Marie J. Jean, 1985. Image-Worlds – An interview by Jérome Delgado

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Entrevues
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Marie J. Jean

Far more than a catalogue for the eponymous exhibition, the book 1985. Image-Worlds offers an overview of a decade “through a plurality of points of view, both cultural and generational,” as Marie J. Jean explains. The director of the VOX centre also refers to this “editorial stance” of giving such weight to the image. “Slowing the gaze, contextualizing images and returning the weight of history to them, becomes a political act. In this sense, we aren’t content with documenting the past; we are concerned with current thought on the world of images in which we live.”

Serge Clément et Alexis Desgagnés, Métamorphose – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Alexis Desgagnés, Serge Clément

“Unique” despite a relatively familiar process—a double-sided book meant to be consulted from either end—Métamorphose brings together photographer Serge Clément and poet Alexis Desgagnés. Admiring their “osmosis,” Sylvain Campeau sees in their creative exchange a shared “density,” moving between a “concrete-and-glass jungle” and the figure of the bird within an “overcrowding of emotions.” The publication, he writes, is best appreciated when experienced “by travel through it following paths that veer off.”

Martin Désilets, Matière noire – Jean Pelchat

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Jean Pelchat | Artists: Martin Désilets

A beautiful and understated book, in Jean Pelchat’s view, Matière noire brings together Martin Désilets’ projects based on the accumulation and layering, on a single surface, of photographs of museum artworks. In his review, Pelchat focuses on this body of work by discussing the essays assembled for the publication, written by Catherine Nichols, Michel Poivert, and Pauline Martin. He notes both the strengths and weaknesses of their reflections, which variously evoke Ad Reinhardt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a “particular blur” surrounding well-known paintings.

James Andrew Rosen, Aphasia – Louis Perreault

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: James Andrew Rosen

During a convalescence that forced him into a long period of isolation, James Andrew Rosen re-evaluated his own photographic archives. He recontextualized them around the notion of repair and a “slow return to the outside world,” writes Louis Perreault, leading to the book Aphasia. Linked to the “transformative power of photography,” the body of work offers a meditation on impermanence. Enthralled, the critic praises Rosen for capturing the elusive, “this moment in suspension, which would be dissipated by a single movement.”

Yves Arcand, Indicia – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Yves Arcand

Originating from a process that begins with the accumulation of organic matter on acetate sheets, the large-format images in the exhibition Indicia evoked “a scientific imaginary” and suggested “the point of view of a microscope,” according to Michel Hard-Vallée. Through this nature-based practice, which aligns him with photographers such as Michael Flomen, Sara Angelucci, and Normand Rajotte, Yves Arcand probes the indexical dimension of the photographic sign while working at a remove from his subject. This “first assessment” of a decade of research, the critic argues, calls for a continuation.

Andrea Szilasi, Réfléchir – Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Andrea Szilasi

The fifteen collages and six Polaroids by Andrea Szilasi brought together under the title Réfléchir prompted a response from Alexis Desgagnés marked by both sensitivity and restraint. “I realized that I had to speak not only about an exhibition but about this unique and paradoxical experience,” he writes. While he carefully describes the works, which emerge from a “manual, gestural, instinctive” process, he argues that the notions of space and the body provide the framework that “were key to reflecting” on the exhibition as a whole.

Geneviève Thibault, Intérieurs – Bernard Schütze

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Geneviève Thibault

Presented at the Maison du notaire in Trois-Pistoles, Intérieurs was grounded in the principle of democratizing art, though through what Bernard Schütze describes as an “inversion of the gaze”: local residents were invited to propose objects they considered to have artistic value. The exhibition, the critic observes, “shifted the aesthetic question toward lived experience and the everyday.” The approximately sixty objects on display were accompanied by photographs by Geneviève Thibault, whose photographic intervention in participants’ homes echoed the exhibition’s emphasis on abundance and the absence of hierarchy.

Jasmin Bilodeau, C’est trop beau, je vais le prendre en photo – Nathalie Côté

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Côté | Artists: Jasmin Bilodeau

A reflection on obsolescence and dematerialization, this exhibition contained only four photographs, yet each was monumental in scale and the result of an extensive process involving two stages of image capture and the use of maquettes. Depicting the seasons through four abandoned buildings, the series occupies a space between documentary and fiction, imbued with the trompe-l’œil sensibility that has long characterized BGL, the collective of which Jasmin Bilodeau was once a member. For Nathalie Côté, the artist thus reaffirms his affinity for a mode of working that is “physical, almost sculptural,” grounded in manipulation and hands-on making.

Storage Story – Safia Belmenouar

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Safia Belmenouar

The inaugural exhibition of South Korea’s first public museum dedicated to photography—the Photo SeMA—engaged in dialogue with the institution’s archives (comprising 20,000 works and documents), its surroundings, and a building designed in the shape of a camera shutter. Safia Belmenouar discusses the works of the six artists who approached the museum “a living space in which multiple experiences, narratives, and reinterpretations intersected.” The exhibition explored the very notion of collecting, presenting the Photo SeMA as “a place of fertile tensions rather than a museified space.”

Araki Nobuyoshi, Polaraki – Jessica Ragazzini

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini | Artists: Araki Nobuyoshi

Prolific and provocative, Araki Nobuyoshi embraced the Polaroid for its simplicity and immediacy. It served, as Jessica Ragazzini puts it, as a means to “eternally fix the ephemeral,” a notion explored in her review of the Musée Guimet exhibition dedicated to the Japanese photographer. Linked to the donation of a collection of one thousand Polaroids, POLARAKI reflected both Araki’s penchant for excess and his experimental, almost casual approach to image-making, as he cuts, rearranges, and scribbles on his photographs. Ragazzini also notes the complexity of his practice, shaped by themes of eroticism and the traditional art of rope bondage.

Sepideh Farsi, Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk – Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Sepideh Farsi

A haunting film about Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk takes the form of a dialogue conducted through video communications between the filmmaker and a Palestinian photographer. The latter’s death, killed in a bombing, brings the narrative to an abrupt end. The documentary, a “cinematographic tribute to how photography bears witness” writes Claudia Polledri, sheds light on the realities of daily precarity. The technological disruptions, the critic notes, mirrors the protagonist’s living conditions.

Camera and the City – Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein

Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the exhibition Camera and the City explored street photography. According to Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein, however, it did little to renew the way the subject is approached. Her review highlights a key concern—the narrative is “MoMA-centric,” in her view—but also underscores some of the exhibition’s strengths, particularly the conceptual photography section, featuring artists such as Susan Dobson, Melvin Charney, VALIE EXPORT, and others whose work exposes the shortcomings and contradictions of urban space.

le commun des mortels, “Look, you shall see” – Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: le commun des mortels

An unusual exhibition both for its content (damaged photographs) and for the sheer number of images, Dommage ! revealed the accumulative work of ordinary people (Jacques Barbier and Élise Pic). Drawn to collecting devalued, rejected, and even discarded images, the duo challenges “the notions of authorship, originality, and artistic value.” This is what Érika Nimis observed, describing the experience as akin to visiting “a cabinet of wonders.”

Michel Huneault, From Trauma to Peaceful Memory – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Michel Huneault

After twelve years of stays in Japan, photographer Michel Huneault has amassed an extensive body of documentation on the aftermath of the triple disaster that struck the Tohoku region in 2011 (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident). From devastation to regeneration, his images bear witness to the “settled memory” taking shape there, as Sophie Mangado writes. In her essay, she examines the three bodies of work that make up POST TOHOKU 2012–2024 and observes how this transformation has also left its mark on Michel Huneault.

Angela Grauerholz, Sirens, Heroines, and Unique Women – Ioana Dragomir et Cheryl Simon

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Cheryl Simon, Ioana Dragomir | Artists: Angela Grauerholz

Written jointly by two authors, this essay was inspired by Angela Grauerholz’s photobook la femme 100 têtes, both by its form and by the sense of female collegiality it engenders. Although presented separately, the observations of Ioana Dragomir and Cheryl Simon ultimately form a cohesive whole, centred on the “surplus of meaning [that emerges] beyond the photograph.” In this work, whose title refers to Max Ernst’s historic book La Femme 100 Têtes, the emphasis is less on revealing identities than on concealing them.

Luc Delahaye, Le bruit du monde – Stephen Horne, Being in the Real

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Luc Delahaye

After a career as a photojournalist and war correspondent that earned him the highest honours, Luc Delahaye made the radical decision to leave that profession and produce images solely as an artist. The some seventy-four works he has created since 2001 nonetheless address the same subjects: scenes of devastation and war, their impact on civilian populations, portraits of victims, and political or institutional gatherings. Yet, according to Stephen Horne, the shift in Delahaye’s practice marks a move toward emotion.

Jeff Wall, Photographs 1984–2023 – Kenneth Hayes, Hits and B-sides

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: Jeff Wall

The retrospective that the MOCA in Toronto devoted to Jeff Wall brought together both his early backlit lightbox works, large-scale tableau photographs, and more stripped-down black-and-white compositions. Like classic rock, Wall’s images are now more than ever treated as historical tableaux, according to Kenneth Hayes.While, in his view, “a scrim of time and familiarity blurs and softens their perception,” the exhibition clearly highlighted the Vancouver artist’s command of composition, framing, montage, and scale.

Donigan Cumming, Primer – Mona Hakim, A Vivid Framing of Exchanges

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Donigan Cumming

Within the confined space of a parking attendant’s booth, where doors and windows act as a frame, Donigan Cumming captured the gestures and expressions of passersby on the fly, producing full-length portraits or landscape-format images. Left as negatives for forty-five years, these images eventually appeared in an unusually sized book. While the atypical nature of this limited edition publication makes it a collector’s item, Mona Hakim considers its refinement to lie in its subject, an endangered one: physical exchanges and portraits of individuals drawn directly from public space.

Thematic presentation: Tableaux

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Jeff Wall, Luc Delahaye

Buy this issue →   [Summer 2026] Thematic presentation by Jacques Doyon The artists’ portfolios that we present in this issue are apprehended from the point of view of the tableau – photographic, of course, but also drawing on pictorial and even cinematographic traditions. In views of daily life, scenes of conflicts, and portraits, posed […]

Editorial : Photographic Tableaux

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Buy this issue →   [Summer 2026] Editorial by Jacques Doyon The artists’ portfolios that we present in this issue are apprehended from the point of view of the tableau – photographic, of course, but also drawing on pictorial and even cinemat­o­graphic traditions. They include views of daily life, scenes of conflicts, and portraits, posed […]

Ciel variable 132 – Tableaux

Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX

[Summer 2026]

Issue 132 of Ciel variable, titled Tableaux, brings together works by Donigan Cumming, Jeff Wall, and Luc Delahaye, exploring contemporary social issues through the photographic tableau. The issue also features essays, an interview with Marie J. Jean, and a selection of exhibitions and publications in contemporary photography from Quebec and internationally.

Manif d’art 12 — La biennale de Québec – Jean-Michel Quirion

Biennales & Cie
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Anouk Verviers, Carolina Caycedo, Françoise Sullivan, Jessie Kleemann, Joyce Joumaa, Minha Park, Sabrina Ratté, Vanessa Bell, Vicky Sabourin

Focusing on snow and its various forms once it has turned back into water Manif d’art 12 raises a panoply of geographic and political issues. The works brought together under the theme Splitting Ice evoke both acts of assertion and gestures of healing. Here, Jean-Michel Quirion offers an overview.

Maxim Dondyuk, White Series – Érika Nimis

Documentary photography
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Maxim Dondyuk

The photographer Maxim Dondyuk’s winter landscapes may seem beautiful and peaceful, but they conceal a world of destruction. The images grouped under the title White Series complement a long-term project on the war in Ukraine. Read, here, what Érika Nimis thought of Dondyuk’s work.

Ciel variable 131 – Collecting

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING

[Winter 2026]

This issue brings together three bodies of work united by a shared passion for images: Christos Dikeakos’s portraits of art collectors, Michel Campeau’s extensive archive-based series celebrating the gestures and rituals of the darkroom, and Sara Knelman’s unusual collection of vernacular photographs of women reading across a century. Together, these projects highlight the gestures, knowledge, and commitments that shape culture, ensure its transmission, and affirm the essential place of images in our lives.

Michel-Hardy Vallée, Focus on Quebec Photography – An interview by Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Entrevues
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Michel-Hardy Vallée

A web-based and educational project, Mise au point sur la photographie québécoise offers a rare—if not the only—history of the discipline as it has unfolded in Quebec since the first daguerreotype. One of its creator, Michel Hardy-Vallée, explains the choice of themes and monographic essays: “ We really wanted to foreground the issue of uses, which give access to an entire spectrum of relationships. Who uses photography, where, when, and why?” he explains in an interview conducted by Charles Guilbert.

David Hlynsky, A Focusing Appliance – Kenneth Hayes

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Readings
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: David Hlynsky

For this book alternating images, reflections, and anecdotes, David Hlynsky drew on his lived experience as a photographer, teacher, and father. Neither annals nor a theoretical essay, “the book reads as notes on a life-long captivation by photography . . . [The images] feature much careful observation and a quick visual wit” writes Kenneth Hayes. He invokes a wide range of authors, from Marshall McLuhan to Jonathan Crary, including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, to explain Hlynsky’s “postmodern, quirky, and highly self-conscious” work.

Sandra Brewster, Blur – Safia Belmenouar

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Readings
Authors: Safia Belmenouar | Artists: Sandra Brewster

First presented as an exhibition, Sandra Brewster’s Blur brings out, in book form, the tactile and shifting dimension of the images. “As if it were a flipbook – the portraits begin to dance in my hands” writes Safia Belmenouar. This also reactivates “the very core of Brewster’s approach: to capture identity through its movement, its constitutive instability.” Marked by printing accidents and a lack of sharpness, the work as a whole presents itself as an act of resistance against representations imposed by colonial history.

Michel-Hardy Vallée, Premières planches. Photos de John Max – Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Readings
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Michel-Hardy Vallée

This volume devoted to the formative years of photographer John Max, “as his professional status grew” is based on the discovery of previously unseen images that remained at the contact-sheet stage. Beyond offering a return to the 1950s and 1960s, Premières planches pays tribute to work done quietly, sheltered from view. “They reveal the swarm of experience behind the apparent coherence – before the selection and refinement – inscribing images, people, and illustrious moments in the shared continuum made of micro-narratives and multiple social groups,” comments Fanny Bieth.

Marie-Alice Dumont. In Conversation with Raymonde April – Hélène Samson

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Hélène Samson | Artists: Marie-Alice Dumont, Raymonde April

An unlikely meeting between two artists—Marie-Alice Dumont, a historic figure in Québec photography as one of the first women in the profession, and Raymonde April, from the contemporary scene—this exhibition at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent brought their images together through a fluid installation. From their aesthetic disparity (the singular gaze of one, the poetic polysemy of the other) emerged an empathy toward the subjects and a connection with everyday life, materiality, and the rural landscape, noted Hélène Samson.

Yan Giguère, Somme toute – Charlotte Lalou Rousseau

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charlotte Lalou Rousseau | Artists: Yan Giguère

[Winter 2026] Somme toute by Charlotte Lalou Rousseau Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 10.04.2025 — 14.06.2025 [EXCERPT] In his exhibition Somme toute, Yan Giguère presented twelve photographic assemblages from his eponymous project of fourteen “stations” – Giguère’s word for them – which totalled 242 analogue images. Their composition and form of installation testified […]

Patrick Dionne et Miki Gingras, Uchronie – Marcel Blouin

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marcel Blouin | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

A humanist-leaning exhibition, with a focus on “visceral contestation and disturbing police repression,” Uchronie drew on image-based practices, social sciences, and philosophy. The works of Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras, where fiction and documentation brush against each other, recall those of Gisèle Freund or Donigan Cumming, according to Marcel Blouin. Uchronie “intelligently avoiding the shoals of objective pseudo-documentation and appealing to the people concerned […] to show what needs to show,” he writes.

Sébastien Michaud, Façonner son sentier – Mariane Tremblay

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mariane Tremblay | Artists: Sébastien Michaud

Like a walk through the forest, Sébastien Michaud’s exhibition featured around twenty “picture or sculpture stations” made from manipulated and distorted prints. Before these photographs of nature, Mariane Tremblay saw an invitation to an introspective journey, to the “let themselves become forest” advocated by philosopher Baptiste Morizot. She writes that our relationship with the living world in the face of the ecological crisis depends on the human capacity to change and adapt.

Simon Émond, Phobos Deimos – Bernard Lamarche

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Bernard Lamarche | Artists: Simon Émond

Adapted from a photographic book, the exhibition Phobos Deimos took the form of a labyrinth, in which Simon Émond evoked the figures of Fear and Terror, as well as that of the monster. The transition from the “invocatory cry” of the original project to an immersive experience of the images was a success, according to Bernard Lamarche. “We may emerge unscathed from [our encounter with the monster],” he writes, “or, as this exhibition did so well, it will swallow us.”

Jacynthe Carrier, du seuil à la cime – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier

Jacynthe Carrier’s works are among those that brush past us like a breath, according to Jean-Michel Quirion. Better still, he writes, they “reach out and softly embrace us” in his review of du seuil à la cime. The video and photographic installations that formed the exhibition revealed the life cycles animating an urban wasteland. Through the addition of performative actions, the artist renders it welcoming, turning it into a place to inhabit, where one can “make territory together.”

Julianknxx, Chorus in Rememory of Flight – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Julianknxx

The exhibition circulated by London’s Barbican Centre and seen by Sylvain Campeau in Lisbon reflected Julianknxx’s commitment to the African diaspora in Europe. Originally from Sierra Leone, the England-based artist explored, most notably in a monumental three-screen video, the presence of Black bodies in cities where racism remains latent. The result, described by the critic as “astounding,” asserted that the renewal of this population’s identity enriches society.

Skawennati, Welcome to the Dreamhouse – Julie Graff

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julie Graff | Artists: Skawennati

A key figure in media arts and cyberspace, Skawennati speculates on fairer futures more conducive to the flourishing of Indigenous people. The retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada presented her renowned machinimas and machinimagraphs (films and images related to virtual environments), as well as installations that, according to Julie Graff, allowed viewers to navigate between different degrees of realism. Organized around a theme with multiple meanings, the exhibition addressed both “the lack of Indigenous representation” and “colonial narratives of stasis and disappearance.”

Clara Gutsche, On Depicting the Immediate and the Enigmatic – Earl Miller

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Essays, Focus
Authors: Earl Miller | Artists: Clara Gutsche

As the recipient of a major award (the 2024 Scotiabank Photography Award), Clara Gutsche was the subject of a retrospective highlighting her interest in communities and architecture. In his essay based on his visit to The Image Centre, Earl Miller reviews each of the series on display and observes how age, the passing of the years, or “ the uncanny filter of skewed time”, as he writes, have shaped the artist.

WALKIE TALKIE, Photography Bogged Down in the Crevices of the Internet – Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés

[Winter 2026] Photography Bogged Down in the Crevices of the Internet by Alexis Desgagnés [EXCERPT] “Yo! We’re back with another episode of Walkie Talkie!” That’s how Paulie B, the nickname of the New York photographer and content creator Paul Baldonado, introduces the videos in his Walkie Talkie series. As I write this article, the series, […]

Andrew Jackson, Emotional Geography – Rose Henriquez

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Essays, Focus
Artists: Andrew Jackson

Invited by the McCord Stewart Museum to photograph a Montreal neighbourhood, his own, Andrew Jackson offers a sensitive portrait of the Black community of Little Burgundy. His gaze, as Rose Henriquez notes, aligns with theories on the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. In this way, Andrew Jackson gives each of his subjects “the possibility of appropriating how one is represented, choosing how and when to be seen.”

Sara Knelman, Lady Readers – Cheryl Simon, Sovereign Subjects

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Portfolios
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Sara Knelman

This unusual collection of hundreds of vernacular images, gathered by Sara Knelman, reflects the evolution of photographic techniques and the shifting place of women in society, juxtaposing leisure and lightness with more studious, professional attitudes. A true manifesto that frames reading as an act of women’s social empowerment, the book also invites a careful appreciation of images presented without commentary beyond the sparse notes on their backs.

Michel Campeau, Gestes et rituels de la chambre noire – Mona Hakim, An Affective Typology of Photographic Knowledge

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Michel Campeau

A studious scrutinizer and inveterate gleaner, Michel Campeau offers a series of photographs conceived as a typology of the gestures and rituals inherent to darkroom practice. The work of a practitioner who brings images of the past back to life, his book presents, often with a touch of humour, an archaeological gaze at an almost-obsolescent technology. For Mona Hakim, the project takes a humanist approach, highlighting the labour and inventiveness of people who have remained anonymous.

Christos Dikeakos, The Collectors – Karen Henry, Picturing West Coast Collections

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Portfolios
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Christos Dikeakos

Presented as a collectors’ collection, Christos Dikeakos’s portrait series reflects the richness and diversity of people who are engaged in and fervent about amassing works for the pleasure of living with them. The images, varied and sumptuous, immerse us in worlds manifestly shaped by passion. In her essay, Karen Henry shows how Dikeakos draws on an ecosystem that serves art, its preservation and its sharing.

Thematic presentation: Collecting

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christos Dikeakos, Michel Campeau, Sara Knelman

The thematic dossier of this issue, titled Collecting, brings together series by artists and a writer— Christos Dikeakos, Michel Campeau, and Sara Knelman. Their work invites readers to explore portraits of collectors, archival materials that pay tribute to darkroom practices, and a century of images depicting women reading, highlighting the significance of the gestures, forms of knowledge, and modes of engagement that shape and circulate culture.

Editorial: A Passion for Images

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christos Dikeakos, Michel Campeau, Sara Knelman

[Winter 2026] A Passion for Images by Jacques Doyon Each of the series presented in this issue bespeaks a passion for images. Assembled by artists and a writer – all of whom are both collectors, archivists, and documentarians – are portraits of British Columbian collectors of contemporary and Indigenous art, archival images that pay tribute […]

ABLAZE (did Rodin like chandeliers?), by Ewa Monika Zebrowski – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

[November 12 2025] By Michel Hardy-Vallée ABLAZE (did Rodin like chandeliers?), Ewa Monika Zebrowski How many dimensions are there to a sheet of paper? Because of its thinness, three feels excessive; but two also seems insufficient: how can a book have a third dimension if its pages only have two? Bookworms were likely pioneers of […]

MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain – Sylvain Campeau

Authors: Sylvain Campeau

Under the title “In Praise of the Missing Image,” MOMENTA Biennale de l’image explores silenced and forgotten narratives. In his overview of the event, Sylvain Campeau observes the powerful presence of the image, which joins forces with other forms of expression to affirm singular worlds. Read it here.

Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie – Jean-Michel Quirion

Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Ève Cadieux, Geoffrey James, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Kassandra Reynolds, Reno Salvail, Stéphane Duroy

Since 2009, the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie has stood out as a must-see event for art and culture lovers. For its 16th edition, running from July 15 to September 30, 2025, the festival unfolds across 11 sites along more than 500 km of territory under the theme of Passages. Each exhibition explores transitions, memory, and the traces left in landscapes and lives. Featured artists include Jocelyne Alloucherie, with HOBO, a contemplative film on invisible circulations; Stéphane Duroy, with Unknown, an evolving work on exile and the false promises of the American Dream; Ève Cadieux, who documents the remains of world’s fairs; Geoffrey James, revealing the overlooked zones of Canadian territory; Kassandra Reynolds, paying tribute to her horticulturist father; and a posthumous presentation of Reno Salvail’s I Became the Volcano, exploring cosmic and earthly forces. Between landscapes, memory, and transmission, photography becomes an art of passage.

Jeff Khonsary, Fillip, Image Index (2005–24) – An interview by Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Entrevues
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Jeff Khonsary

Dans cette entrevue, nous plongeons au cœur d’ Image Index (2004–25), un impressionnant répertoire visuel des éditions Fillip. Dirigé par Jeff Khonsary, le volume de 464 pages rassemble 778 images publiées sur vingt ans, accompagnées de légendes et notes bibliographiques. L’ouvrage dévoile l’évolution de Fillip, où texte et image dialoguent, et invite à repenser la manière dont nous lisons, voyons et comprenons la photographie et l’art contemporain.

Serge Tisseron, Le jour où j’ai tué mon frère – Christelle Proulx

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Readings
Authors: Christelle Proulx | Artists: Serge Tisseron

[Fall 2025] Le jour où j’ai tué mon frère by Christelle Proulx Marcillac-Vallon, Lamaindonne, 2025, 96 pages [EXCERPT] In this short book, Serge Tisseron reflects on memory, photography, and the generation of images by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including an anecdote in which he remembers his own past. Tisseron, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has […]

Bertrand Carrière, Tout ceci est impossible – Franck Michel

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Readings
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

[Fall 2025] Tout ceci est impossible by Franck Michel Montréal, Cinémathèque québécoise et Somme Toute, 2025, 312 pages [EXCERPT] Since his earliest days as a photographer, Bertrand Carrière has maintained a close relationship with cinema. He began his career as a set photographer and devoted his first book, Témoin de l’ombre (1995), to that craft. […]

Guy Delisle, Pour une fraction de seconde – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Readings
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Guy Delisle

[Fall 2025] Pour une fraction de seconde by Michel Hardy-Vallée Paris, Delcourt, 2024, 202 pages [EXCERPT] For a work to be called a photograph, it must contain at least one image. Add a second one and you have a comic strip. And with a third, you have a film if you make them scroll by […]

Leyla Majeri, Si tu ne te souviens pas, invente – Nathalie Côté

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Côté

[Fall 2025] Si tu ne te souviens pas, invente by Nathalie Côté VU, Québec 08.03.2025 — 20.04.2025 [EXCERPT] The installation that Leyla Majeri presented at VU stood out for her aesthetic, her approach, and her method. Composed of a montage of short film sequences and four abstract sepia-tone photographic series, the exhibition was the result […]

Léna Mill-Reuillard, Double Instantanéité – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Léna Mill-Reuillard

[Fall 2025] Double Instantanéité by Sylvain Campeau La Bande Vidéo, Québec 11.01.2025 — 9.02.2025 [EXCERPT] Anyone who has visited La Bande Vidéo will have noticed that its gallery is not very big. Once viewers enter, they are right on top of the works on display. This rapid immersion can be a pitfall: the artist must […]

Lorna Bauer, Sunday is Violet – Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Lorna Bauer

[Fall 2025] Sunday is Violet by Fanny Bieth Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal 27.02.2025 — 05.04.2025 [EXCERPT] Presented in the Montreal premises of Galerie Nicolas Robert, the exhibition Sunday is Violet featured a series of works made in 2024 by Lorna Bauer, who combines photography, sculpture, and installation in her practice. Flowers were central to the […]

Thomas Kneubühler, The Dividing Line – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler, Thomas Kneubühler

[Fall 2025] The Dividing Line by Sophie Mangado Optica – Centre d’art contemporain, Montréal 17.01.2025 — 29.03.2025 [EXCERPT] Thomas Kneubühler, a Swiss-born photographer and video artist living in Montreal, is interested in spaces to which access is limited. He designed the installation The Dividing Line to fit within one of the galleries at Optica. Immediately […]

Jeff Thomas, Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me – Sophie Guignard

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Guignard | Artists: Jeff Thomas

[Fall 2025] Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me by Sophie Guignard Galerie d’art d’Ottawa 19.10.2024 — 16.03.2025 [EXCERPT] The exhibition Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me: Jeff Thomas Origin surveyed forty years of images by Jeff Thomas, a member of the Onondaga Nation. Following a car accident in 1979, which left him with a permanent […]

1985. Image-Worlds – Hélène Samson

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Hélène Samson

[Fall 2025] 1985. Image-Worlds by Hélène Samson VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal 27.03.2025 — 21.06.2025 [EXCERPT] The VOX centre celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2025. This seemed a good opportunity to devote an exhibition to the decade in which it was born. More than seventy photographic and video works by thirty artists, along with […]

Laure Prouvost, Oma-je – Marcus Miller

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marcus Miller | Artists: Laure Prouvost

[Fall 2025] Oma-je by Marcus Miller PHI, Montréal 01.11.202 — 09.03.2025 [EXCERPT] Step into Laure Prouvost’s bohemian tea room and enjoy a “cuppa.” No pinkies-up here. This room, crowded with the detritus of departed loved ones, is at once claustrophobic, disorienting, and strangely familiar. Although it seems to be in a state of great disarray, […]

Sébastien Cliche, Fluctuation du semblable – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Sébastien Cliche

[Fall 2025] Fluctuation du semblable by Jean-Michel Quirion Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 18.01.2025 — 15.03.2025 [EXCERPT] In Fluctuation du semblable, a body of work presented in a solo exhibition at Occurrence, we were abruptly immersed by the Montreal artist Sébastien Cliche into the elsewhere of a speculative dehumanized society. The gallery, usually […]

Contemporary Photography in Poland – Amélie Laurence Fortin

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Essays, Focus
Authors: Amélie Laurence Fortin

[Fall 2025] A Pink Cloud in a Grey Sky by Amélie Laurence Fortin [EXCERPT] “Our choices are not neutral; we are as vulnerable and sensitive to the effects of images as anyone else.” — Kamila Bondar and Łukasz Rusznica Introduced by a short wall text on the challenge of subjectivity and the importance of looking, […]

Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Luminous Imprints – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Essays, Focus
Authors: Pierre Dessureault

[Fall 2025] Luminous Imprints by Pierre Dessureault [EXCERPT] Since 1994, Marie-Jeanne Musiol has been engaged in a unique exploration of the porous borders between how science and art represent nature. Most of the images in the exhibition I See Stars in the Deep Dark were from the series Bodies of Light and were made between […]

AI and Humanity – Jessica Ragazzini

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Essays, Focus
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini

[Fall 2025] AI and Humanity: Toward a New World of Poetics by Jessica Ragazzini [EXCERPT] In all subjectivity: The world according to AI is a brilliant but paradoxical exhibition – it claims to scrutinize AI while it exposes, above all, human fears of being surpassed, copied, or rendered obsolete. What I perceive is a humanity […]

Frédéric Lavoie, De visu ⎻ Josianne Poirier, Records of Encounters with the Living

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Portfolios
Authors: Josianne Poirier | Artists: Frédéric Lavoie

Frédéric Lavoie explores the plant world as a living ecosystem through projections and image notebooks, blending observation with naturalistic inventories.

Sara A.Tremblay, Poids, plumes ⎻ Charlotte Lalou Rousseau, Clearing Away the Rocks

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Portfolios
Authors: Charlotte Lalou Rousseau | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay

With Poids, plumes, Sara A. Tremblay explores intimacy, nature, and grief through photography, performance, and installation, navigating the cycles of life and regeneration.

Sara Angelucci, Nocturnal Botanical ⎻ Sara Knelman, Pure Beads of Life

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Portfolios
Authors: Sara Knelman | Artists: Sara Angelucci

Sara Angelucci plonge au cœur du végétal avec des compositions vibrantes qui célèbrent la vie, explorant botanique, écologie et relation sensorielle au monde après le deuil.

Thematic presentation: Plants and Gardens

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Frédéric Lavoie, Sara A. Tremblay, Sara Angelucci

An artistic exploration of the plant world through photography and the close observation of gardens, plants, and ecosystems, highlighting the relationship between nature, ecology, and human experience.”

Editorial: Listening to the living

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Frédéric Lavoie, Sara A. Tremblay, Sara Angelucci

[Fall 2025] Editorial by Jacques Doyon In this issue, the plant world is under attentive investigation. Garden flowers and plants, and the terrains and territories around them, are examined, studied, recorded, sometimes manipulated, in an attempt to capture the living microcosm that they are home to. Fruits, flowers, leaves, and branches – and insects, fungi, […]

Ciel variable 130 – Plants and Gardens

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS

Issue 130: an artistic and sensory exploration of the plant world, blending observation, ecology, and poetic quest, through the works of Sara Angelucci, Sara A. Tremblay, and Frédéric Lavoie.

Éric Desmarais, Caught Up in the System – An interview by Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Entrevues
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Eric Desmarais

[Summer 2025] Caught Up in the System Éric Desmarais interviewed by Jean Gagnon [EXCERPT] In botanical science, a sporobolus is a drought­tolerant grass with long, dense leaves. In art, it refers to Sporobole, an artist-run centre in Sher­brooke, Quebec. Rooted in its city and region for more than fifty years, first as the Regroupement des […]

Danièle Méaux, Quand la photographie pense la forêt – Claire Moeder

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Danièle Méaux

[Summer 2025] Danièle Méaux, Quand la photographie pense la forêt by Claire Moeder [EXCERPT] In today’s crisis situation, forests are being reshaped or destroyed, subjected to drastic human interventions and major catastrophes, and so a book on the relationship between photography and forests bears the promise of linking art to an exigent reality. In Quand […]

Reno Salvail, Je suis devenu le volcan – Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Reno Salvail

[Summer 2025] Je suis devenu le volcan by Reno Salvail [EXCERPT] Je suis devenu le volcan is a unique object that can’t be categorized easily. It is part artist book, part retrospective monograph. It alternates, literally, between photographs and contact sheets by Reno Salvail (1947–2023) and analyses, neither solely descriptive nor purely poetic, written by […]

Agence Stock Photo – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Readings
Authors: Sophie Bertrand, Sophie Mangado

[Summer 2025] Agence Stock Photo by Sophie Mangado [EXCERPT] In 1987, Robert Fréchette, Jean-François LeBlanc, and Martin Roy founded Agence Stock Photo in Montreal. The three shared a humanist vision of documentary photography and wanted to stay indepen­dent of the large press groups; they took inspiration from agencies such as Magnum and VU. Over Stock’s […]

Linda Rutenberg, Traces: Earth’s Memories – Christian Roy

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Linda Rutenberg

[Summer 2025] Traces: Earth’s Memories by Christian Roy [EXCERPT] Montreal photographer Linda Rutenberg’s exhibition Traces surveyed the second half of her thirty-year career, juxtaposing three bodies of work related to the theme of fragile traces of threatened environments, whether they be natural, cultural, or a combination of the two. The instal­lation that viewers reached after […]

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions – Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Janis Rafa

[Summer 2025] Landscape Depressions by Marie Perrault [EXCERPT] Janis Rafa, a Greek-born artist based in Amsterdam, is known for her multimedia installations, sculptures, drawings, and films. This exhibition featured a selection of video works from the last ten years that foreground relationships between humans and animals. Pointing her camera toward the spaces where these relationships […]

Chantal Akerman, Travelling – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Chantal Akerman

[Summer 2025] Travelling by Stephen Horne [EXCERPT] The exhibition Travelling presented the practice and life of the acclaimed experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015), for whom a film was a place to be brought into being, a precarious and personal journey toward the visible. To this end, starting in the 1990s, she began to show her […]

Antoine d’Agata, Methode – Jessica Ragazzini

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini

[Summer 2025] Methode by Jessica Ragazzini [EXCERPT] During his residency-exhibition Méthode, Antoine d’Agata invited visitors to the Centre Pompidou to enter the complex, raw world of his photographic practice. For a hundred days, he transformed one of the museum’s galleries into an open studio in which he had amassed three decades of archives, visual narratives, […]

Faits divers – Julie Martin

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julie Martin

[Summer 2025] Faits divers by Julie Martin [EXCERPT] Considered a minor form of news, often replete with sordid situations, faits divers (weird local news items) lure and fasci­nate as much as they draw repugnance and contempt. Although this ambivalence is key to how we think of such content, the artists gathered at the MAC VAL […]

My-Van Dam, Connecting From the Inside Out – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion

[Summer 2025] Connecting From the Inside Out by Jean-Michel Quirion [EXCERPT] The multidisciplinary artist My-Van Dam’s exhibition Connecting From the Inside Out, presented at MAI in fall 2024 and curated by Geneviève Wallen, evinces striking fragility. During an intensive month-long research-creation residency at SBC Galerie d’art contemporain in summer 2023 (with support from Atelier circulaire […]

August Sander, Sander Sardinia 1927 – Kenneth Hayes

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: August Sander

[Summer 2025] Sander Sardinia 1927 by Kenneth Hayes [EXCERPT] This tightly focused exhibition presents photographs that August Sander made on his little-known journey to Sardinia in the spring of 1927, just prior to the debut of the presentation of his life-work, The People of the 20th Century, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, in Cologne, later that […]

Michaëlle Sergile, To All the Unnamed Women – Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Michaëlle Sergile

[Summer 2025] To All the Unnamed Women by Érika Nimis [EXCERPT] The McCord Stewart Museum’s Artist­- in-Residence program, launched in 2012, invites artists to immerse themselves in the museum’s collections, including the Notman Photographic Archives, in order to form new interpretations of them. In 2023, Karen Tam produced the immersive installation Swallowing Mountains, paying tribute […]

Hybridity in Action – Florence Le Blanc

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Florence Le Blanc

[Summer 2025] Hybridity in Action by Florence Le Blanc [EXCERPT] Although interactions between photography and animation have evolved since the early twentieth century, recent upheavals in the media world (digital era, social networks, artificial intelligence, and so on) are forcing us to revise how we view images and to realize that reciprocity between the two […]

View from the Sidewalk – Stephanie Hornstein

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Clara Gutsche, Normand Rajotte, William Notman

[Summer 2025] View from the Sidewalk by Stephanie Hornstein [EXCERPT] Few people have meaningfully transformed the way that I perceive the city around me. One was a graffiti artist friend who took me beneath the Ville-Marie overpass and taught me how to decipher the bubble letters and flourishes that form the signatures of Montreal’s most […]

The Age of Plants – Bénédicte Ramade

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade

[Summer 2025] The Age of Plants by Bénédicte Ramade [EXCERPT] With the exhibition Science/Fiction, une non-histoire des Plantes, the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris bore witness to the turn toward plants that has been shaking up the cultural world for a decade, overturning general preconceptions regarding this realm of the living world. Inspired […]

Ed Pien, Presente: Pasado/Futuro – Bernard Schütze, Shaping the Contours of time

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Ed Pien

[Summer 2025] Shaping the Contours of time by Bernard Schütze [EXCERPT] The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. – Rainer Maria Rilke In his two-volume artist book, Presente: Pasado/Futuro, Ed Pien sets out part of a broader ongoing project in which he explores notions of time […]

Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Kiss Landing – Fanny Bieth, Photography as a Talisman

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Fatine-Violette Sabiri

[Summer 2025] Photography as a Talisman by Fanny Bieth Fatine-Violette Sabiri is a multidisciplinary artist whose media include photography, textile arts, and installation. Her book Kiss Landing, published in 2024,1 brings together almost two hundred photographs taken in Casablanca, where Sabrini was born, and in Montreal, where she lives and works. Produced over a ten-year […]

Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Architecture of the Self ⎻ Érika Nimis, Feeling and Listening to Images

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Mallory Lowe Mpoka

[Summer 2025] Feeling and Listening to Images by Érika Nimis [EXCERPT] By combining photography and textiles, the Cameroonian-Belgian artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka weaves visual stories that explore the blurred boundaries of identity and belonging. She focuses on the way in which an individual may navigate in multiple spaces, constantly redefining what it means to be […]

Thematic presentation: From Continent to Continent

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ed Pien, Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Mallory Lowe Mpoka

Recent news has brought us three artist’s books rooted in a search for identity grounded in duality, encounter, and the passage of memory.

Editorial: Tracing Identities Constructed through Time

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ed Pien, Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Mallory Lowe Mpoka

[Summer 2025] Editorial by Jacques Doyon The three artist books featured in this issue were founded on a quest for identity rooted in duality, encounter, and memory. They bear testament to a search for self, built from life sto­ries, diasporic links, transmission of heritages. Photographic portraits and self-portraits are central to these illustrated narratives that […]

Ciel variable 129 – From Continent to Continent

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT

[Summer 2025] Entitled From Continent to Continent, the thematic dossier highlights the books of three artists — Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Ed Pien — whose photographic projects explore questions of identity through portraiture and self-portraiture, in an intimate journey across continents, cultures, and personal histories. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES

Art Souterrain – Jérôme Delgado

Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Andrew Rovenko, Barbara Iweins, Blandine Soulage, Caroline Hayeur, Caroline Monnet, Celine Lecomte, Éloi Perreault, Geneviève Thibault, Isabelle Hayeur, Jacynthe Carrier, Jeanne Castonguay-Carrière

For its 17th edition, the Art Souterrain festival has explored our habitats — whether real or mental, intimate or environmental. With photography featured extensively, the festival paints a global portrait that is not always positive but remains tinged with hope. Read here what we thought about it.

Ciel variable 128 – Change of Scene

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE

The thematic dossier of issue 128 presents recent works by Geoffrey James, Louie Palu and Jinyoung Kim which highlight a feeling of disorientation and relative strangeness evoked by the exploration of different aspects of Canadian reality.

Éric Desmarais, Sporobole: A Canary in the Technological Mine – An interview by Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Entrevues
Artists: Jean Gagnon

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating the creative process, the artist-run center Sporobole, whose expertise encompasses digital realities, advocates for an active and pragmatic stance, “neither technophilic nor technophobic.” In an interview, its director, Éric Desmarais, comments on the role of art and copyright in a context where AI would be in control.

Soлomiya no. 3 – Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Readings
Artists: Érika Nimis

A magazine founded in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Soлomiya addresses a diversity of issues through texts and photography. After reviewing the third issue (2024), Érika Nimis notes that “a tone ranging from hard-hitting articles on the emergency to in-depth reflections on the many challenges raised by the war.”

Sites of Photographic Knowledge – Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Readings
Authors: Sophie Bertrand

Taking stock of photography, its themes, its networks, and its perspectives—that’s the aim of a research group called Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique. After eight years of existence, its reflection sessions have resulted in seven books.

Paolo Roversi – Ewa Monika Zebrowski

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ewa Monika Zebrowski | Artists: Paolo Roversi

In her first piece of writing, photographer Ewa Monika Zebrowski reflects on the work of Paolo Roversi, whose retrospective she attended. The exhibition celebrated the experimentation of this fashion and portrait photographer skilled in the techniques of Polaroid.

Yann Pocreau, Des images-lumière – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Yann Pocreau

The second iteration of a project on color and light, Yann Pocreau’s exhibition at the Centre Sagamie took the form of a collection of photographic, cinematic and expographical atmospheres. The content was not the result of taking photographs, but of collecting found images and intervening on them in various ways.

Ewa Monika Zebrowski and Anna Lois Dawson Harrington, Light and Fog – Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Anna Lois Dawson Harrington, Ewa Monika Zebrowski

The encounter between nature and culture, inherent to the Reford Gardens, resonated in the exhibition Light and Fog. Curator Hélène Samson used the representation of the landscape to create an encounter between two eras, between the photography of Ewa Monika Zebrowski and the watercolors of Anna Dawson and Lois Harrington.

Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse is known for his use of technologies originally designed for non-artistic purposes. For his project in the Amazon, he used a device that reproduces the thermal signature of the human body, aiming this time to capture natural ecosystems. While he imitates companies seeking to exploit land, the Irish artist does so in order to denounce them.

Sandra Brewster, Lullaby of Birdlands – Earl Miller

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Earl Miller | Artists: Sandra Brewster

For the exhibition Lullaby of Birdland, Sandra Brewster presented images printed by gel transfer. This technique, specific to analog photography, involves a number of imperfections that the artist accentuated by crumpling the paper and giving it an illusion of wear.

Thomas Struth, Nature & Politics – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth’s exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery brought together photographs from the last fifteen years, including those from his visits to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a place marked by the measurement of time.

Thematic presentation: Change of Scene

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Thematic presentation for Ciel variable 128: Change of Scene.

Geoffrey James, Canadian Photographs – Kenneth Hayes, A Weakness for Places

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James’s Canadian Photographs offer a paradoxical perspective on the vast country that is Canada. Cities and landscapes appear torn between a not always glorious past and an uncertain future.

Louie Palu, Distant Early Warning – Jill Glessing, The New Battle Lines: Images from the Arctic

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Louie Palu

Louie Palu has traveled to the Canadian Arctic several times, a part of the country whose strategic importance is well known, yet largely inaccessible to most of us due to its inhospitable nature. From his travels, Palu has created a critical project on the militarization of this territory.

Editorial: Elsewhere as Here

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Editorial by Jacques Doyon for Ciel variable no. 128, on the idea of a change of scene.

Jinyoung Kim, Here – Gabrielle Sarthou, Uprooted, Taking Root

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Jinyoung Kim

Jinyoung Kim’s journey is one of emigration, from South Korea to Canada. Although the places are briefly mentioned, it is the very idea of displacement, and the upheavals associated with such uprooting, that forms the core of his works.

Woman, Life, Freedom: Resistance through Images – Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays, Focus
Authors: Claudia Polledri

Conceived by two Le Monde journalists, Tu ne meurs pas gives a key role to images in the political resistance being waged by the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Claudia Polledri’s essay describes the context behind the uprising unfolding both in the streets and on social media, and invokes the concept of “citizen journalism” to assess amateur images not by their aesthetic value but by their informational significance.

Michael Torosian, Bound Greatness – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Michael Torosian

On the occasion of the summer 2024 exhibition paying tribute to the publishing work of Toronto-based Michael Torosian, Michel Hardy-Vallée takes a look at some of the books he has devoted to photography. The Lumiere Press titles, which focus on eminent photographers, are deeply rooted, he notes, within a broader print culture, as Torosian placed great importance on aspects such as image reproduction, typography, presswork, and bookbinding.

Marlene Creates, Territory, Memory, Language – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Marlene Creates

In this text dedicated to Marlene Creates, Pierre Dessureault explores forty years of image-making in which territory, memory and language intertwine. The Newfoundland artist, whose early work is rooted in the tradition of land art, has never ceased to draw inspiration from her experiences of nature.

Virginie Laganière, Le silence des murs – Esther Bourdages

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Esther Bourdages | Artists: Virginie Laganière

Virginie Laganière’s exhibition at Occurrence revisited the “silence of the walls,” inspired by an old nuclear power plant in Switzerland that has been converted into a storage facility for cultural goods belonging to museum institutions.

Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, A Book – and an Award – Sophie Mangado

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Entrevues
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Charles-Frédérick Ouellet

In this interview, conducted in the wake of two pieces of news concerning him (the publication of a book and the receiving of a prestigious award), Charles-Frédérick Ouellet talks about the backstory of the image honoured by the World Press Photo jury and about the approach behind his projects.

Maxence Croteau, L’infime (codex) – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Readings
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Maxence Croteau

In L’infime (codex), a single-copy volume, Maxence Croteau photographed one image of each of the books in a university library on every single shelf. The exhaustiveness of his approach effaces the hierarchy of the gaze, Hardy-Vallée believes, but its materiality is its most interesting aspect.

Isabelle Bonnet et Sophie Hackett, Casa Susanna – Dayna McLeod

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Readings
Authors: Dayna McLeod

The book Casa Susanna, and the photography exhibition that it accompanied, looked back at an unusual celebration of femininity that took place in New York State in the 1960s: that of a community of transvestite men, trans women, and non-gender-conforming people.

Nathalie Bujold, Métroscopies – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Campeau | Artists: Nathalie Bujold

Flowing from the video recording of the Montreal metro that Nathalie Bujold made as she rode, equipped only with her cell phone, the exhibition Métroscopies comprises eleven screens that convey both unity and diversity.

Josée Pedneault, Talle – Laurie Boivin

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Laurie Boivin | Artists: Josée Pedneault

A meditative, almost wondrous experience, in Laurie Boivin’s view, the exhibition Talle immersed viewers in the underbrush of the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region. In works produced during photographic missions developed by Les Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, Josée Pedneault joined people picking berries in secret spots where wild fruits grow in abundance.

Simon S. Belleau, Répliques – Jean-Michel Quirion

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Simon S. Belleau

Montreal artist Simon S. Belleau’s most important exhibition in his decade-long career, Répliques, combined a film, works on paper, and an architectural intervention. Ambitious and spectacular, in the view of Jean-Michel Quirion, Belleau’s offering evoked the work in preparation or backstage in a theatre or film set, by paying attention to what is made visible and what is hidden.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente et Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Foreign in a Domestic Sense – Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Reflecting the political and identity-related ambiguity of Puerto Rico, the artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo produced a four-channel video installation, shot in Florida among members of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

De la vie au lit – Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth

Unlike what capitalist customs would have us believe, beds are not made simply for rest with a view to better productivity on the job. As the exhibition De la vie au lit advocates, a bed can also be a space for creation, discussion, or action – a place where people with disabilities or illnesses express themselves. The works on display addressed the question of inclusivity and urged us to rethink our spaces and our practices.

Jeremy Shaw, Phase Shifting Index – Marie Perrault

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Jeremy Shaw

Phase Shifting Index, Jeremy Shaw’s seven-channel video installation illustrating how physical and collective rituals influence minds is so impactful that viewers may experience profound illumination, as Marie Perrault suggests. From the initial cacophony to the final rave, the work is the spectacular outcome of Shaw’s twenty years of research into sublimation and its cognitive effects.

Suzanne Lafont, Et toi, chère plante ? – Nathalie Côté

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Côté | Artists: Suzanne Lafont

Far from the herbarium and botanical identification, the images that Suzanne Lafont produces from the wildflowers and weeds that she gathers comprise an exploration of colour and relationships between the visual and the written. Following in the tradition of conceptual art, as Nathalie Côté notes, Lafont manipulates her photographs to obtain surreal results, even as she evokes our connections with nature in a myriad of ways.

Eric Tschaeppeler, Birth Order – Michel Hellman

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hellman | Artists: Eric Tschaeppeler

The order in which children are born plays a fundamental role in the construction of their identity. This notion is behind Eric Tschaeppeler’s series of portraits of siblings titled Birth Order. When Michel Hellman saw the exhibition, he appreciated the absence of artifice and was struck by the composition and intimate nature of the images.