← ONLINE ISSUES
In this stream is the full content of the magazine’s issues published since 1986, except for the most recent three years. A huge trove of content is offered for consultation and research.
The issues are presented in sections that correspond to the major periods in the evolution of Ciel variable, related to changes in the editorial team, development of its content and design, or modifications to its name and logo.
[Winter 2015] The realm of the living includes as many habitats as ways of life. As fragments of the impossible inventory of all inhabited places, these four portfolios cross over into environments that may be real or fantasized, but are always constructed. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
[Fall 2014] 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. ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
[Spring-Summer 2014] 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. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
[Winter 2014] 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. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
[Fall 2013] The transition to the digital image regime entails a series of permutations that noticeably modify our relations with a common public space and how art is produced. Our experience of concrete spaces and temporality, as well as the distinctions between private sphere and public exhibition, between amateur and professional productions, are totally […]
[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. Some where between group portrait, “objective” selfportrait, and urban antiaesthetic . . […]
[Winter 2013] This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of […]
[Fall 2012] Today, the North is making economic headlines, as it has become a new Eldorado for societies stalked by the dream of continual growth. This territory – homeland to First Nations, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast pool of natural resources – is nevertheless mostly unknown to the general public. […]
[Spring-Summer 2012] From Alberta to Azerbaijan, from resolute Bay to mumbai, and from Oran to Johannesburg, this issue reveals images of an industrious, prosperous world that includes numerous dysfunctions and aberrations. with aesthetic strategies combining the documentary and the sublime, a multitude of perspectives, narrations, and installations, the image sometimes retreats to the background. […]
[Winter 2012] 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. ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
[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 . […]
[Spring – Summer 2011] Queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a higly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strenghts or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READING VOICES Purchase this issue
[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 […]
[Fall 2010] Historic performances are currently being updated in different forms: exhibitions, appropriations, remediations, and re-enactments. These practices raise a number of questions about the status of performance documentation (photos, videos, and films in particular) and how it is interpreted, addressed here through multiple recent examples. ÉDITORIAL DOSSIER EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
[Summer 2010] 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. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS VOICES […]
[Spring 2010] Portraits convey individualities, but they also express common conditions. Facial features, pose, clothing, and immediate environment contribute to a representation of self, but they also bring us closer to others. These images, like the photographers’ trajectories, portray uniqueness at the crossroads where cultures mix. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITONS READINGS VOICES […]
[Fall 2009 – Winter 2010] Taken as a whole, what do the images that make up a magazine say? What do their format and positioning reveal? Artists appropriate, divert, or exaggerate the content and layout of existing magazines, seeking to make manifest how the image’s share of the page is structured and tease out […]
[Summer 2009] Although it is rarely installed as permanent public art, photography nevertheless has a growing presence within the urban public space. More and more artistic and institutional initiatives are encroaching on the territory of advertising – posting in all its forms – to dispute this high-visibility space and offer alternative ways of looking at […]
[Spring 2009] This issue focuses on the side effects of the accelerated modernization of China: Shanghai is portrayed in an odd half-light that bespeaks the end of an era; landscapes discoloured by dust storms testify to a rapid desertification; a city that lives under water hints at vast tracts of land that have been submerged… […]
[Fall 2008 – Winter 2009] The image bank is an archive based on modalities of selection, indexation and thematic grouping which condition its usage. This apparatus is appropriated by artists to explore the contextual conditions of the reading of images. Visual literacy and the future of the « virtual museum » imagined by Malraux […]
[Summer 2008] Photographing the street, over time, to record the evolution of the city and how it is used is a strategy that remains current. In these pages, it reveals the survival of small businesses in the era of globalization of markets, it allows us to follow the radical transformation of a city centre, and […]
[Spring 2008] Why does one collect photographic images? What motivates an individual to select only a few printed images from among thousands and assemble them into a collection that says as much about that individual as about his or her environment? EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Download this issue (Free of Charge)
[Winter 2007] Today’s global tourism industry has developed a cultural structure that orients how we see. The works presented here address various aspects of that structure and offer new perspectives on a global phenomenon. The subjects approached range from the political nature of the Venice Biennale to the recently acquired monumental status of certain sites. […]