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 […]

Fred Herzog, The City’s Fabric – Helga Pakasaar, Free Observer

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Helga Pakasaar | Artists: Fred Herzog

[Summer 2008] For more than fifty years, Fred Herzog has roamed the streets of Vancouver. His camera dwells on the raw fabric of the city: second-hand stores, restaurants, storefront windows, barbershops, and vacant lots, and the people using those spaces. The selection of images presented here stems from a body of work that comprises hundreds […]

Robert Walker, Mediascapes: New York, Montreal, Warsaw – Pierre Dessureault, Mercantile Labyrinths

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker

[Summer 2008] In today’s world, the blurring between the urban landscape and the mediascape increasingly typifies our experience of our environment. Robert Walker’s body of work illustrates this blurring in a remarkable manner. The images presented in this portfolio span multiple continents and decades. Over the years, illusionary compositions and vibrant colours have become trademarks […]

Zoe Leonard, Analogue – Petra Halkes, Objects and merchandise

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Petra Halkes | Artists: Zoe Leonard

[Summer 2008] In her most recent series of photographic works, Zoe Leonard focuses her square viewfinder on small shops and businesses on three continents. This series, titled Analogue (1997–2007), documents discount stores, repair shops, second-hand stores, restaurants, and flea markets that are separated by thousands of miles. Yet, they share a common consumerism vocabulary and […]

Lazare, Portraits et paysages, la collection Lazare – René Viau, Singular Introspections

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Chuck Close, Edward Burtynsky, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michal Rovner, Nan Goldin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Strand, Raymonde April, Sally Mann, Sarah Moon

[Spring 2008] Following a first purchase, a work by Julia Margaret Cameron (United Kingdom, nineteenth century), the Lazare family has moulded the photographic content of it’s collection over the past twenty-five years to form what is a mainly contemporary ensemble of emotionally rich portraits and nostalgic landscapes. Whether it is a poetic photograph of the […]

W. M. Hunt, Collection Dancing Bear, Vernacular images – Maria-Antonella Pelizzari, Hide and seek in a photograph collection

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Maria Antonella Pelizzari

[Spring 2008] For thirty years, W. H. Hunt has been building a photography collection that brings together 1,200 works marked by the absence of sight in the photographed subjects. Composed of classical and contemporary works by renowned artists, as well as documentary images and snapshots by amateur photographers, this collection spans the entire history of […]

Ydessa Hendeles, Collector and curator – John Bentley Mays, Archiving Contemporary Anxieties

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: John Bentley Mays

[Spring 2008] The singularity of collections exists at the meeting point of the artists’ sensitivities and the collector’s philosophy. In the case of Ydessa Hendeles’s collection, this marriage of viewpoints results in a rich exploration of the pathologies, contradictions, and anxieties of contemporary Western societies. by John Bentley Mays Archiving Contemporary Anxieties Toronto collector Ydessa […]

Jessica Auer, Re-creational Spaces – Michelle Kasprzak, Ways Out of the Labyrinth: The Works of Jessica Auer

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Portfolios
Authors: Michelle Kasprzak | Artists: Jessica Auer

[Fall 2007] Popular sites and tourism fascinate Jessica Auer. She has produced a series of photographic works that were shot in North and South America in which landscapes and architecture have been preserved, renovated, altered, or built from scratch for the benefit of tourism. Through novel perspectives and intriguing details, she invites viewers to appreciate […]

Jana Sterbak, Waiting for High Water – Alain Laframboise, Jana Sterbak, Trompe-l’œil in Venice

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Portfolios
Authors: Alain Laframboise | Artists: Jana Sterbak

[Fall 2007] Produced in 2005–06, Waiting For High Water is the latest instalment of Jana Sterbak’s video projects with Stanley as camera-dog. Through a canine view of Venice, this work suggests a completely new perspective on this pre-eminent tourist destination. Exhibited as a triptych video projection, the edited video that resulted from the dog’s view […]

Antoni Muntadas, On Translation: I Giardini – Reesa Greenberg, The Currency of Time : Muntadas and I Giardini

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Portfolios
Authors: Reesa Greenberg | Artists: Antoni Muntadas, I Giardini

[Fall 2007] On Translation is an all-encompassing site-specific series of projects that Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas has been exhibiting since 1995. The 2005 instalment of the project – On Translation: I Giardini – was composed of a central interactive installation work, as well as photographic, video, and Web-based components. Produced on the occasion of Muntadas’s selection […]

Bill Vazan, Itinéraires urbains 1960-1970 – Serge Bérard, Du concept au Cosmos, perspectivisme chez Bill Vazan

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Portfolios
Authors: Serge Bérard | Artists: Bill Vazan

[Summer 2007] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Summary Since the end of the 1960s, Bill Vazan has been producing conceptual works in the form of urban itineraries for which he uses various modes of transportation (walking, driving, riding […]

Bill Vazan, Itinéraires urbains 1960-1970 – Henry Lehmann, Tangible and Intangible lines

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Portfolios
Authors: Henry Lehmann | Artists: Bill Vazan

[Summer 2007] by Henry Lehmann The title was as brief and streamlined as the piece itself, called simply Worldline. With this unearthly 1971 project, based on the ultimate invisibility of pure line and on its infinite conceptual reach, Montreal artist Bill Vazan truly launched his career. Of course, most of this line, tangibly linked up […]

David Maisel, Black Maps – John K. Grande, Tapping topographies, An interview with David Maisel

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: David Maisel

[Summer 2007] David Maisel’s recent body of works, Black Maps, is composed of five series of aerial photographs, the subject of which is the undoing of the natural world by wide-scale human interventions. The latest of these series, Terminal Mirages – reproduced here – was shot from a helicopter flying above Great Salt Lake in Utah. In an […]

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 […]

Paul Litherland, Absolutely Fabulous – Dayna McLeod, Straight queerness and Alternative Models for Manhood

Ciel variable 75 - MUTATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Paul Litherland

[Fall 2007] In Absolutely Fabulous, Paul Litherland playfully constructs stereotypical gender identities in himself, only to deconstruct them and raise his viewers’ awareness of cultural biases. The ten works that constitute this series evolved from a 1993 performance, Souvenirs. Each work is a self-portrait in which gendered clothing articles and props are used. In their […]

Orlan, Pre-Columbian self-Hybridations – Maxime Coulombe, Le visage comme tableau

Ciel variable 75 - MUTATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Maxime Coulombe | Artists: Orlan

[Fall 2007] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The author argues that in order to fully understand Orlan’s Self-Hybridations series, one must return to her highly controversial series of performances, The Reincarnation of Sainte-Orlan. In this earlier series, […]

Rafael Goldchain, Familial Ground – Martha Langford, The varieties of Goldchain experience

Ciel variable 75 - MUTATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Martha Langford | Artists: Rafael Goldchain

[Fall 2007] Familial Ground is the product of a process that started several years ago when Rafael Goldchain’s son was born. Goldchain gradually realized that his new role as parent included the responsibility to pass on a familial and cultural inheritance. Familial Ground is an autobiographical installation work that includes digitally altered self-portrait photographs, reproductions […]

Frank Breuer, Warehouses and logos – Gary Michael Dault, Objecthood and presentness, the photographs of Frank Breuer

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Portfolios
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Frank Breuer

[Winter 2006-2007] Cologne-based photographer Frank Breuer is a virtuoso of profuse emptiness. His photographs of the bleak but strangely beautiful warehouses and of the logo-bearing, corporate, pylon-like signs that often stand nearby seem largely emptied of discursive, annotative meaning. Because both the warehouses and the emptied sign-structures that are his subject offer no internal articulation, […]

Mike Yuhasz, Great north development group – John K. Grande, The World According to Mike Yuhasz…The Development Mystique

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Mike Yuhasz

[Winter 2006-2007] Multidisciplinary artist Mike Yuhasz’s Great North Development Group project explores the way we conceive of and relate to land in today’s complex world. Yuhasz’s confected, prearranged, set-up, and situational photographic and informational material carries contradictory and duplicitous messages about the consumer. The project is as much about our potential collective perception, understanding, and […]

Doyon-Rivest, Thanks for being there – Julie Lavigne, Les produits dérivés de la firme Doyon-Rivest, publicité, multiple ou ready-made ?

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Lavigne | Artists: Mathieu Doyon, Simon Rivest

[Winter 2006-2007] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Since they created their Doyon-Rivest “corporate” identity in 2000, artists Mathieu Doyon and Simon Rivest have been exploring the interrelationships between advertising and art, mimicking methods of advertising in order […]

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

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

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

Matthieu Brouillard, Les cadavres anticipés – Jean-Pierre Vidal, Le regard atterré et l’envol de l’imaginaire

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Portfolios
Authors: Jean-Pierre Vidal | Artists: Matthieu Brouillard

[Fall 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract With the real artificiality, the true “falseness,” of his images, Matthieu Brouillard eloquently captures the imagination while deflecting the spectator’s regard toward what must be called a reflection on the […]

Gregory Crewdson, Beneath the roses – Cyril Thomas, La part mystérieuse de Gregory Crewdson, dévoilement et construction de l’image photographique

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Portfolios
Authors: Cyril Thomas | Artists: Gregory Crewdson

[Fall 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The article outlines the career of Gregory Crewdson on the occasion of his retrospective at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. Through an analysis of six photographic series, the author attempts to […]

Manon De Pauw, Prendre position – Hélène Brunet Neumann, Le corps conjugué

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Portfolios
Authors: Hélène Brunet Neumann | Artists: Manon De Pauw

[Summer 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Manon De Pauw’s photographic and videographic work stands out for its ludic liveliness, the richness of its formal compositions, and its poetically evocative power. De Pauw explores the playful relationship […]

Annie Baillargeon, Arabesques et grotesques – Guy Sioui Durand, L’image au corps, L’allégorie luxuriante des performances photos chez Annie Baillargeon

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Portfolios
Authors: Guy Sioui Durand | Artists: Annie Baillargeon

[Summer 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract In today’s generalized culture of screen images, new “nondisciplines” are entering the visual arts, media arts, action art, and art theory. Digital technologies, in particular, are multiplying in inventiveness and […]

Erwin Wurm, Déséquilibre et inertie – Patrice Duhamel, Cet emploi du temps de l’entropie, du provisoire

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Portfolios
Authors: Patrice Duhamel | Artists: Erwin Wurm

[Summer 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The situations in which Erwin Wurm involves us can be fully inscribed under the sign of potentiality. Beyond metaphysics, Wurm is interested in making the actual physique of bodies speak. […]

Roy Arden, The World as Will and Representation – Dieter Roelstraete, Les mots et les choses, Alternating Currents in Roy Arden’s Net.art

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Dieter Roelstraete | Artists: Roy Arden

[Spring 2006] by Dieter Roelstraete In The World as Will and Representation, his first-ever online/Internet art project, acclaimed Vancouver artist Roy Arden returns to the archival tropes, modes, and motifs that helped give decisive shape to his landmark works from the mid-1980s, the best known of which are the Rupture, Abjection, and Mission “series” or […]

Roy Arden, The World as Will and Representation – Roy Arden, Notes on The World as Will and Representation (Archive, 2004–)

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Portfolios
Artists: Roy Arden

[Spring 2006] Roy Arden’s piece presents a kaleidoscopic flux of some 10,000 images extracted from the web, depicting different manifestations of the concrete world. Structured around arbitrary entries, it deploys so many numerous variations that we are left in a state of amazement and confusion. By Roy Arden I have collected images since I was […]

Emmanuelle Léonard, Resguárdeme – André-Louis Paré, Emmanuelle Léonard : une histoire de l’œil

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: André-Louis Paré | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard, Sean Reuthler

[Spring 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The author bases himself on Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to examine the works of Emmanuelle Léonard – more specifically, the video installation Guardia, resguárdeme (Guard, protect me), […]

Chih-Chien Wang, The Centre of the Forest Is a Lake Like Mirror – Alice Ming Wai Jim, Domestic Trajectories

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Alice Ming Wai Jim | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang

[Spring 2006] The piece, initially presented at Dazibao, covered the entire walls of the gallery with dozens of images and two video works. Each photography is like a suspended moment in time, extracted from a continuous flux in which perception, memory and culture intermingle to create a personal trajectory and identity. Newspaper Wrap, on the […]

Paul Lacroix, Pulsations – Lisanne Nadeau, Paul Lacroix : l’œuvre au noir

Ciel variable 70 - MATERIA ET LUMEN | Portfolios
Authors: Lisanne Nadeau | Artists: Paul Lacroix

[Winter 2005-2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract All of Paul Lacroix’s works are imbued with his fascination with the marking of a vast, luminous surface of paper. From drawing to photogram, he attracts us with an unvarying, […]

Claudia Fährenkemper, Microcosms – AnnThomas, Interpreting the Microcosm through Photographs

Ciel variable 70 - MATERIA ET LUMEN | Portfolios
Authors: Ann Thomas | Artists: Claudia Fährenkemper

[Winter 2005-2006] German photographer Claudia Fährenkemper’s powerful black and white photomicrographs are a contemporary expression of the centuries-old human need to know what lies beneath the surface of things. Taken with a scanning electron microscope, her photographs of insects, crystals and planktons provide a sensual encounter with the microcosm and its morphology that lead to […]

Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Prélèvements – Sylvain Campeau, Conduction lumineuse du vivant

Ciel variable 70 - MATERIA ET LUMEN | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Marie-Jeanne Musiol

[Winter 2005-2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Campeau examines the scope and consequences of what seems to be implied by the possibility that objects can produce their own visible radiation, thereby challenging the very notion of photographic […]

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

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

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

Cheryl Sourkes: Cam Work – Jessica Wyman, Cheryl Sourkes: Surveilling the Field

Ciel variable 69 – BEHOLDING THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Jessica Wyman | Artists: Cheryl Sourkes

[Fall 2005] Cheryl Sourkes has been surfing and capturing webcam images for several years, and her work serves to articulate for viewers some of the ponderous questions that emerge in seeing the world differently through this particular technology. Sourkes’s current practice is not one of making images so much as it is one of selecting […]

Pierre Granche, Miroirs / reflets / trouées – Alain Laframboise, Dans la ville instable

Ciel variable 69 – BEHOLDING THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Alain Laframboise | Artists: Pierre Granche

[Fall 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Highlighting the similarities between the convex mirror used by Pierre Granche in his series of photographs and Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), the mirror that Brunelleschi used in […]

SYN- : Prospectus, Ville intérieure, randonnée dans un hyperbâtiment – Johanne Sloan, Appropriating the Megastructure

Ciel variable 69 – BEHOLDING THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Johanne Sloan | Artists: SYN–

[Fall 2005] By Johanne Sloan SYN–’s Prospectus (2003–04)1 points to contradictions in the relationship between contemporary artists and the city. This sequence of eighty-one photographs shows the SYN– members wandering around and engaged in play at various locations in the “hyperbuilding” otherwise known as Montreal’s underground city. Their sensibility might be akin to that of […]

Denis Farley, Irradiations – Johanna Mizgala, Wanderings through Light

Ciel variable 68 – MEMORIES OF THE DISASTER | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Denis Farley

[Summer 2005] In his Irradiations series as in his earlier works, Denis Farley partakes in an ongoing investigation of the nature of photography as a self-conscious gesture. In a string of works produced following a site-specific group exhibition in the Canadian government’s once top-secret underground bunker, and now a decommissioned relic of the Cold War, […]

Liza Nguyen, Souvenirs du Vietnam – Octave Debary, Vietnam : photographies et éthique du souvenir

Ciel variable 68 – MEMORIES OF THE DISASTER | Portfolios
Authors: Octave Debary | Artists: Liza Nguyen

[Summer 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract What meaning should be given to the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon? This text analyzes how Souvenirs du Vietnam, a work by Liza Nguyen, offers […]

Bertrand Carrière, Caux – Gary Michael Dault, CAUX: Photographs by Bertrand Carrière

Ciel variable 68 – MEMORIES OF THE DISASTER | Portfolios
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

[Summer 2005] In three recent interrelated works, Bertrand Carrière explores ways of expressing the memories embedded in the landscape at the site of the Dieppe Raid of 1942. The Caux series constitutes a long meditation on the sense of purposelessness and loss embodied by that very landscape. It was preceded by Jubilee, an installation in […]

Melvin Charney, UN DICTIONNAIRE… série 100 : New York, 9/11/2001 – Anne Bénichou, Des ruines et des corps pour penser le monde, un entretien avec Melvin Charney

Ciel variable 68 – MEMORIES OF THE DISASTER | Portfolios
Authors: Anne Bénichou | Artists: Melvin Charney

[Summer 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract In the early 1970s, Melvin Charney began a work in progress, UN DICTIONNAIRE…, a collection of press-agency photographs, published in newspapers, in which buildings and cities involved in current events […]

David Claerbout, Moments réflexifs – Valérie Lamontagne, David Claerbout : le spectre du temps

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Portfolios
Authors: Valérie Lamontagne | Artists: David Claerbout

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The author considers David Claerbout’s work in relation to the overlapping histories of cinema and photography and suggests that the etymological and perceptive frictions that have developed between these media […]

Stan Denniston, Time Passages – Cheryl Sourkes, Stan Denniston: Stills

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Portfolios
Authors: Cheryl Sourkes | Artists: Stan Denniston

[Spring 2005] Using long, continuous video takes and the static camera position of the still photographer to capture what at first appears to be inert subject matter–geological formations, deserted highways and other abandoned sites—Stan Denniston’s ‘fixed focus’ movies invoke an uncanny temporal sensibility. Subject movement is minimal and unpredictable, defined as it is by the […]

Tetsuomi Anzai, Still Breathing – Cheryl Simon, Time Travels: Mixed-Media Works by Tetsuomi Anzai

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Portfolios
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Tetsuomi Anzai

[Spring 2005] Each the product of a very particular combination of media generated imagery, Tetsuomi Anzai’s mixed media installation works offer unique perspectives on a world increasingly apprehended through pictures. Whether stills enlivened through video animation techniques, video loops upturned to approximate the live streaming of camera obscura technology, or satellite renderings rolled, spun and […]

Fiona Tan, Déprises identitaires – Vincent Bonin, L’emploi du temps : travail et désœuvrement dans Countenance de Fiona Tan

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Bonin | Artists: Fiona Tan

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract In the installation Countenance (2001), Fiona Tan uses film to quote the archiving and photographing methods behind August Sander’s photographic recension project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Men of the twentieth […]

Adad Hannah, Surface Tension – Will Straw, Adad Hannah: Struggling Against Time

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Portfolios
Authors: Will Straw | Artists: Adad Hannah

[Spring 2005] On the very threshold of immobility, Adad Hannah’s works are initially interpreted by our eyes as being static images – only to eventually reveal subtle movements that betray their nature as works of video rather than of still photography. Recalling a history of negotiated relationships between the static and moving image, these revelations […]

Raymonde April – Jean-Claude Rochefort, Bifurcations. Notes et matériaux

Ciel variable 66B - RAYMONDE APRIL | Portfolios
Authors: Jean-Claude Rochefort | Artists: Raymonde April

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The author observes, first, that the artist maintains an emotional relationship with nature and that an ontology of the landscape is manifested in her work because there is a profound […]

Angela Grauerholz, images tirées du film Ephemeris (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] The question today is, however – perhaps has always been – how somebody can appropriate (in fact steal) somebody else’s doing and yet make something of it that is uniquely his own. In other words, the question is not what are the models to be followed or that are being followed, but what […]

Angela Grauerholz, Sans titre (washed water) (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005]

Angela Grauerholz, Sans titre (circular) (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Angela Grauerholz, Sans titre (artists regrouping) (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Angela Grauerholz, Sans titre (Courting death) (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Angela Grauerholz, Épiphytes (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] World-view and self-image are indissolubly intertwined with each other. The way man sees the world is the way he sees himself; the way he conceives himself is the way he conceives the world. Alterations in his view of the world lead to alterations in his view of himself and vice versa. ⎯ Christopher […]

Angela Grauerholz, Familiaris (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Angela Grauerholz, La flâneuse (extraits)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] There is no question of inventing the flaneuse: the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century. Nor is it appropriate to reject totally the existing literature on modernity, for the experiences it describes certainly defined a good deal of the lives of […]

Angela Grauerholz, Vorbilder (modèles)

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005]

Angela Grauerholz: Salle de lecture de l’artiste au travail

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Portfolios
Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005]

Klaus Scherübel – Reinhard Braun, The Artist at Work

Ciel variable 65 - PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Reinhard Braun | Artists: Klaus Scherübel

[Fall 2004] In his series Untitled (The Artist at Work), Klaus Scherübel presents a paradoxical system of references to myths and phantasms of modernism and to descriptive contexts of current art. To take the title or the visual appearance as a starting point already implies taking part in a discourse that is subverted by the […]

Hicham Benohoud, Version soft – Lyne Crevier, résister

Ciel variable 65 - PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Lyne Crevier | Artists: Hicham Benohoud

[Fall 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract In his series of self-portraits Version soft, the Moroccan artist Hicham Benohoud has metamorphosed his features by “martyrizing” his head in harsh photographs recalling those in Photomatons or mug shots. […]

Pascal Grandmaison, Portraits – Christine Bernier, Cet autre regard du portrait

Ciel variable 65 - PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Christine Bernier | Artists: Pascal Grandmaison

[Fall 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Pascal Grandmaison’s photographic and videographic work is often defined as renewing the concept of the portrait. This text explains that the innovation of Grandmaison’s portraits is situated more in the […]

Jason Salavon, Fuzzy Logic – Elizabeth Menon, The conceptual Aesthetic of Jason Salavon

Ciel variable 64 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Elizabeth Menon | Artists: Jason Salavon

[Summer 2004] Jason Salavon employs computers and code to transform material appropriated from popular culture. His work ranges from digital video installations to Web-based interactive works and works on computers to create paintings that blur the line between manmade and machine aesthetic. His photo and video-based print works cultivate a dual aesthetic of painterly veils […]

Louis Joncas, Detritus – George Bogardi

Ciel variable 64 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: George Bogardi | Artists: Louis Joncas

[Summer 2004] The Detritus series is an ongoing investigation of Joncas’s material existence, informed by still-life painting and vanitas. The series depicts the detritus of domestic life and everyday survival. It questions rituals and banal chores – such as cleaning, eating, grooming, and consuming – that leave behind an endless trail of detritus. The objects […]

Gwenaël Bélanger, Chutes – Marie-Ève Charron, De la trajectoire dans la chute des corps

Ciel variable 64 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Marie-Ève Charron | Artists: Gwenaël Bélanger

[Summer 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Gwenaël Bélanger’s series Chutes follows in the spirit of early-twentieth-century studies on transcription of movement. Each series uses a sequential modality to reconstitute the trajectory of everyday objects abandoned in […]

Sorel Cohen, Divans maudits – Sophie Mendelsohn and Krystel Wallet, D’un regard… à l’autre

Ciel variable 63 - PERSONA | Portfolios
Authors: Krystel Wallet, Sophie Mendelsohn | Artists: Sorel Cohen

[Spring 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract During a stay in Paris, Sorel Cohen set up her camera in different psychoanalysts’ offices. The result was a series of images around the analyst’s couch, the body that we […]

Nikki S. Lee – Dayna McLeod, Stretching Identity to Fit: The Many Faces of Nikki S. Lee

Ciel variable 63 - PERSONA | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Nikki S. Lee

[Spring 2004] par Dayna McLeod In “Image #6” of Nikki Lee’s The Punk Project series, two punks are seated on the cement steps of an innocuous building. He has a closely cropped mohawk and wears camouflage pants with a leather jacket thrown across his lap. She wears ripped net stockings over striped tights, and a […]

Massimo Guerrera, Le temps de déclencher quelques ouvertures – Massimo Guerrera, Porus

Ciel variable 63 - PERSONA | Portfolios
Authors: Massimo Guerrera | Artists: Massimo Guerrera

[Spring 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Yinka Shonibare, Journal d’un dandy victorien – Eduardo Ralickas, Yinka Shonibare: le dandysme et la figuration de l’histoire

Ciel variable 63 - PERSONA | Portfolios
Authors: Eduardo Ralickas | Artists: Yinka Shonibare

[Spring 2004] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Yinka Shonibare’s works can be characterized in terms of their powerful deconstruction of Western notions of identity. In this light, the artist’s embrace of the figure of the dandy is […]

The Bigger Picture – Karen Love, The Bigger Picture: Portraits from Ottawa

Ciel variable 62 - TERRITORY | IDENTITY | Portfolios
Authors: Karen Love | Artists: Alexandre Castonguay, Allan MacKay, Arnaud Maggs, Barbara Woodley, Charles Gagnon, Chris Lund, Chris Mikula, David Barbour, David Cation, Duncan Cameron, Evergon, Germaine Koh, Jeffrey Thomas, Jerry Grey, Justin Wonnacott, Ken Lum, Larissa Fassler, Lynn Ball, Max Dean, Michael Schreier, Michael Snow, Paul Couvrette, Rod MacIvor, Sylvain Cousineau, Tony Fouhse, Trevor Gould

[Winter 2003] The Bigger Picture: Portraits from Ottawa, organized for the Ottawa Art Gallery by Karen Love, gathers together over 200 Ottawa portraits by 78 image-makers, presented thematically in order to provoke a range of questions about how we understand the idea of a portrait. No longer simply an accurate depiction of physical characteristics or […]

Scott Walden, Unsettled – Scott Walden, Places Lost. In search of Newfoundland’s resettled communities

Ciel variable 62 - TERRITORY | IDENTITY | Portfolios
Authors: Scott Walden | Artists: Scott Walden

[Winter 2003] Scott Walden’s Unsettled was produced following a summer spent in Newfoundland photographing the remnants of abandoned coastal communities, casualties of government programs seeking to centralize the new province’s scattered population. The resulting book, Places Lost: In Search of Newfoundland’s Resettled Communities, gathers some forty images reproduced in duotone, along with many vintage photographs […]

Linea di Confine : William Guerrieri, Sergio Buffini, Marco Signorini, Paola di Bello, Guido Guidi – Michèle Cohen Hadria, Le lointain est ici

Ciel variable 62 - TERRITORY | IDENTITY | Portfolios
Authors: Michèle Cohen Hadria | Artists: Guido Guidi, Marco Signorini, Paola Di Bello, Sergio Buffini, William Guerrieri

[Winter 2003] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The Linea de Confine movement in Emilie Romagne (northern Italy), both conceptual and empirical in its relationship with the territory, follows the lineage of Italian photography of the 1970s – […]

Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, À l’est d’un nouvel éden – Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, Une frontière à l’est d’un nouvel éden. Périple documenté sur les futures limites extérieures de l’Union européenne

Ciel variable 62 - TERRITORY | IDENTITY | Portfolios
Authors: Alban Kakulya, Yann Mingard | Artists: Alban Kakulya, Yann Mingard

[Winter 2003] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea stretches a strip of land more or less six hundred kilometres wide, inhabited by more than sixty million people belonging to seven […]

Stéphane Couturier, Villes génériques – Emmanuel Hermange, Plasticité de l’entropie urbaine

Ciel variable 61 - MODERNE | VERNACULAIRE | Portfolios
Authors: Emmanuel Hermange | Artists: Stéphane Couturier

[Summer 2003] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Stéphane Couturier’s Villes génériques series is a continuation of the photographic work on urban sites under construction that he has been producing for a number of years. This archaeology of […]

Arni Haraldsson, Israel, Jordan and South Africa – Jordan Strom, Posing Presidios: A Conversation with Arni Haraldsson

Ciel variable 61 - MODERNE | VERNACULAIRE | Portfolios
Authors: Jordan Strom | Artists: Arni Haraldsson

[Summer 2003] In parallel to his continuing dozen-year-long project, which addresses the livedness, context, and peculiarities of space in modernist architecture, Haraldsson’s recent photographic works focus on other grounds inherent to modernism, built space, and our relationships to them. In these recent parallel projects – the photographs of Jerusalem’s cityscapes and the Via Dolorosa, the […]

Marik Boudreau, Miradors – André Lamarre, L’œil de la montagne. Sur la recherche photographique de Marik Boudreau

Ciel variable 61 - MODERNE | VERNACULAIRE | Portfolios
Authors: André Lamarre | Artists: Marik Boudreau

[Summer 2003] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract With Miradors, which bears the subtitle Essai photographique sur l’érosion (Photographic essay on erosion), Marik Boudreau has produced a synthesis of her work on abandoned sites and urban ruins. An […]

Olivier Christinat, Portraits et nus – Lyne Crevier, Dévisager

Ciel variable 58 - NUDES AND PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Lyne Crevier | Artists: Olivier Christinat

[Summer 2002] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Olivier Christinat’s spare mises en scène form the canvas for portraits or nudes of young women in a sort of intimate encounter between artist and model that seems to overstep […]

Marisa Portolese, Belle de jour – Dayna McLeod, Tattooed innocence with post-punk appeal

Ciel variable 58 - NUDES AND PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Marisa Portolese

[Summer 2002] Self-possessed women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, each fills the frame with intense looks, confidence, sex appeal, and power as she looks head-on into the camera’s lens and past, to the viewer. Compellingly seductive, these subjects pose for themselves and for the camera with a confronting gaze that is just as powerful. […]

Evergon, Evergon, Margaret and I – Alain Laframboise, Le miroir d’Evergon

Ciel variable 58 - NUDES AND PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Alain Laframboise | Artists: Evergon

[Summer 2002] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The tradition of representing young women to emphasize the ephemeral nature of beauty is very old, as is that of showing older, physically worn women to encourage reflection on time’s […]

Isabelle Hayeur, Paysages incertains – Suzanne Paquet, Quelques fêlures

Ciel variable 57 – CONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

[Spring 2002] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Isabelle Hayeur’s work points as much to the idea of “realism” in photography as to that of authenticity of the landscape(s). These are linked issues, since the landscape is probably […]

Manuel Piña, On Monuments – Petra Watson, The Photographs of Manuel Piña

Ciel variable 57 – CONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE | Portfolios
Authors: Petra Watson | Artists: Manuel Piña

[Spring 2002] Unstable identities emerge in Manuel Piña’s mapping of place and historical past: memory assumes the form of the landscape itself. On Monuments comments on the rewriting of history, ideologies, and the obliteration of the past. Piña photographed sites where monuments were taken down during the 1959 Revolution. He presents these sites as discrete […]

Ivan Binet, Répertoire d’horizons – Sonia Pelletier, Nulle part chez nous

Ciel variable 57 – CONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Ivan Binet

[Spring 2002] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Ivan Binet’s images are impossible panoramic views that retrace the wanderings of the photographer-walker in different regions of Quebec. First sketched out during the shooting, these panoramas truly take form […]

Ramona Ramlochand, Once Upon a Time . . . Ever After, a digital photographic panorama, 2001 – Ramona Ramlochand, Fragmentation

Ciel variable 56 - MAKING WORLDS | Portfolios
Authors: Ramona Ramlochand | Artists: Ramona Ramlochand

[Winter 2001-2002] Under the digital disney sky, the debris of contemporary life consolidates, piled together into a postcard from the edge. It is all sweetness and anxiety. The natural and unnatural, the real and the imagined, becoming one watery vista. By the falls I sat down and wept. This is my theme park. An MRI. […]