue : MAD IN INDIA – Bruno Chalifour, A Future to Define

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Tendance Floue

August 23, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Tendance Floue is a collective of French photographers open to the world and the power of expression who reject labels and preconceptions. They are fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities that documentary photography, which they see as subjective, may offer them – whence, no doubt, the name of their group: “Tendance” (tendency), which tends toward without ever reaching the goal, and “Floue” (vague or blurred), resolutely evading precise definitions. The result?…

Edward Burtynsky, Oil – Sylvain Campeau, Between the Perceptible and the Ethical

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

August 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The images are supreme. Of rather respectable dimensions – when they are not downright immense – and brightly coloured, they please us, dazzle us, force us to admire them. They show landscapes, openings into our immediate environment. But this environment does not have the bucolic accents of yore, for it is increasingly occupied by signs of exploitation of natural resources. Its wild – truly wild – territories are rarer and rarer…

Patrick Dionne et Miki Gingras, Mémoire – Sylvain Campeau, Self-document and Rediscovered Sociability

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

May 29, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — For a number of years, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras have been working on large-scale photographic projects that encourage artistic engagement in society. In 2002, to better fulfil this mission, they founded Diasol, a charitable organization the objective of which is to use art photography as a means of intervention with marginalized people and young people and adults with difficulties with school or family, in psychological distress, or in the process of social reintegration.

MoAD, The face of African Diaspora – Alexandra Martin, Old and New Photographs of African Diaspora

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexandra Martin

May 31, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — In downtown San Francisco, at the corner of Mission and Third streets, is a huge picture window before which passersby can stop to look at a photo-mosaic several metres high inspired by the famous portrait Girl from Tamale (1973) by Chester Higgins Jr., which is also one of the “tiles” in the mosaic.

JR, The Wrinkles of the City – John K. Grande, Image Bridge Builder

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: JR

June 5, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — JR’s photography faces real life. The human faces that engage us in the real environments of the First and Third worlds are an exercise in self-identification within a larger matrix that is a seemingly invisible population of everyday people. Largely unrecognized, these people are off the map when it comes to social, political, or economic rights.

Collaborations

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Artists: JR, Miki Gingras, MoAD, Patrick Dionne

See the oversized faces of a city’s inhabitants emerging on its walls and façades. These people came together to find ways to reappropriate the urban space, and to advertise their presence and identity. Here, photography is a tool for affirmative collaboration. JR The Wrinkles of the City Presentation of Wrinkles of the City, produced for […]

Sylvie Readman, À contretemps – René Viau, Utopia Out of Focus

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Sylvie Readman

March 21, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — What do we see? Somewhere on the urban periphery, a parallelepiped of concrete topped with an azure tarp sits on a rectangle of asphalt. Elsewhere, the whitewashed wall of a shed rises behind a section of suspended electrical wires. We come upon other indeterminate pieces of land, other uninhabited buildings. The photographs’ titles correspond to the toponymy of industrial sectors that appear more or less abandoned…

Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Of time, lost – Paule Mackrous, One Imagination, a Thousand Stories

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Paule Mackrous | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

March 23, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “The issue is clear: truth or life; history or art,” writes Nietzsche in the opening pages of his Seconde considération intempestive¹. The living, fragile and fleeting, are lost from the objective spectacle of history. This will remain so as long as we make history a succession of factual data rather than a return to an “internal time consciousness.”² Words engender linearity, whereas the experience of time is formed of simultaneities and twists.

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.

Places

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
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, all those buildings that one sees on urban access roads, sometimes abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment. This, compared to the old city, to sites shaped by time, proximity, a different pace of life … […]

Martin Schoeller, Close up, Female Bodybuilders – Johanna Mizgala, Accumulating and Dispersing Perspective : The Portraits of Martin Schoeller

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Martin Schoeller

January 10, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — It is nice to stare – particularly at beautiful people who in part make their living as the object of your gaze, each making a concerted effort to appear as though they might actually exist solely for the purpose of your continuing adoration.

Tony Fouhse, USER Portraits of Crack Addicts – Emily Falvey, Use value

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Emily Falvey | Artists: Tony Fouhse

January 12, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — The pressure placed upon contemporary artists to produce socially critical, politically engaged works of art is both enormous and confusing. On the one hand, galleries and other visual-arts organizations expect artists to mobilize the population via certain “artistic strategies,” such as subverting cherished yet secretly oppressive idols or breaking out of traditional exhibition formats to …

JJ Levine, Queer Portraits – Dayna McLeod, Queering the Heteronormative Matrix

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: JJ Levine

January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — Vivid colours and rich, symbolic domestic detailing underscore the confident, self-possessed gazes of JJ Levine’s subjects in their series Queer Portraits. An exploration of identity, gender politics, community, public vs. private, radical queer life, and deviant gender presentations, Queer Portraits confronts us with a group of subjects that ultimately reflect a portrait of the artist themselves. An intimate look at Levine’s community, this series plays with …

Faces

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Artists: JJ Levine, Martin Schoeller, Tony Fouhse

[Spring/Summer 2011] 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. JJ Levine, Queer Portraits Levine offers a series of intimate, touching portraits of friends and close relations in […]

Michel Campeau, La chambre noire – Richard Baillargeon, On Obsolescence and Being Photographic

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Richard Baillargeon | Artists: Michel Campeau

October 11, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Michel Campeau, who has been a contemporary-art photographer for four decades, has received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize (2010), the Jean-Paul-Riopelle Career Grant (2009), and the Higashikawa International Photography Prize in Japan (1994). His work, which explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of images, questions the conventions of documentary photography. A retrospective exhibition of his work in 1996 at the Canadian Contemporary Photography Museum covered his production from 1971 to 1996. Campeau is represented by Galerie Simon Blais (Montreal), and lives and works in Montreal.

Chuck Samuels, Before Photography – Chuck Samuels, The Figure of the Photographer

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

October 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Chuck Samuels’s photographs have been exhibited, published, and collected extensively in Quebec, Canada, and abroad. His installation and video works have been presented in various venues, including several Canadian film and video festivals, and his photographs are in numerous collections in Canada, France, Belgium and the United States.

Yan Giguère, Attractions – Sylvain Campeau, Gravity and Tropism

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Yan Giguère

October 18, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Yan Giguère has been a well-known figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene since the mid-1990s. His most recent photographic works were in solo exhibitions at Galerie Optica in 2009, Centre VU in 2008 and 2002, and Galerie B-312 in 2002. His pieces, which are in a number of collections, highlight the poetry of the everyday in series with strong narrative potential arranged on the walls of the exhibition space.

Alain Pratte, Histoires – Mona Hakim, A Thousand Journeys

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Alain Pratte

October 20, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Since 1973, Alain Pratte has produced numerous photographic projects, a number of which have been in exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including France and Venezuela. His work bears witness to passing time, the permanence or fleeting aspect of objects, unpredictable fates, and illusory ambitions.

Series

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Pratte, Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, Yan Giguère

[Winter 2011] Fragmented narratives, recording of traces, and role playing within the image are some of the ways in which the artists presented in this issue approach the notion of series. Systematic or scattered, the series provides a means to gather multiple images to evoke a personal universe, possible dramas, a disappearing world, or the […]

Stan Douglas, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 – Karen Henry

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Essays, Portfolios
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Stan Douglas

May 16, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The impressive piece of public art addresses the very nature of public space. It is named after the two streets that cross at the north corner of the Woodward’s building, on which the artwork is installed. The image inhabits space like a sculpture, grandly overlooking the public and private courtyards of the new complex in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

War at a Distance. Blake Fitzpatrick, Karyn Sandlos, Roger Simon, curators – Amish Morrell

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Amish Morrell | Artists: Allyson Mitchell, Graeme Smith, Louie Palu, Richard Johnson, Stephen Andrews, Suzanne Opton

May 19, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The theme of the exhibition War at a Distance, presented by the TPW Gallery in Toronto, was media representations of war in the context of debates over the Canadian presence in Afghanistan.

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.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups – Jacinto Lageira, The Poetics of Facts

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Sophie Ristelhueber

May 26, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — In Eleven Blowups, Sophie Ristelhueber uses elements of her own photographs to re-create images of bomb craters produced by the media. In showing the traces of destruction, these images, true and false at once, portray not the specificity of a single story and place but the experience of collapse.

Conflict

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Artists: Emanuel Licha, Sophie Ristelhueber, Stan Douglas

Bombs opening up craters in streets, training camps that look like urban neighbourhoods, media perceptions of the war in Afghanistan, a look back at the riot as background for an urban renewal project… and images that use representation and fiction to try to convey these realities. SOPHIE RISTELHUEBER Eleven Blowups Poetics of Facts Jacinto Lageira […]

Hu Yang, Shanghai Living – Lei Ping, Restratified Private Space

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Lei Ping | Artists: Hu Yang

[Spring 2010] Here are selections from a remarkable documentary work produced by Hu Yang, a Shanghai photographer who recently moved to Toronto. Shanghai Living comprises some five hundred portraits of Shanghai residents photographed in their own interiors, along with short excerpts from interviews in which each describes his or her way of life, values, and […]

Olga Chagaoutdinova, From Russia and Cuba – Gary Michael Dault, Back to the Futur

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Olga Chagaoutdinova

[Spring 2010] A résident of Canada for the last ten years, Olga Chagaoutdinova has remained interested in the evolution of the Russian society, where she experienced the early effects of perestroika. She returned to Russia to take photographs of people and interiors that juxtapose artefacts of traditional Soviet life with heterogeneous aspects of Western consumer […]

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 […]

Ron Terada, Defile – Adam Carr, Trading Places, The Story of Defile

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Portfolios
Authors: Adam Carr | Artists: Ron Terada

[Fall 2009] Defile (2003), by Ron Terada, is a single-issue artist’s magazine that deals with advertising as an intrinsic component of the art world: the magazine is composed exclusively of ads. Produced by Art Metropole and YYZ Books, this project featured the main art magazines from Canada and other countries in exchange for the publication […]

Michael Snow, Repeat Offender – Martha Langford, From Repeat Offender to La revue

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Portfolios
Authors: Martha Langford | Artists: Michael Snow

[Fall 2009] Repeat Offender (1986), by Michael Snow, is a reprint, inverted and in black and white, of a Penthouse portfolio. First published in the now-defunct Toronto photography magazine Photo Communique, this project was produced upon invitation of Elke Town for an issue with the themes of mass mediation and appropriation. In the context of […]

Christian Boltanski, Signal – Anne Bénichou, Signal A Nazi Propaganda Magazine Deconstructed by an Artist

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Portfolios
Authors: Anne Bénichou | Artists: Christian Boltanski

[Fall 2009] Signal (2004), by Christian Boltanski, is a series of colour plates taken from the magazine Signal, a propaganda organ of the Nazi regime issued bimonthly from April 1940 to March 1945 with a print run of 2.5 million copies. Excerpted from the original page sequences, these plates juxtapose portrayals of war and culture that […]

Hans-Peter Feldmann, profil without words

Ciel variable 83 - MEDIUM : MAGAZINES | Portfolios
Artists: Hans-Peter Feldmann

[Fall 2009] profil without words (2000), by Hans-Peter Feldmann, is a replica of a news magazine from which the text has been removed so that only the photographs remain, in their original sequence and positioning on the pages. Making the images talk for themselves, this project reveals the visual formatting of current affairs produced by […]

Peter Gnass, La multitude déchue – Patrice Loubier, The Displaced Monument

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Patrice Loubier | Artists: Peter Gnass

[Summer 2009] Last autumn, Peter Gnass produced an intervention in the form of a temporary posting on the façades of a dozen Montreal cultural sites (galleries, museums, studios, art schools). The poster featured a long band of close-up pictures of ten statues, seen from the back, on which was superimposed a series of letters that […]

ATSA, FRAG on the Main – Bernard Vallée and Pierre Anctil

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Bernard Vallée, Pierre Anctil | Artists: ATSA

[Summer 2009] ATSA (Action terroriste socialement acceptable, or Socially Acceptable Terrorist Action), a collective founded in 1997 by artists Pierre Allard and Annie Roy, is well known for its public interventions. Every year since 1998, it has produced State of Emergency, an urban refugee camp for Montreal’s homeless. In general, the collective’s interventions question the […]

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 […]

Yang li, Uprooted – Sylvain Campeau, Art and Submersion, Memories of a Chinese Dream

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Yang Yi

[Spring 2009] In 2009, the Three Gorges Dam will have flooded hundreds of square kilometres in central China. Chinese artist Yang Yi will see his hometown, Kaixian, being submerged during the last phase of the project. Employing mastery of both photography and digital techniques, Yi shows us ghost towns engulfed by water whose inhabitants, fitted out […]

Benoît Aquin, Chinese “Dust Bowl” – William A. Ewing, Fire & Ice

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Portfolios
Authors: William E. Ewing | Artists: Benoit Aquin

[Spring 2009] In November 2008, Benoit Aquin won the prestigious Prix Pictet for his series on desertification and dust storms in China. One of the greatest environmental disasters of our time, the Chinese “Dust Bowl” is probably the largest conversion of productive land into sand anywhere in the world. In November 2008, Benoit Aquin won […]

Greg Girard, Phantom Shanghai – Amish Morrell, Accelerated Ruins

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Portfolios
Authors: Amish Morrell | Artists: Greg Girard

[Spring 2009] Until recently, a former resident of Shanghai from the 1930s or 1940s, returning to the city decades later, would have a good chance of being able to locate his or her old home since urban development for profit was suspended for nearly a half century. However, as Shanghai modernizes, entire neighbourhoods that were […]

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 […]

George Legrady, Cell Tango et Pockets Full of Memories – Jean Gagnon, George Legrady’s Images in Transit

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Portfolios
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: George Legrady

[Fall 2008] George Legrady’s recent Cell Tango project consists of a dynamically growing archive of cell-phone images, associated with indexical terms. When exhibited as a wall projection, the artwork unfolds a galaxy of images and the textual structure of their interaction. Pockets Full of Memories, Legrady’s previous project, had a similar structure. The project’s audience […]

Peter Piller, Bombs and Hunts – Cheryl Simon, Remembering, Repeating, and Reading Across the Surface of Things: Peter Piller’s Archive

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Portfolios
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Peter Piller

[Summer 2008] The Archive Peter Piller contains tens of thousands of press images that Piller started to collect while employed at an advertising agency. The numbing task of endlessly scanning publications day in and day out became engaging when Piller started to clip and organize images from the newspapers. His archive contain pictures that usually […]