Archives

Myriam Yates, Parcs. Playgrounds — Josianne Poirier

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Josianne Poirier | Artists: Myriam Yates

[Summer 2022] By Josianne Poirier Optica, Montréal 6.11.2021 — 18.12.2021 [Excerpt] For the series of photographs and videos comprising the exhibition Parcs. Playgrounds, Myriam Yates aimed her camera at deserted playgrounds. The facilities that she documented in different New York neighbourhoods in 2018 nevertheless bear the traces of past use and suggest bodies in gymnastic […]

Sorel Cohen, Métaphores conceptuelles — Johanne Sloan

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Johanne Sloan | Artists: Sorel Cohen

[Summer 2022] By Johanne Sloan VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal 18.11.2021 — 19.02.2022 [Excerpt] The wit, energy, and experimental spirit of Sorel Cohen’s work is as inspiring as ever in an exhibition at VOX, which brings together selected pieces from the 1970s to the 2000s. Cohen’s art practice flourished at the intersection of […]

Emmanuel Galland, « Mes Dates / Close Friends » — Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Emmanuel Galland

[Summer 2022] By Sophie Bertrand HANGAR 7826, Montréal 6.11.2021 — 28.11.2021 [Excerpt] Max, Brad, Tyler, John, Diego, Erik. These disembodied names, crowded together on the walls of the small gallery HANGAR 7826, wordlessly welcome us to the most recent exhibition by Emmanuel Galland, « Mes Dates / Close Friends ». At first glance, the grouping […]

Taysir Batniji, Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Taysir Batniji

[Summer 2022] By Érika Nimis MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine 6.06.2021 — 9.01.2022 [Excerpt] The Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne devoted a solo exhibition to Taysir Batniji, retracing with rare coherence more than twenty-five years of his art career in some fifty works: paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, performances. Born in Gaza […]

Taysir Batniji, Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews

[Été 2022] Par Daniel Roy MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine 6.06.2021 — 9.01.2022 [Extrait]

Sanaz Sohrabi, Hiding in Plain Sight: Archives of Oil — Emmanuelle Choquette

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Sanaz Sohrabi

[Summer 2022] By Emmanuelle Choquette Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark, Montréal 28.10.2021 — 27.11.2021 [Excerpt] In her practice, Sanaz Sohrabi probes the political structure, the trajectory, and the circulation of the image. She addresses these issues through the prism of the archive as site of representation and as tool of construction of dominant narratives. […]

Michel Boulanger, Dans ces rangs de lignes pressées — Daniel Roy

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Roy | Artists: Michel Boulanger

[Summer 2022] By Daniel Roy Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 14.01.2022 — 19.02.2022 [Excerpt] Through his art practice, Michel Boulanger has developed a specific interest in industrial technologies and how they transform the agrarian landscape. His most recent animation video, Dans ces rangs de lignes pressées, presented at Occurrence, portrays the anxieties and […]

Luther Konadu, Portraiture en gestuelles — Nicolas Mavrikakis

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Luther Konadu

[Summer 2022] By Nicolas Mavrikakis SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal 4.11.2021 — 18.12.2021 [Excerpt] Whatever one might do or say, many people continue to see photography as having an aura of truth. Its authoritative status with regard to the potential to capture reality, a historical construction inherited from the nineteenth century, is a persistent cliché. […]

Michel Saint-Jean. When Documentary Takes a Side— Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault

[Summer 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] In the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec was experiencing a radical revision of all kinds of models that had previously been seen as immutable. This major transformation swept away obsolete institutions and fossilized ways of thinking inherited from the Great Darkness of the Duplessis period and laid claim to a […]

Terror Contagion. Surveilling the Surveillance — Edward Pérez-González

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González

[Summer 2022] By Edward Pérez-González [Excerpt] It was with my head full of the rave reviews I’d read in the local press – “a show that sends shivers down your spine,” “a blood-curdling exhibition” – that I went to the temporary site of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), in Place Ville Marie, to […]

Prospectus for a Future History of Quebec Photography — Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée

[Summer 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] When we try to reach a better understanding of the history of photography in Quebec, we inevitably stumble into three common areas. The ﬁrst is absence: so, where is this reference book that everyone’s waiting for and no one has written yet? And yet, there are books on the […]

Meryl Mcmaster, As Immense as the Sky — Lori Beavis, The Beginning of Something New

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Lori Beavis | Artists: Meryl McMaster

[Summer 2022] By Lori Beavis [Excerpt] I want to plunge into the storage space where Meryl McMaster stores the habiliments that she has created for her performative photographic practice. While there I could closely investigate the cloaks, patterned coats, feathered armbands, hand wraps, plumed plant material, and bird-festooned headwear. Over the past fifteen years, McMaster […]

Jeff Thomas, Indians on Tour — Carolyn Hickey, The Indigenous Map Maker’s Room

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Carolyn Hickey | Artists: Jeff Thomas

[Summer 2022] An interview conducted by Carolyn Hickey [Extrait] The exhibition The Indigenous Map Maker’s Room at the Latcham Art Centre1 resurfaced Jeff Thomas’s series Indians on Tour, which he began some twenty years ago. The series has continued to evolve and has generated other, parallel series. In this interview conducted by Carolyn Hickey, the […]

Dana Claxton, Portraits & Regalia — Skeena Reece, It’s Love or a Photograph

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Skeena Reece | Artists: Dana Claxton

[Summer 2022] It’s Love or a Photograph – Depends on How You See It By Skeena Reece [Excerpt] The Mustang Suite is a series about more than mobility. Though that’s a great place to start, to introduce you to Dana Claxton’s works; images that include literal modes of transportation are a part of the photographs’ […]

Figures of Affirmation

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Artists: Dana Claxton, Jeff Thomas, Meryl McMaster

[Summer 2022] Indigenous culture has long been oppressed in this country, but strong proud voices are now speaking out in public and are increasingly being heard. Here, we present three of these voices: they stand out for their use of photography as a central vehicle of their approach. Together, they oﬀer a renewed vision of […]

Visible Everywhere

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Dana Claxton, Jeff Thomas, Meryl McMaster

[Summer 2022] By Jacques Doyon Indigenous peoples have been conﬁned to reservations, cut off from their ancestral lands, subjected to forced assimilation in schools, and had their status denied as Métis or urban residents. They have been forbidden to display the signs of their cultures and were long condemned to invisibility. But the situation is […]

Ciel variable 120 – Figures of Affirmation

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION

[Summer 2022]

Indigenous culture has long been oppressed in this country, but strong proud voices are now speaking out in public and are increasingly being heard. Here, we present three of these voices: they stand out for their use of photography as a central vehicle of their approach. Together, they offer a renewed vision of Indigenous identity, drawing on both tradition and contemporary realities and stamping a presence everywhere in the territory.

Gregory Halpern, ZZYZX – Louis Perreault

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Gregory Halpern

May 18, 2022 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — In the photography world, the book continues to play an essential role of dissemination. Yet, beyond simply being a tool for promotion of a photographer’s work, the book is seen by many as a creative space on its own…

William A. Ewing, Photographs Are the Eyes of Our Civilization — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, William E. Ewing | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Francesco Zizola, Olivier Christinat

[Winter 2022] An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] Author, exhibition curator, professor, and longtime director of the Musée de l’Élysée (1996– 2010), in Lausanne, William A. Ewing began his career in Montreal; he was the founder of Optica, which he directed from 1972 to 1977. Ewing has been exploring the field of photography for some […]

Valérian Mazataud, liwa mairin, la femme de l’eau — Serge Allaire

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: Serge Allaire

[Winter 2022] Montréal, à compte d’auteur, 2021, non paginé By Serge Allaire [Excerpt] Valérian Mazataud’s most recent work takes us on an adventure to the island of Bobel, a huge rock rising out of the Caribbean Sea fifty kilometres off the coast of La Mosquita, one of the last untouched regions on the planet. The […]

Anne-Marie Proulx, Le Jardin d’après — Élisabeth Recurt

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: Élisabeth Recurt | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx

[Winter 2022] Paris, Éditions Loco, 2021, 192 p. By Élisabeth Recurt [Excerpt] Freely inspired by a novel by Anne Hébert,1 Anne-Marie Proulx’s photobook is composed of 125 black-and-white and colour photographs (taken on a 35 mm analogue camera and a cell phone), lines from plays (spoken by the protagonist of the novel, Flora Fontanges), and […]

Martin Désilets — Yannick Marcoux

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Yannick Marcoux | Artists: Martin Désilets

[Winter 2022] Les tableaux réunis Musée d’art de Joliette 19.06.2021— 6.09.2021 By Yannick Marcoux [Excerpt] In a poem in his L’art poétique, Nicolas Boileau made a suggestion that has become famous: “Put your work twenty times on the anvil.” It seems that twenty times is not enough for the artist Martin Désilets, who, since 2017, […]

Carlos Ferrand Zavala — Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Carlos Ferrand Zavala

[Winter 2022] SBC, galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal 4.09.2021 — 23.10.2021 By Alexis Desgagnés [Excerpt] Peruvian-born Montreal artist Carlos Ferrand Zavala, recipient of the Bourse de carrière Michel-Brault from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec in 2015, is known mainly as a director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. Among his latest films are 13, un […]

Catherine Bodmer — Emmanuelle Choquette

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Catherine Bodmer

[Winter 2022] Galerie B-312, Montréal 7.05.2021 — 23.06.2021 By Emmanuelle Choquette [Excerpt] The exhibition Synonymes is an outcome of Catherine Bodmer’s long-term research conducted during residencies in Mexico City between 2010 and 2018. Pairing photography and text, the body of work on display in Galerie B-312’s two exhibition spaces addresses Bodmer’s relationship, developed over time, […]

Françoise Sullivan — Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Françoise Sullivan

[Winter 2022] Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal 14.05.2021 — 16.07.2021 By Didier Morelli [Excerpt] Even in her nineties, the seminal Quebec interdisciplinary artist Françoise Sullivan never ceases to inspire. Françoise Sullivan: The 1970s, organized by the Galerie de l’UQAM, delves into her experimentation five decades ago, with particular attention to her time in Italy. Filmed and […]

Lorenza Böttner — Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Lorenza Böttner

[Winter 2022] Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montréal 29.04.2021 — 19.06.2021 By Fanny Bieth [Excerpt] Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm is the first international retrospective exhibition for the Chilean-German artist Lorenza Böttner, a trans person who lost both arms as a child following an accident. Böttner’s practice and life embody, to use the words […]

Dawit L. Petros — Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Dawit L. Petros

[Winter 2022] Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal 3.09.2021 — 30.10.2021 By Claudia Polledri [Excerpt] Gaps, holes, fissures, and frictions – the title defines the perimeter of the exhibition by Eritrean artist Dawit L. Petros, presented as part of the Momenta 2021 satellite program. In this show, composed of photographs and serigraphs on paper and canvas, Petros, […]

Sylvie Readman, Denis Rioux — Mona Hakim

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Denis Rioux, Sylvie Readman

[Winter 2022] Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal 8.09.2021 — 9.10.2021 By Mona Hakim [Excerpt] Presented in a single exhibition space and arranged facing each other, the photographs of Sylvie Readman and Denis Rioux highlight their common concern with the issues and properties of the photographic language within which the primary conditions of the visual and conceptual experience […]

Dawoud Bey — Ariane Noël de Tilly

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Dawoud Bey

[Winter 2022] Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 17.04.2021 — 3.10.2021 By Ariane Noël de Tilly [Excerpt] Since the very inception of his photographic career, Dawoud Bey has pointed his lens toward people and, especially, marginalized communities. The retrospective of his work presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art highlighted the ethical dimension […]

James Coleman, What Goes Around Comes Around — Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Coleman

[Winter 2022] By Stephen Horne “A being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past two footprints perpetually obliterating one another toe to heel, heel to toe.” – W. B. YEATS 1 [Excerpt] James Coleman´s complex cinematic installations disclose the beauty and pleasure of “looking.” The aesthetic experience to which I refer […]

Errance Sans Retour, “They also killed my father” — Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Renaud Philippe

[Winter 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] “We are not in front of the images; we are in the middle of them. Like they are in the middle of us. The question is how we circulate among them, how we make them circulate.”1 The life of images, constantly relaunched in various presentation contexts, is core to […]

Et fili ? Cultural Transmission and the Quebec Photobook — Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx, Bertrand Carrière, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, Donigan Cumming, Florence Le Blanc, Guillaume Simoneau, John Max, Matthieu Brouillard, Michel Campeau, Sylvain Cousineau

[Hiver 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] It’s a lovely image: my father, who had been taking photographs since the 1960s, had given me his Beseler 23C II enlarger. I went to pick it up in order to flesh out my amateur darkroom, and I was thinking about transmission of culture. The caption might have quoted […]

Andreas Rutkauskas, Refuge: After the Fire — Franck Michel, The Resilience of Landscapes

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas

[Winter 2022] By Franck Michel The landscape enwraps, penetrates, it is not before one as an object. . . . It is an atmosphere, a sensory halo, and not simply a visual through-line. – DAVID LE BRETON [Excerpt] The history of landscape photography offers an incomparable source of information on the evolution of territories […]

Thomas Kneubühler, Alpine Signals — Louis Perreault, Without Data Loss

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler

[Winter 2022] By Louis Perreault [Excerpt] In the first photograph in Alpine Signals, the immaculate white of a horse’s mane offers a reminder of the clouds that overhang the distant mountains. The blue sky spreads above the shrubs positioned in the centre of the composition, which pick up the colour of the verdant nature in […]

Geneviève Chevalier, Mirement/Towering : La Ménagerie et L’Herbier — Sylvain Campeau, Arranging the Living

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier

[Winter 2022] By Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] Over the last few years, artist Geneviève Chevalier has become interested in places and methods of classification used in the natural sciences to inventory and analyze ﬂora and fauna. Menageries were, in a way, the ancestors of museums. They contained both collections and live exotic animals, but as an […]

Against Nature

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Geneviève Chevalier, Thomas Kneubühler

[Winter 2022] The title might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying that its fate […]

Against Nature?

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2022] Par Jacques Doyon The title might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying […]

Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE

Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE

[Winter 2022]

The title Against Nature might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying that its fate is entirely in our hands.

Marie-Josée Rousseau, At the Crossroads of Photographic Practices — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Entrevues
Authors: Jérôme Delgado

Founder of the only gallery in Quebec devoted exclusively to photography, Marie-Josée Rousseau talks about her motivations and her role in the art market. She came to photography through digital technology – which allowed her “unparalleled exploration” – has become a spokesperson for the image as object. In her view, “photography must be embodied in an object that can be seen and touched.” She sees her gallery, La Castiglione, as a crossroads of currents, disciplines, and schools of thought. The name refers to a historical figure in photography used by Rousseau so that it “could grow outside of me” and with whom everyone would identify – “a concept that isn’t as easy when the name of the owner is front and centre.” Having become nomadic in 2020, La Castiglione and its business model have to be rethought, and Rousseau has given herself a year to consider how its activities will continue.

Alexis Desgagnés, Ammoniaque — Ève Dorais

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Ève Dorais | Artists: Alexis Desgagnés

Offering views of an industrial neighbourhood in the Montreal district of Hochelaga, Ammoniaque elegantly combines the documentary approach – “the importance of the subject and the picture taking,” as Ève Dorais specifies – and the materiality of the photograph through the use of analogue cameras and photosensitive film. In Dorais’s view, Alexis Desgagnés’s “off-axis photographic gaze” and attention to details give rise to an almost-spiritual dimension. Desgagnés – who is also an art historian, curator, and poet –explores words written on a corrugated-iron wall to uncover urban poetry. Similar to Claude Gauvreau’s Exploréen language, the words are imbued with “pain, incongruity, and euphoria.” This is an essential book, Dorais says, because it makes us aware of an urban space that falls between the cracks but is full of humanity, and it “encourages us to reconsider our conceptions of landscape and of beautiful photography.”

La fête : The People Came to Party — Dayna McLeod

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Dayna McLeod

“A feast for the heart, head, and soul,” is how Dayna McLeod describes La Fête, the perfect book to look at in the context of deprivation and isolation caused by the pandemic. The hundred photographs gathered from a call for submissions from Quebec and Brazilian artists are documentary, portraiture, and candid images. Freely associated but carefully organized, they offer a “gateway to feelings,” “a journey of party places and people,” “party and reverie … that pull on our memories, longing, and fear of missing out.” Although an audio application gives the images a sound environment, the essays give them meaning by teasing out the political momentum of the theme.

Women Street Photographers — Ariane Noël de Tilly

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly

Like the photograph appearing on the cover, the book’s intention is obvious: to direct our attention toward a woman who is looking. “That is exactly what Women Street Photographers invites us to do,” writes Ariane Noël de Tilly, “to get to know the work of women photographers and the … events that they have captured in the public space.” Noël de Tilly describes this project, compiled from a series of annual exhibitions with the same title, as offering an overview in one hundred photographs whose rather free association “highlights the great variety of approaches to street photography.” This heterogeneous organization underlines “the happy coincidences linked to our experience of the public space.” Of the two essays included in the book, one evokes the intersection since the nineteenth century of two histories: that of photography and that of the status of women.

Érika Nimis, Mutants — Christian Roy

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Érika Nimis

Erika Nimis’s photographic practice, both documentary and experimental, leads her to find traces of places and abandoned objects. The body of work titled Mutants – reproductions of documents, close-ups of text excerpts, images of places, people, and objects – is the result of her discovery of the site of the University of Mutants, which no longer exists. The institution, once situated on the Senegalese island of Gorée, supported research on “endogenous alternatives” that might, in Christian Roy’s view, have resulted in a different world, developed in the Southern Hemisphere. This “uchronic utopia” is reflected in Nimis’s melancholic images. “Combining Afrofuturism and retrofuturism, Mutants offers an archaeological immersion in this site left in the planning stage,” Roy notes, concluding that this “photographic research project … is both inspiring and poetic.”

Yann Pocreau, Les Impermanents — Daniel Roy

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Roy | Artists: Yann Pocreau

Continuing Yann Pocreau’s reflections on the materiality of light, Impermanencies brought together works inspired by the celestial vault. With photographs of all types, including some produced without a camera, Pocreau ventured, as Daniel Roy notes, into a meditation on the cosmos, time, “the fleetingness of life, and the finiteness of living beings and things.” His experiments with the printing of light was redolent with homage to the pioneers of photography. And there’s more. The presence of prints not treated with fixer, “doomed to imminent extinction,” introduced thoughts about “all the creators whose names are lost to history, who have been erased by time.” As Roy observes, “The photograph is not as permanent as might have been desired. It can be altered. Memory, too.”

Chuck Samuels, Becoming Photography — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Chuck Samuels

Chuck Samuels has been delving into the mise en abîme of photography, and the photographic portrait, since 1991. Brought together under the title Becoming Photography in exhibitions in two venues, these different bodies of work arise from two paradigms, in Sylvain Campeau’s view: the now-settled issue of the originality of an artwork and the current universe of “unending ramifications.” Campeau acknowledges that the evolution of Samuels’s practice, between appropriation of the reputation of “illustrious forebears” and contestation of the “hierarchy of people and genres,” fits within the “dissolution of barriers among media,” which are now all similar, all digital. “This desire to become the photograph,” he notes, “was deployed at the very moment when it could provoke only out-and-out rejection.”

Capture Photography Festival 2021 — Karen Henry

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karen Henry

Given the multifaceted nature of the Capture festival, Karen Henry decided to focus on the part that took place in the public space. It must be said that the 2021 edition was not without controversy after the sudden removal of Steven Shearer’s series devoted to sleep. “The sleeping subjects are inherently vulnerable,” Henry notes, “and they made a number of people uneasy.” Henry had a number of questions concerning this “debacle.” Had the organizers taken account of the fentanyl crisis raging in Vancouver? Had an advertising company decided what could be seen? Henry also reviews other projects, including those by Anique Jordan and Jordan Bennett, which, by talking about Black or Indigenous communities, “evoke the ongoing experience of loss, but also hold the promise (and challenge) of so much more to be said.”

Paul Walde, Requiem for a Glacier — Reilley Bishop-Stall

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Reilley Bishop-Stall | Artists: Paul Walde

Initially an oratorio performed in situ, then a video installation, Requiem for a Glacier originated in a natural site in British Columbia threatened by a planned (and abandoned) ski resort project. As climate change continues to warm the planet, Paul Walde’s work, evocative of both mourning and struggle, remains relevant, even years after it was first performed. In images, it enhances “temporal and visual effects that mirror the dramatic urgency of the oratorio,” writes Reilley Bishop-Stall. However, the artwork as a whole is questionable in the eyes of the Ktunaxa nation. “The projection of such a … lamentation as a Latin Requiem onto sacred Ktunaxa territory raises … issues that cannot be avoided. That being said, Walde’s rooting of the score in both ancient Euro-Christian traditions and contemporary Canadian politics is potentially productive for evaluating the divergent interests.”

Emanuel Licha, zo reken — André Lavoie

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: André Lavoie | Artists: Emanuel Licha

After years of creating representations of war, Emanuel Licha immerses himself in a Haiti in constant struggle. His documentary zo reken, closer to linear film than his previous works, draws on both recorded and offscreen images. “This is a habitual posture for him, as he probes the subjective nature of our gaze,” notes André Lavoie. The insurrectional atmosphere in the Haitian capital is viewed through a double frame: that of the camera and that of the windows of a zo reken (literally, shark bone), as the 4×4 vehicles used by foreign powers and humanitarian organizations are called locally. “From within this vehicle, Haiti is revealed in a perfectly defined aesthetic offering, a gaze delineated as if the spectator were also shut into this closed space.”

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Carne y Arena — Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

A fascinating voice in the growing medium of virtual reality, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s solid reputation was borne out in his installation presented in Montreal, Carne y Arena. Jean Gagnon challenges the enthusiasm shown for this “exceptional storytelling experience,” although he acknowledges its high quality in that respect. “Iñárritu’s work,” he writes, “is even more ingenious, for his installation cannot be summarized simply in narration, and the experience is not simply virtual.” This work, out the ordeal of clandestine migration, “articulates something other than simulated reality” and reaches past the phenomenon of what is perceived. “Carne y Arena,” Gagnon concludes, “questions art’s effectiveness, role, and power to generate change by oscillating between emotion and intellect, the sensory and the intelligible.”

Meryl McMaster, There Once Was A Song — Stéphanie Hornstein

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Meryl McMaster

In the exhibition that Meryl McMaster organized during a residency during which she worked with the McCord Museum collection, she explored human beings’ paradoxical relationship with nature. To the birds under glass bell jars conserved by the museum, McMaster responded with works that, in Stéphanie Hornstein’s view, portray struggle and suffering related to the Dutch traditional vanitas style. Although the exhibition embraces “the transience of all lifeforms,” as Hornstein describes it, McMaster’s work is not pessimistic in tone. “Death, McMaster insists, is a natural, if disconcerting, process and instead of denying it – say, by sticking stuffed birds in bell jars – we would do well to learn from life’s cycles.”

Luc Bourdon. Playing with Images and Sounds — Nicole Gingras

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Nicole Gingras | Artists: Luc Bourdon

Luc Bourdon, a major figure in video and film, has produced some fifty works, many on the subject of culture, including La mémoire des anges (2008) and La part du diable (2017), built on material from the NFB archives. In this interview, conducted during celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Vidéographe, with which Bourdon has worked, Nicole Gingras talks to him about his early career, his love of words, and his vision of editing. Bourdon, who adopted video in the 1980s for its “potential of saying ‘I see,’” acknowledges that he was influenced by Gary Hill and Michael Snow. He owes them the idea of using images as “a means of inserting words and phrases” into his work. After creating in the “immediacy” provided by video, Bourdon became involved in productions that required “more energy and research,” such as La mémoire des anges, an “impressionistic” film on which he spent a good deal of time.

David Tomas, Speech and silence — Vincent Bonin

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Vincent Bonin | Artists: David Tomas

Invited by Ciel variable to re-evaluate David Tomas’s practice, Vincent Bonin offers a cross section of the intellectual trajectory of artist and anthropologist Tomas, who died in 2019. Bonin discusses the importance that Tomas accorded to silence, even up to his final work, which bore the ambiguous words “No Lot.” “This ‘no’ now resonates in the posthumous space, as a last form of the resistance of silence after the interruption of speech,” Bonin observes. The creator of kinetic installations marked by “semiotic complexity,” Tomas was known for his technological innovations (he began to use strobe lights, chronometers, and automatic triggers in the 1980s). He participated in the critical reassessment of the history of photography, as did Jeff Wall and Alan Sekula, while avoiding “statements of intent,” preferring to base his work on fragmentary or performative thought, and he remained silent even “when he was present.”

Moyra Davey. The Personal Narrative and the Art of Fragmented Anti-dogma Narration — Nicolas Mavrikakis

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Moyra Davey

In reaction to “left-wing extremism” and campaigns for “art that is moral and bland, with no grey areas,” critic Nicolas Mavrikakis offers an impassioned reading of Moyra Davey’s practice, and specifically her video i confess (2019). This work, which addresses polarizing themes, leads, in Mavrikakis’s view, to reflection “beyond the opposition between good and evil.” Unclassifiable and complex, based on plays of images within the image, the video is “a sort of Russian doll” with multiple references, and Davey quotes James Baldwin and Pierre Vallières, among others. Like i confess, and Joyce Wieland’s film Pierre Vallières (1972), upon which Mavrikakis also comments, this essay rises against dogmas and suggests that we not get bogged down in fixed, simple readings of cultural history, including when we discuss Vallières, the author of White Niggers of America.

Robert Graham, Three Montréal Photographers + — Zoë Tousignant, Robert Graham’s History of Photography in Montreal

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Michel Campeau, Tom Gibson

A reflection on Robert Graham’s activities as a critic and collector, this exhibition of three Montreal photographers (and more) opens broad perspectives. It accounts for an approach that combines the acquisition of artworks and spending time with their creators (in this case, Tom Gibson, Donigan Cumming, and Michel Campeau) with the development of a critical vision of photography. Zoë Tousignant defends the principle that an image is appreciated as much for what it doesn’t show as what it does show. She notes that Graham, whose collection comprises works that are “visual correlatives” of his thought, is interested in the parergon, Jacques Derrida’s concept that has it that “what resides outside of a work of art is in fact fundamental.” “Telling the history of photography in Montreal cannot involve the exclusion of all that is foreign,” writes Tousignant, who sees the inclusion in the exhibition of images by Muybridge, Tichý, and Parr as reflecting “the total imbrication of the local scene with the international.”

Amandine Alessandra, Marine Baudrillard, Carole Lévesque, Katharina Niemeyer et Magali Uhl, Écran total — Edward Pérez-González, The Absence Machine

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Charlie Doyon

The result of a research project around Jean Baudrillard’s reflection on the notion of the “total screen,” this exhibition brings together seven artists who comment on the omnipresence of the screen and its effects on our lives. According to critic Edward Pérez-González, “the works that form the core of the exhibition are based on the critical vision of the world of Baudrillard the philosopher … a world in which the statement becomes the screen itself.” Baudrillard the photographer, whose images are present in the exhibition, proposes, as Pérez-González writes, “to capture the value of experience … of the ‘I’ that I am.” It is this subjectivity, linked to a body of work attentive to light, that is tending to disappear in the era of screens. “Through the accumulation of sequences, decontextualization, and schematization,” Pérez-González summarizes, “a disconnected world is shown and scrutinized soullessly.”

William A. Ewing et Holly Roussell, Civilization – Quelle époque ! — Julie Martin, A Photographic Mapping of the TwentyFirst Century

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin | Artists: Massimo Vitali

Two hundred works, a hundred and ten photographers, eight sections: this ambitious exhibition, observes critic Julie Martin, “offers a glimpse of the movements that run through today’s world: interrelations, invisible flows, influences, mobility of goods and human beings.” Martin bases her reflection on the principle of “cognitive mapping,” formulated by Fredric Jameson to evoke what escapes our gaze, our senses, and our experience. Although she sees Civilization as a descendant of Edward Steichen’s legendary exhibition The Family of Man, she underlines that this new show is a true panorama of diversity – and not a portrayal of capitalistic hegemony. “The curators do not renounce the idea of a human community,” Martin writes, “but they respect its disparities [and] make visible the mechanisms of power (hidden in The Family of Man) that shape our world.”

Exhibiting Photography

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios

[Fall 2021] Thematic presentation by Jacques Doyon The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can actively contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. By bringing together a large number of images and points of view, the first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes […]

Exhibiting Photography to Talk about Global Changes

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. By bringing together a large number of images and points of view, the first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes affecting global civilization. Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the “total screen,” the second contrasts traditional photography and its mutant, digital, and interactive form, which augments the real at the scale of a screen interface. The third highlights the career of a photography critic whose vision is fed by his encounter with the works he has collected and their creators, while being attentive to the development of a photographic community.

Ciel variable 118 – EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY

[Fall 2021]
The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. The first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes affecting global civilization. The second contrasts traditional photography with its mutant, digital, and interactive form. The third is the career of a photography critic whose vision is fed by the act of collecting.

Bertrand Carrière, Learning photography from books — Serge Allaire

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: Serge Allaire | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

Bernard Carrière, who has produced numerous photobooks over a forty-year career, talks about the process behind the retrospective exhibition and monograph, both titled Solstice, and reveals that he came to photography through print publications. “I really learned about photography through magazines and the LIFE encyclopedia,” he says. “And the discovery of books was fundamental. The first one I had was a short monograph on Henri Cartier-Bresson.” “I learned photography from books,” he continues, and he favours that very medium for deploying his series. Before making this choice, sequential organization of images, as if making a film, was the basis for his creative inspiration. “One creates by subtracting. If I’ve learned one thing with the editor of my films … it’s how to see the tree (the image) and the forest (the book, the film) at the same time: the unique importance of each image, each shot, in a whole that makes sense.”

Ron Jude — Louis Perreault

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Ron Jude

Ron Jude’s photobook “vibrates on the table,” according to Louis Perreault, so utterly does the sensory experience offered overflow the edges of the images. In Perreault’s view, Jude, a fundamental figure in the publishing world, has innovated once again, and he also takes a new direction in his practice: here, the landscape is the subject, the narrative thread of the images is less influential, and the strategy turns to accumulation rather than juxtaposition. 12 Hz is like “a musical composition,” Perreault writes, “each image acting as a track added to the others, each vibrating at a different frequency. Like a composer at the mixing console, Jude adjusts the levels of each track, measuring out the abstraction, the textures, the reproduction of space and place.” The reference to low frequencies in the title suggests that sound wave are forces that shape landscapes, imperceptible movements that permeate the dark-toned images.

Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes — Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Claudia Polledri

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

Rejouer le vivant – Amélie Giguère

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Amélie Giguère, Anne Bénichou

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

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Querelle entre deux puces pour savoir à qui appartient le chien sur lequel elles vivent — Noémie Fortin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Noémie Fortin | Artists: Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens

The videos, installations, and photographs that form the exhibition arising from a residency at the Grantham Foundation offer “a sensitive, well-informed portrait of the use, contamination, and appropriation of land in rural areas,” as Noémie Fortin describes it. Here, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens continue their approach based on the desire to materialize and make “visible” abstract concepts and even censored studies – as the case for the work L’affaire Louis Robert. They also emphasize the contrast between the “violence and care” inherent to cultivating the soil, as in the video Herber, désherber. “The pieces that they have brought together offer different gateways to the issues of ownership and exclusion … in order to provoke both an emotional reaction and a critical reflection.”

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: John Akomfrah

The three-channel video Vertigo Sea offers an immersive and panoramic environment based on “a powerful montage” of still and moving images, as well as juxtaposed and superimposed sounds, including music, recordings of nature, songs, and texts read by off-screen voices. The narrative proposed by John Akomfrah makes the ocean, “site of history, of beauty and bounty,” into “a scene of disaster.” “Human forces” have provoked this transformation, as shown in a succession of images that evoke slavery and water pollution. Despite references to Géricault, Turner, Friedrich, Melville, and Woolf, the work, writes Jill Glessing, “prompts viewers to consider their own contemporary relationship with the savagery perpetrated within and against that watery paradise.”

Sara A. Tremblay — Paule Mackrous

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Paule Mackrous | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay

Created in the context of isolation imposed by the pandemic, the visual and virtual essay Tout t’empêche, posted on Instagram, is a well-thought-out project, resonating with the reality of the health crisis and the food autonomy movement. Through a series of images of harvested flowers, fruits, and vegetables, Sara A. Tremblay displays her daily life on a farm in the Orford region. In the view of Paule Mackrous, the work forms a “ritual,” the scope of which goes beyond intimacy, by highlighting an ecosystem of light, wind, insects, nocturnal animals, and more. “A counterweight is thus offered to both the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19, such as anosmia (loss of the senses of small and taste), physical distancing, and the requirement to touch nothing – effects that prevent us from experiencing all the sensory dimensions of the world.”

Gagnon-Forest, Séquence aérienne — Élisabeth Recurt

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Élisabeth Recurt | Artists: Gagnon-Forest

The duo of Gagnon-Forest, sensitive to the issues linking space and the collective imagination, produce works linked to sociological and aesthetic concerns. The six photographs that they inserted in the large windows of a municipal building alternate scientific (topographic) images and landscapes blurred by the amalgamation of points of view (using the parallax principle). The objectivity of the former, black-and-white digitized cadastral plans, is contrasted against the latter, blue-tinted images. In Élisabeth Recurt’s view, this combination of “informational quality” and “visual quality with fictive content” points to urban constraints and evokes an inaccessible elsewhere. The “sociological and poetic threads” of Séquence aérienne remind her of the practice of Melvin Charney, who reflected “on the domination of the functional dimension over the social dimension in urban planning” and blended reality and fiction in his works.

Stan Douglas, Penn Station’s Half Century — Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin | Artists: Stan Douglas

Commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the Empire State Development for a new train-station lobby, Penn Station’s Half Century returns to a historical era of New York City. The artist, Stan Douglas, reconstructed narratives around Penn Station, the demolition of which in 1963 was the catalyst for the modern heritage preservation movement. The four photographic panels, which intermingle fact and fiction, are, in Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin’s opinion, “breath-taking tableaux.” “The composed conceptual work of the Vancouver School of photography here takes on epic new ambition,” Zebrowski-Rubin writes, revealing the audacious technique behind the creative process. He notes that the mastery and scale of Douglas’s work augur well for the approaching 2022 Vienna Biennale, at which Douglas will occupy the Canadian pavilion.

Isabelle Hayeur, (D)énoncer — Jean De Julio-Paquin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean De Julio-Paquin | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

An ambitious project in three cities, seventy photographs, six videos, a digital platform, and a monograph, (D)énoncer would have been a major social and political event. The triple exhibition summarizes Isabelle Hayeur’s practice and “reveals, in a dialectic relationship, the fractures between an ideal world and the real world,” notes Jean De Julio-Paquin. Although, in De Julio-Paquin’s view, it was a good idea to divide the programs into themes, the event as a whole “bear[s] witness to the degradation of ecosystems and its repercussions on the social fabric.” De Julio-Paquin dwells on each of the sections, points out Hayeur’s commitment to forms of small-scale resistance – James C. Scott’s concept of infra-politics – and observes that her quest “is not to find beauty or magnificent in devastation, but simply to capture the ambivalence of our relationship with the material world and with life.”

Sandra Brewster — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Sandra Brewster

Toronto artist Sandra Brewster, who claims the right to opacity – a concept dear to Édouard Glissant – rethinks Blackness, situating it somewhere “between visibility and invisibility.” This is the conclusion drawn by Érika Nimis in her review of this finely tuned show focused on the deconstruction and representation of racialized people. Brewster transfers images onto a variety of supports (paper, wood, video) as “a metaphor for movement – that, among others, of her family’s migration,” Nimis writes. Long exposure times, models in motion, and random effects are among the means Brewster uses to defy the weighty heritage of photographic practices and crack open the notion of a monolithic Black community. Finally, in Nimis’s view, the most effective response to the stigmatization of appearance may be found in movement.

Judith Bellavance — Mona Hakim

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Judith Bellavance

Sensitive to memory, loss, and emotion, Judith Bellavance found the subject for her series Le goût de la durée in an Irish community in the Gaspé – more specifically, in a church basement frozen in time. According to Mona Hakim, Bellavance reconstructs “a personal story through the marks of wear that the site bears and the emblematic objects that it contains.” Favouring a form of “magnification,” she bears witness to the users’ desire to “care for” their living environment. At a time when the fate of our patrimonial and religious architecture is being challenged, writes Hakim, Le goût de la durée sensitively and poetically evokes reflections on our relationship with history and memory – on a heritage just under the surface.

Chih-Chien Wang. A Gift of Images — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang

In this essay, Sylvain Campeau explores a genre rarely discussed and yet essential to Chih-Chien Wang’s work: the still life – and, in particular, the theme of food. Although fruits and vegetables inhabit Wang’s photographs and videos, that’s not the whole story. Turning to theoretical reflections such as that of Anne Cauquelin and her “table gifts,” Campeau regards the still life as “a fundamental part of a gift, and this is even more obvious in Wang’s work.” The idea of the gift, of a possible “gathering of guests,” leads Campeau to dwell on the artist’s works in which sharing takes the form of speaking, of “confessions.” “Through the exchange and the giving of human beings’ formative stories, there is a question of evading what in them determines us and defines us too closely,” he suggests.

Évariste Desparois. A Disappearance Story — Sébastien Hudon

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Évariste Desparois

It was the discovery and acquisition of facsimiles of works by Évariste Desparois that gave the impetus for Sébastien Hudon’s essay. Hudon describes the first layer of a long-term investigation, a noble mission to bring back from oblivion an inventive artist who created photomontages that earned him ephemeral celebrity. Unknown to historians, a mysterious figure even unto his death, Desparois emerged in an era when modernity was taking off in Quebec. Based on sparse documentation, Hudon follows Desparois’s career, finding clues to his stay in Europe in the orbit of Riopelle and Borduas. “What could have happened for a contemporary artist who was among the signatories of Prisme d’yeux and Refus global to be so utterly wiped out of the history of art and photography in Quebec?” Hudon wonders. “The surprising disappearance of Évariste Desparois, and the splitting up of his body of work, bespeaks the fate of so many artists.”

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Araki Nobuyoshi / Juergen Teller. Correspondence and Adventures in Book Form — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Alec Soth, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Araki Nobuyoshi, Juergen Teller

Four photographers, three books, two cousins, one prisoner: beyond the heterogeneous content discussed, Jérôme Delgado addresses correspondence as a source of creativity and building closeness among culturally, socially, or physically distant individuals. During the pandemic lockdown, photographer Alec Soth exchanged letters with C. Fausto Cabrera, who was literally locked down in a prison. The result of their epistolary dialogue became a book and two unusual images. For decades, photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti travelled to the Argentinian countryside to visit two cousins who, through images, became both her creative correspondents and the protagonists in their adventures. Photographers Araki Nobuyoshi and Juergen Teller, both of them drawn to flesh and to life, offer a purely visual dialogue. Their book testifies, as a correspondence would, to a deep friendship, mutual respect, and the passage of time.

Franck Gérard, En l’état — Jacques Leenhardt, Franck Gérard’s Photographic Encounters

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Leenhardt | Artists: Franck Gérard

[Summer 2021] A story, July 13, 1999, to the present (excerpts) Franck Gérard A press clipping. A few months after my fall, a patron, Löic Francheteau from Flesselles, in a bar where I hang out showed me a newspaper clipping that he had cut out for me. The article tells the story of a young […]

Vincent Lafrance, Savoir vivre — Zoë Tousignant, The Artful Life (according to Vincent Lafrance)

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Vincent Lafrance

In his web series Savoir vivre, Vincent Lafrance stages an alter ego in search of meaning and renewal. Blending autofiction and reflection on creation, the artist explores isolation, failure, and the quest for a new balance with the world.

Steve Giasson, Nouvelles Performances invisibles — Didier Morelli, The Artist’s Body, a Camera, and Various Performative Interactions

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Steve Giasson

Steve Giasson continues his Invisible Performances with a series of actions shared on social media during the pandemic. By linking his body to the camera, he creates a poetic and critical imaginary that questions social and media codes.

Shifted

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Artists: Franck Gérard, Steve Giasson, Vincent Lafrance

Three artists explore, each in their own way, the visible and the invisible: through erudition, autofiction, and subjectivity, their works reveal an ironic distance from the contemporary world.

What Is It Exactly about Human Life?

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

In the feature section of this issue, we encounter three artists, three aesthetic approaches that converge in a certain ironic distance. One, more erudite, draws on the layers of cultural history; another, more narrative, unfolds an autofiction through subtle touches and existential resonances; the last, more direct, affirms the subjectivity of a framing, of a gaze. What, in the end, of the visible and the invisible? What kind of knowledge helps us live better? And what do all these small things that go off track tell us about the state of the world?

Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED

[Summer 2021]

This issue features three artists, with three aesthetic positionings, who share an ironic distancing. One, more scholarly, builds on strata of cultural history; the second, more narrative, fashions, with small strokes, a self-fiction with existential echoes; the last, more direct, affirms the subjectivity of a framing, a gaze. What is it exactly about the visible and the invisible? What wisdom do we need to live better? And what do all these little things that are derailed say about the state of the world?

Chuck Samuels. Gales, nez qui coulent et défaillances de garde-robe — Chuck Samuels

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

[Hiver 2021] An Interview by Chuck Samuels Chuck Samuels is an occasional freelance critic who lives and works in Montreal. This is the third in a series of interviews with Chuck Samuels appearing in Ciel variable. He has also published articles in such Canadian contemporary arts magazines as MIX, Fuse, and Vanguard (co-written with Moira […]

Ouvrages à souligner — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Geneviève Cadieux, Isabelle Hayeur

[Hiver 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Par Jérôme Delgado (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Vikky Alexander, Nordic Rock — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Vikky Alexander

[Winter 2021] Nordic Rock Darling Foundry, Montreal February 27–August 29, 2020 By James D. Campbell Vikky Alexander’s Nordic Rock is a rare extravaganza of the literal and the metaphorical, the real and the surreal. It provokes a counterpoint to and reappraisal of the massive scale of the imposing Darling Foundry Main Hall in which it […]

Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin — Gabrielle Sarthou

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Fenêtre oubliée Galerie la Castiglione chez Produit Rien, Montréal Du 3 au 26 septembre 2020 By Gabrielle Sarthou (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Biennale de Berlin pour l’art contemporain Du 5 septembre au 1er novembre 2020 By Érika Nimis (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Bertrand Carrière — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Dans les années – Photographies 1996–2019 Galerie d’art Antoine-Sirois de l’Université de Sherbrooke Du 8 septembre au 17 octobre 2020 By Sylvain Campeau (En français seulement) Buy the issue […]

Photographie et société : L’Autre Amérique — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Photographie et société : L’Autre Amérique Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée, Montréal Du 26 août au 4 octobre 2020 By Jérôme Delgado (En français seulement) Buy the issue […]

Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf — Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Dédales d’almanachs Festival Art souterrain, Montréal Du 29 février au 22 mars 2020 Par Alexis Desgagnés (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Virginie Laganière — Nathalie Bachand

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Bachand | Artists: Virginie Laganière

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Derrière l’horizon Circa art actuel, Montréal Du 8 juillet au 22 août 2020 Par Nathalie Bachand (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Rachel Echenberg — Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Rachel Echenberg

[Winter 2021] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Conversations avec ma famille Galerie B-312, Montréal Du 3 septembre au 3 octobre 2020 Par Charles Guilbert (En français seulement) Buy the issue

Gathering Clouds. A History of Photography Through Clouds — Bruno Chalifour

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Essays
Authors: Bruno Chalifour

[Winter 2021] By Bruno Chalifour After months of a world pandemic, being surrounded by clouds may sound like a reprieve: fluffy, light, ethereal, and flying higher than the contemporary political discourse in the United States, clouds may provide temporary solace in our dark, sometimes ignorant, times. The exhibition Gathering Clouds, Photographs from the Nineteenth Century […]

Les Années Musicales : 1920–2020. The Space-Music Dimension Becomes Multiplicity — Edward Pérez-González

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González

[Winter 2021] Par Edward Pérez-González The Single and the Multiple. Briefly, multiplicity can be defined as a condition that amplifies things and phenomena; a state of abundance, of potentialities, that enables us to perceive and comprehend the world through different and heterogeneous dimensions – from another dimension. This mode of the single and the multiple […]

Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Le livre photographique comme espace de collaboration — Zoë Tousignant

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

[Winter 2021] By Zoë Tousignant It stands to reason that much thought, time, and energy go into the making of a photobook. Fortunately, the work that it involves is usually shared by several individuals who, each expert in their own field, contribute to creating the end product. These individuals most often include a photographer, a […]

David K. Ross, Children of Kaos — Jeanne Randolph, Sometimes a Name Is Just a Name

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Jeanne Randolph | Artists: David K. Ross

[Winter 2021] By Jeanne Randolph Vain Pillaging – I told him I was thinking, “Vain Pillaging.” – As in futile? my friend responded. – As in gall-darn hubris, I said. Any one of us can do what we want with names, even four-thousand-year old names. – And, said my friend, who is familiar with […]

Chloé Beaulac, Ces lieux qui nous habitent — Dominique Sirois-Rouleau, Territories of Memory

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Dominique Sirois-Rouleau | Artists: Chloé Beaulac

[Winter 2021] Dominique Sirois-Rouleau Chosen to take part in the Missions photographiques des Laurentides project,1 Chloé Beaulac set herself the objective of finding the family cottage that had been part of her childhood. This quest motivated the month-long residency, during which her recollections tied to the Laurentian landscape were confronted with reality. For days, she […]

Alain Lefort, Résonance des silences — Yannick Marcoux, The Pixel: A Fragile Mirage

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Yannick Marcoux | Artists: Alain Lefort

[Winter 2021] Par Yannick Marcoux Looking back upon our origins, it was a long time ago – a very long time, ten thousand years in fact – that the last ice age ended on Earth. What remains of that epoch seems to fascinate Alain Lefort, who, after making his series Eidolôn on drifting icebergs, has […]

Landscapes as Mirrors

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Lefort, Chloé Beaulac, David K. Ross

[Winter 2021] What do the most distant, wild, silent landscapes tell us? How do landscapes of our childhood, those that awoke us to the world, shape us? What reflections of our own future do we find in the chaos of urban sites? Landscapes are like mirrors, utterly shaped by human presence. The city is a […]

Projecting Ourselves into the World Around Us — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2021] By Jacques Doyon What do the most distant, wild, silent landscapes tell us? How do landscapes of our childhood, those that awoke us to the world, shape us? What reflections of our own future do we find in the chaos of urban sites? Landscapes are like mirrors, utterly shaped by human presence. The […]

Ciel variable 116 – LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS

[Winter 2021]

What do the most distant, wild, silent landscapes tell us? How do landscapes of our childhood, those that awoke us to the world, shape us? What reflections of our own future do we find in the chaos of urban sites? Landscapes are like mirrors, utterly shaped by human presence. The city is a direct extension of the social body and, similarly, all of nature is a construction of culture that becomes meaningful only through the human gaze.

Robert Walker, Griﬃntown / Montréal en mutation — James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Robert Walker

[Summer 2020] An Interview by James D. Campbell Robert Walker was born in Montreal in 1945. He graduated in visual arts from Sir George Williams University in the late 1960s. In 1975, he attended a workshop given by American photographer Lee Friedlander that would be transformative, and he embraced colour street photography as an aesthetic […]

Arles, Les Rencontres de la photographie — Bruno Chalifour

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Bruno Chalifour

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Une histoire française Françoise Denoyelle Paris, Les Rencontres d’Arles / Art Book Magazine 2019, 320 p. (ill. n&b) 50 ans d’histoire Françoise Denoyelle et Sam Stourdzé Paris, La Martinière, 2019, 278 […]

Ouvrages à souligner — Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Recensions de publications
Authors: Fanny Bieth

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Par Fanny Bieth (In French only) Acheter ce numéro

David McMillan — Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: David McMillan

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Croissance et Dégradation Pripiat et la zone d’exclusion de Tchernobyl David McMillan essai de Claude Baillargeon Göttingen, Steidl, 2019, 262 p., 200 photographies Par Pierre Dessureault (In French only) Buy the […]

Sarah Wendt et Pascal Dufaux | Alexis Bellavance — Nathalie Bachand

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Bachand | Artists: Alexis Bellavance, Pascal Dufaux, Sarah Wendt

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Axenéo7 Du 18 septembre au 26 octobre 2019 Par Nathalie Bachand (In French only) Acheter ce numéro

Rencontres photographiques de Guyane | 6e édition — Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Léa Magnien

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Parenthèse(s) Du 6 au 30 novembre 2019 Par Sophie Bertrand (In French only) Acheter ce numéro

Szilasi & Szilasi — Fanny Bieth et Clément Willer

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews, Recensions d'expositions
Authors: Clément Willer, Fanny Bieth | Artists: Andrea Szilasi, Gabor Szilasi

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Galerie Deux Poissons, Montréal Du 17 octobre au 23 novembre 2019 Par Fanny Bieth et Clément Willer (En Français seulement) Acheter ce numéro

Jocelyn Philibert — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Dimension Lumière EXPRESSION. Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe Du 9 novembre 2019 au 26 janvier 2020 Par Sylvain Campeau (En Français seulement) Acheter ce numéro

Normand Rajotte — Mona Hakim

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Normand Rajotte

[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Sur les lieux La Castiglione, Montréal Du 2 octobre au 9 novembre 2019 Par Mona Hakim (En Français seulement) Acheter ce numéro

Monique Moumblow — Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Monique Moumblow

[Fall 2019] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Compositions | Pale Shadows Centre VOX Du 1er novembre 2019 au 29 février 2020 By Charles Guilbert (In French only) Acheter ce numéro

Hito Steyerl, This is the future — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Hito Steyerl

[Fall 2019] Art Gallery of Ontario October 24, 2019–February 23, 2020 By Jill Glessing Artist and cultural critic Hito Steyerl, widely recognized for her writing and video works, explores the mostly invisible relations among contemporary art, networked digital technology, and the power structures that aim to control them. In her exhibition This is the future […]

Isaac Julien — Ariane Noël de Tilly

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Isaac Julien

[Fall 2019] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Isaac Julien Frederick Douglass: Lessons of the Hour SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah Du 3 octobre au 15 décembre 2019 By Ariane Noël de Tilly (In French only) Acheter ce numéro

3e Biennale des photographes du monde arabe contemporain. Regards sur le Liban, l’Égypte et le Maroc – Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri

[Summer 2020] By Claudia Polledri The third edition of the Biennial of Contemporary Arab World Photography,1 curated by Gabriel Bauret, was held in Paris in 2019. Inaugurated in 2015 on the joint initiative of the Arab World Institute (AWI) and the Maison européenne de la photographie (MEP), the event is important because it showcases works […]

Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay. Overview on the Tenth Year of the Photojournalism Festival – Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Essays
Authors: Sophie Bertrand

[Summer 2020] By Sophie Bertrand For the last ten years, the Zoom Photo Festival been a mid-autumn feature in Chicoutimi, in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. La Pulperie de Chicoutimi, a national historic site and regular partner of the festival, serves as headquarters and hosts most of the exhibitions, with La Zone Portuaire, and other shows are […]

MOMENTA 2019. Listening to Things – Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Essays
Authors: Charles Guilbert

[Summer 2020] By Charles Guilbert For the second edition of Momenta | Biennale de l’image1 (it had fourteen editions under its previous name, Le Mois de la photo), co-curators María Wills Londoño, Audrey Genois, and Maude Johnson chose an evocative and seemingly paradoxical title: The Life of Things. It was a title that might bring […]

Mary Kavanagh, Daughters of Uranium – Blake Fitzpatrick, Embodied Politics

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Blake Fitzpatrick | Artists: Mary Kavanagh

[Summer 2020] By Blake Fitzpatrick Uranium is an unstable element. It breaks down over time – a very long time. Naturally occurring uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years, meaning that it takes that amount of time for half of the uranium to transform into other elements in a radioactive decay chain. The elements […]

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance – Érika Nimis, La marche du monde

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: William Kentridge

[Summer 2020] By Érika Nimis Interdisciplinary artist William Kentridge (born 1955 in Johannesburg) is internationally celebrated for his animated films composed of charcoal drawings and as a director of live shows. Born into an activist family intimately involved with the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s, Kentridge works in media as varied as printmaking, sculpture, performance, […]

Benoit Aquin, La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii – Alexis Desgagnés, Anton Bequii : A Spiritual Uprising

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Benoit Aquin

[Summer 2020] [Technology] is no longer opposed to human beings but is being integrated with them and gradually absorbing them. — Jacques Ellul By Alexis Desgagnés I was asked to write about Benoit Aquin’s La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii.1 It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked. I haven’t said […]

The March of the World

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Artists: Benoit Aquin, Mary Kavanagh, William Kentridge

[Summer 2020] The works in this special section address dimensions of human activity that have considerable signiﬁcance in today’s globalized society in view of the role of technology, the use of energy resources, and respect for human rights. These complex works combine multiple voices to reﬂect ethical issues and their impacts on individuals and communities. […]

Pandemic Vertigo — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2020] By Jacques Doyon I’m writing this editorial at a time when, to general surprise, paralysis of a signiﬁcant portion of human activity is gradually spreading across the globe (with some 2.5 billion people in conﬁnement right now). Suddenly, the unthinkable has happened. The immutable rumble of economic activity spurred on by the desire […]

Ciel variable 115 – THE MARCH OF THE WORLD

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD

[Summer 2020]

The works in this special section address dimensions of human activity that have considerable significance in today’s globalized society in view of the role of technology, the use of energy resources, and respect for human rights. These complex works combine multiple voices to reflect ethical issues and their impacts on individuals and communities.

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