[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 documents and artefacts, were gathered to answer the question posed by the curator and the centre’s executive director, Marie J. Jean: “What impact did the 1980s make in today’s world?” The works in 1985. Image-Worlds were unearthed through research with artists and in collections, notably those of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Cinémathèque Québécoise, and the National Film Board. Given the historiographic challenge, the show offered an eclectic profusion of works; it was difficult to find a narrative line, as the artists’ propositions went in all directions.
The exhibition began in a sort of vestibule whose walls were papered with newspaper clippings. Sound archives brought to mind the sociopolitical demands of an era marked by high youth unemployment, and on a screen was a recapitulation, in photographs and texts, of VOX’s evolution since its foundation in 1985. The tone was set from the start: by rendering the political climate of the period – the premise posed here – images helped to shape a world. However, the powerful, unequivocal impetus of this introduction was lost elsewhere, for instance in the self-reflexive and enigmatic photographic series by Raymonde April and Moyra Davey. Nor did it make a forceful return anywhere in the exhibition, except in a few videos and in the photographs of Jana Sterbak, Lynne Cohen, Dominique Blain, and Donigan Cumming.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: 1985. Image-Worlds]
Hélène Samson, who holds a doctorate from the Université de Montréal, retired from the McCord Stewart Museum, where she had been curator of photography since 2006, in 2022. She organized numerous photography exhibitions, including Notman, a Visionary Photographer (2016–17), Alexander Henderson – Art and Nature (2022–23), and others on contemporary Quebec photographers. She has published books on William Notman and Henderson and contributed to national and international magazines. Currently, she is working as an independent curator and associate researcher with the McCord Stewart Museum.