Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Manon Labrecque
May 26, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Pierre Vidal | Artists: Matthieu Brouillard
June 2, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Fiona Annis
June 9, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — In the photoworks in this exhibition, Fiona Annis dilated with poetic acuity on the clockwork of the heavens. She mined resources as varied and recondite as the first spectroscopic data on the trajectory of Halley’s Comet, recorded in 1910, and Binary Stars: A Pictorial Atlas, 1992…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Leila Alaoui
June 20, 2017 [originally published in French in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Welling
June 16, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — This exhibition presented a selection of work from Welling’s early days in the 1970s and from recent production. The artist’s principal interests lie in the area of photographic materiality and some of its attendant themes – colour, technologies, and abstraction – and to the social relations inherent in the production and circulation of photographs…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier
June 18, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis
June 23, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Philippe Guillaume | Artists: Robert Mapplethorpe
June 25, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — The Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition Focus Perfection, which opened last fall at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, was a lavish retrospective dedicated to the controversial New York artist who took up photography in 1970 with a borrowed Polaroid camera…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Angela Grauerholz
June 30, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — From July 19, 2016, to February 19, 2017, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts mounted an exhibition titled She Photographs, described in the press release as a “feminine echo” of the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the museum in autumn 2016. More than simply an echo, this presentation of works by thirty female photographers, most of them Canadian, painted a strong and true portrait…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Josef Sudek
August 18, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — In the early 1920s, when Josef Sudek was becoming established as a photographer, Prague had emerged as a point of convergence for avant-garde movements from France, Germany, and Russia. After the dismantlement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the Great War, members of these movements were interested in rethinking art – both how it was practised and its relationship with life…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing
August 25, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Resistance to oppression takes many forms. Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated during Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, struggled to understand the workings of power. Developing his concept of hegemony, published later in Prison Notebooks, Gramsci proposed that power is always in flux and unstable, hence always vulnerable to popular contestation…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Denis Farley
September 1, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Espaces aériens marks a turning point in Farley’s aesthetic, developed since the 1980s, of working mainly in documentation of landscape and architecture. In this series, he gradually abandons horizontal composition and aims his lens upward, letting layers of clouds dictate the composition and perturb the unified reading…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Francine Paul | Artists: Alain Lefort
September 8, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Since 2010, Lefort’s photographic series have evidenced his desire to go to increasingly remote regions alone to photograph natural phenomena; most recently, he has been intrigued by icebergs, huge in both dimensions and appeal…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert
September 15, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — For more than ten years, Jocelyn Philibert has been photographing trees at night. This near-obsession was triggered during a summer spent in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, on the bank of the St. Lawrence River. Having just acquired a small digital camera, he decided to go out and explore the vicinity of his cottage, photographing everything around him, after the sun went down…
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert
At first glance, the works presented here might seem to be simply about work on a motif. A more attentive look, however, shows that what is indicated here, in this focus on trees, or icebergs, or clouds, is the shaping of natural elements by human action on a landscape that has become an environment. Jocelyn […]
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert
Each series of images in this issue presents, in a way, work on a motif – a live view of the landscape, in the tradition of landscape painters. Capturing the infinite variations of trees, icebergs, or clouds under different conditions certainly testifies to an interest in nature, but perhaps even more in how it is […]
[Spring-Summer 2017] At first glance, the works presented here might seem to be simply about work on a motif. A more attentive look, however, shows that what is indicated here, in this focus on trees, or icebergs, or clouds, is the shaping of natural elements by human action on a landscape that has become […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Interviews
Authors: Hélène Samson, Jacques Doyon | Artists: William Notman
March 18, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Hélène Samson has been the curator of the photography collection at the McCord Museum since 2006. She is interested in collecting vernacular Canadian photographs and updating nineteenth-century photographic archives…
[Winter 2017] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article.] Download this article (Free of charge)
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Holly King
March 25, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard, Isabelle Hayeur, Sébastien Cliche
March 31, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
April 2, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Fiset
April 7, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Harry Callahan
April 14, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Leo Hsu | Artists: Adrien Missika, Paul Walde
April 16, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video grapples with our changing understanding of the connection between human activity and the destiny of this planet. The title does not begin to suggest the exhibition’s ambitions, which go far beyond surveying work related to climate change…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Ethan Levitas, William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi
April 21, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Caroline Hayeur, D. Kimm
April 23, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Benoit Aquin, Éliane Excoffier, Marisa Portolese, Pascal Grandmaison
[Winter 2017] Artworks created as part of the find-raising campaign (2015-2016) Ciel variable presents the artworks created and acquired during its second fund-raising campaign, conducted in 2015–16. In the same spirit as Sitegeist, the 2012–13 campaign, Artgeist proposed that collectors support the magazine by acquiring an original work created specifically for them. This project also […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: Guy Sioui Durand
April 28, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Two forms of orality opened and then closed the exhibition Ensemble at VU in Quebec City in October 2016. At the opening, an Indigenous talking circle, led by Nadia Myre, was performed in the large gallery called Espace américain. At the end of the exhibition was a roundtable in the centre of the same gallery, moderated by curator Anne-Marie Proulx…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Eaton
April 30, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Jessica Eaton, a fast-rising star in the photographic world, has for some time now explored the notion of “colour is a verb” with rare verve, intensity, and thematic abandon. In her recent dovetailing series of works shown at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal as part of an exhibition aptly titled Transmutations, Eaton, already celebrated as a doyenne of colour theory…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant
May 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — The essay reprinted here was written for an exhibition curated by Zoë Tousignant and presented at Artexte. The exhibition was developed as part of Tousignant’s long-term research project, which examines histories and relationships between photography and the printed document in Canada…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Roger Charbonneau
May 12, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Over the years, Montreal has been the subject of a number of major documentary projects. We might think of Gabor Szilasi’s prolific production – in particular, as he recorded development in the city, his photographs of St. Catherine Street (1977–79) in which he immortalized the configuration of the stores along the street…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker
February 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — For ten years, Robert Walker has been working on a project called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve: Observations and Recollections. The subtitle conveys the two aspects of his approach…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Robert Walker, Roger Charbonneau
[Winter 2017] Over the years, many photographers have explored Montreal and its neighbourhoods. Their images have captured portraits of residents, the colour and composition of the streets and commercial arteries, and the mixture of cultures that contribute to the quality and diversity of a city, as well as the commitment of residents who create the […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
[Winter 2017] It is particularly interesting to present the series of images that Robert Walker has made on the subject of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood – where he was born and currently lives – in light of the festivities for Montreal’s 375th anniversary. The focus of these celebrations – optimistic and perhaps a bit facile – […]
May 14, 2020 [originally published in Winter 2017] — The complete content of CV105 is now available online including porfolios of Robert Walker and Images of Montreal, essays about Canadian Photography Magazines 1970-1990, Jessica Eaton, Ensemble and Artgeist II, an interview with Hélène Samson as well as several recent exhibition and publication reviews…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Interviews
Authors: Ami Barak, Claire Moeder
[Fall 2016] Ami Barak is the curator of the next edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, which will take place in September 2017. Invited to create a series of exhibitions and activities devoted to contemporary photography, he decided to explore the theme of the document and the ambiguity of images, and to […]
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Book Reviews
Authors: Septembre Tiberghien
January 20, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Book Reviews
Authors: Claude Baillargeon
January 22, 2020 [originally published in Fall 2016] — Published to coincide with and provide a broader context for a similarly titled exhibition, “Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph” surveys a vital form of image making traditionally relegated to the margins of the medium’s history…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Hélène Brunet Neumann | Artists: Bonnie Baxter
January 29, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Barbara Kruger, Hannah Höch, Hito Steyerl
February 3, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Marie-Claire Blais, Pascal Grandmaison
February 5, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Thomas Ruff
February 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — A desire to produce and circulate images drove the invention of photography. Almost two centuries later, the dream verges on nightmare as archivists and image theorists scramble to find space and meaning for all the photographs that have been produced. It’s a good time for collectors…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Guillaume Lafleur | Artists: Bettina Hoffmann
February 12, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Emanuel Licha
March 1, 2017 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — With his new feature film, Hotel Machine, artist Emanuel Licha, based in Paris and Montreal, continues his questioning of the place of media and the mediatization of place. His process takes him to the “front lines” of recent warfare – at least, the front lines in the sense of media communications. Taking the relationship between architecture and mass media as a topography, Hotel Machine is a cinematic inquiry into …
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Walid Raad
February 18, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Andrew Esiebo, François-Xavier Gbré, Mimi Cherono Ng'ok
February 20, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Carl Trahan
February 24, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The arts were turned upside down by the advent of the internet and social media, and photography perhaps more than any other art. The uninterrupted flow of images on the Web creates both anxiety and saturation…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays
Authors: Robert Evans | Artists: Robert Bean
February 26, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Robert Bean’s photographs in the series Études (for Marconi), though seemingly straightforward in content, continue the artist’s investigations of obsolescence, its myriad relationships with and the surprisingly malleable notions of past, present, and future, and their outcomes…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays, Interviews
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade, Jacques Doyon
March 3, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The Edge of the Earth focuses on contributions by various artists and journalists to the recognition and consideration of issues linked to climate change, with a particular emphasis on the challenges posed by recognition of the central role played by humans in the disruption of their environment in what is now known as the Anthropocene Era.
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese
March 5, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Montreal-based fine-art photographer Marisa Portolese has garnered well-deserved acclaim for the clarity and lush chromatic and emotional dimensionality of her images. The third instalment of her photographic series of portraits of women and girls titled Belle de jour marks something…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Garry Winogrand
March 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The title that brings together the wild and woolly works in Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s1 is worthy of consideration. The word “outside” depends on its semiotic partner in crime – “inside.” . . .
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Yoanis Menge
March 12, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — HAKAPIK did not go unnoticed during its presentation at Occurrence. The subject was an attention-grabber: a report on the seal hunt by Yoanis Menge, a photographer from Îles de la Madeleine who totally immersed himself in the lives of groups of hunters off the coast of the Canadian North…
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge
[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain […]
Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge
[Fall 2016] The works in this issue’s thematic section are anchored in realities diametrically opposed to each other – the seal hunt, social marginality, and representation of women – and are from different times. These works nevertheless come together in their challenging of prejudices and dominant thought systems. In fact, each proposes to portray people […]
[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, […]
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Interviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Benoit Aquin, Gabor Szilasi
November 4, 2019 [originally published in Spring 2016] — Eighty-eight years old. Decorum would have us qualify this age as venerable. Anyone who divides this number into decades will better measure the span of a lifetime devoted almost entirely to photography. We know about the immense contribution of Gabor Szilasi, who was born in Budapest in 1928 and arrived in Quebec after leaving Hungary in 1956, to the history of Quebec photography…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Kate Hutchinson
November 6, 2019 [originally published in Spring 2016] — Sometime in the early twenty-third century, a sealed copper box is found interred at the foot of the excavated cross on top of Montreal’s estimable Mount Royal. Once opened, archaeologists and sundry forensic experts find a fulsome sheaf of what seem to be vernacular images…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
November 11, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michèle Cohen Hadria | Artists: Daido Moriyama
November 13, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Isadora Chicoine-Marinier | Artists: Catherine Bodmer
November 18, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Petra Mala Miller
November 20, 2019 [originally published in Spring 2016] — Walking into a room full of strangers can be a disconcerting experience, exposing us to questions about belonging and difference. In contrast to such an expectation, Petra Mala Miller’s exhibition Portraits in Light offers a welcoming embrace, perhaps one that recognizes our commonality as strangers.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Yann Pocreau
November 25, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky | Artists: Stan Douglas
December 3, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Nadia Seboussi
December 3, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler
December 9, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Marcel Blouin
December 11, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — It was Lucie Bureau who thought up the organization’s name. She was working at Radio Centre-Ville, a multilingual community radio station broadcasting from St. Lawrence Boulevard in Montreal. The name came to mind because she was producing “vox populi” pieces about social and cultural issues…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Coco Fusco, Em’kal Eyongakpa, George Mahashe, Georges Senga, Héla Ammar, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Lebohang Kganye, Lola Khalfa, Moussa Kalapo, Seydou Camara, Sihem Salhi, Uche Okpa-Iroha, Youssef Lahrichi
December 16, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — The biennale in Bamako, Mali, came to an end on December 31, 2015. This anniversary edition – the tenth – had been delayed by two years due to a major crisis that occurred in 2012. Even a few weeks before the opening, there was still a climate of uncertainty, though it was quickly swept away by the invigorating enthusiasm of the organizing committee.
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Essays
Authors: Claude Baillargeon | Artists: Ishiuchi Miyako
December 18, 2019 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Active since 1975 as a fiercely independent photographer in her native Japan, Ishiuchi Miyako has at last achieved significant recognition on the North American art scene…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
January 6, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Dead trees, a few dried-up pigeons, some rotting fish, and broken-up cottages: what is the world that these make up? From the perspective of Montreal documentary photographer Isabelle Hayeur, this is a landscape – that is, a space inhabited with suburbs and industrial plants…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier
January 8, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — So pervasive have the interventions become that they challenge the stereotype of nature as an ongoing and seemingly inexhaustible eternal backdrop to all that we do. Our era is all about the intertwining of the human built landscape and the natural world…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Auer
January 13, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Who better than a seasoned photographer to explore the phenomenology of light? Jessica Auer’s recent series January, created during a 2015 residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, is a thematic work of great visual poetry…
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Artists: Geneviève Chevalier, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer
[Spring/Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of a […]
Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer
[Spring/Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of a […]
[Spring-Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of […]
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Interviews
Authors: Quentin Bajac, Zoë Tousignant
August 21, 2019 [originally published in Winter 2016] — Quentin Bajac has been the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 2013. In the fall of 2015, MoMA opened the exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 (November 7, 2015, to March 20, 2016) and published the third volume in the Photography at MoMA.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
[Winter 2016] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. par Alexis Desgagnés Download this article (Free of Charge)
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne Bénichou, Franz Anton Cramer
August 28, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Book Reviews
Authors: Daniel Fiset, Erika Wicky
September 4, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jon Davies | Artists: Scott Conarroe
9 Septembre 2019 [originellement publié à l’hiver 2016] — Born in 1974 in Edmonton, Scott Conarroe is best known for his continent-spanning By Rail (2007–09) and By Sea (2009–11). In these photographic series, Conarroe employed a large-format camera and long exposures to consider the U.S. and Canadian landscape, and the myriad transformations that it has undergone, via its expansive railways and coastlines.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gabrielle Desgagné-Duclos | Artists: Alain Laframboise
September 11, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sheena Ellison | Artists: Nicole Jolicoeur
September 16, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Blake Fitzpatrick | Artists: Yto Barrada
September 18, 2019 [originellement publié à l’hiver 2016] — The rupturing effects of global change – as epitomized recently by news stories about migrants in over-crowded boats, with bodies on deck, in the hull, and in the sea – come to roost at the local level, where the risks of globalization are most exposed but also potentially transformed through acts of resistance…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Michel Campeau, Serge Clément
September 24, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Yinka Shonibare
September 25, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fabien Pinaroli | Artists: Christopher Williams
September 30, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis
October 2, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky
October 7, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Ana Casas Broda, Janek Zamoyski, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Luis Arturo Aguirre, Luis González Palma, Martín Chambi, Ray Govea, Rodrigo Moya, Tina Modotti
October 9, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Élène Tremblay
October 15, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — Curator Joan Fontcuberta’s idea of bringing together artists who explore the post-photographic condition for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal is especially pertinent in an era in which digital technology has challenged the status of the photographic image…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis
October 16, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — Lagos – Eko in the Yoruba language – is a typical megalopolis. With its some twenty million inhabitants, it is the economic and cultural heart and soul of Nigeria, which is the birthplace of Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize for literature) and Fela Kuti (the father of Afrobeat) and the home of Nollywood (the third-largest movie industry in the world)….
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena
October 21, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — In the storybook that is Alejandro Cartagena’s oeuvre, Carpoolers is the chapter that comes between Suburbia Mexicana and What We Fight For. The artist, who works and lives in Monterrey, Mexico, has been researching and imaging urban sprawl and its impact for the last decade in photographs that mix a luscious kind of composed beauty with deep human interest…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Julian Germain
October 23, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — It started off in the northeast U.K., where I am based. I had received funding at the time to photograph in six particular schools. I realized pretty soon that it would be interesting to expand to other schools in different parts of the country, in that it was a way to make a portrait of the population…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Raymonde April
October 28, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — For a Westerner travelling, it’s quite easy to take striking pictures of India. But what is being portrayed in these images is simply culture shock. One stays at a distance. Since I was in Mumbai to work, what was urgent for me was not so much to take pictures as to understand…
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April
[Winter 2016] Globalization is making us more aware of the realities of the entire planet through news, visits, and business travel. In addition, urbanization and consumer markets are tending to bring cultures and lifestyles ever closer to each other. Even so, and fortunately, diversity and differences remain. What is more, the most radical forms […]
Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April
[Winter 2016] What can hold things together and forge intersections in universes as different as the ones gathered in these pages, if it is not that they address a few aspects of our common condition that is increasingly shaped by the current path of globalization? The opening of borders in the contemporary era, inaugurated […]
[Winter 2016] Globalization is making us more aware of the realities of the entire planet through news, visits, and business travel. In addition, urbanization and consumer markets are tending to bring cultures and lifestyles ever closer to each other. Even so, and fortunately, diversity and differences remain. What is more, the most radical forms of […]
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Interviews
Authors: Christine Palmiéri, Joan Fontcuberta | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta
June 3, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Automne 2015] — Following up on a first interview with Catalan artist Joan Fontcuberta published in this magazine in 2013 (CV 93), Ciel variable is marking the fourteenth edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, of which Fontcuberta is the curator, by reprinting an interview by Christine Palmiéri…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
[Fall 2015] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV101 – Ouvrages à souligner. Thierry Gervais (avec la collaboration de Gaëlle Morel), La fabrique de l’information visuelle. Photographies et magazines d’actualité, Paris, Éditions Textuel, 2015, 240 p., ill., fr. Hilde Van Gelder, ed., Allan Sekula: […]
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
June 5, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Book Reviews
Authors: Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta
June 10, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Adam Barbu | Artists: Andrew Wright
June 12, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — In recent years, Ottawa-based artist Andrew Wright has produced numerous bodies of work that propose new readings on the ontology of the image. In particular, Wright’s exhibition at Patrick Mikhail’s new Montreal gallery space, titled Untitled Photographic Pictures, presents a series of large-scale photographic works and two mixed-media sculptural works…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Judith Parker | Artists: Manon Labrecque
June 18, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — The artist’s body as a site for the investigation of the internal dualities of the self is the subject of a compelling exhibition of video projections, kinetic sculptures, and drawings by Montreal artist Manon Labrecque…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Alain Lefort
June 20, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Lefort fittingly cribs his title from American author Herman Melville’s 1851 magnum opus Moby Dick: the Pequod is a fictitious nineteenth-century Nantucket whaling ship that appears in the novel as an instrument of revenge…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michèle Cohen Hadria | Artists: Mark Lewis
June 25, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang
June 27, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Vincent Brault | Artists: Sophie Calle
July 2, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alain Laframboise | Artists: Sophie Calle
July 2, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie Proulx | Artists: Raymonde April
July 3, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: Benoit Aquin
July 29, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Alessandro Aceri, Boris Nzebo, Christian Hanussek, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Ginette Daleu, Hervé Yamguen, Hervé Youmbi, Nicolas Eyidi, Patrick Wokmeni
July 31, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Douala. Late January 2015. I take my first steps on the streets of this port city, the economic capital of Cameroon. Douala is a vibrant city that constantly eludes your grasp. First steps and already some reference points. We cannot speak of the contemporary scene in Douala without speaking of the art centres that form its identity.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Dana Claxton, Dayna Danger, Lori Blondeau, Meryl McMaster, Rosalie Favell, Shelley Niro, Skawennati, Terrance Houle
Dress codes categorize their users, signal their belonging to a social group: clothes worn in subcultures, from mods to punks,1 for example, act as symbols and incentives to resist normalcy and bourgeois society – considered, of course, to be coercive. In Indigenous cultures, artists have also appropriated clothes to resist the confinement of their representation […]
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Essays
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Doug Rickard, Jon Rafman, Michael Wolf, Mishka Henner
August 5, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — It has been a few years now since artists discovered that they could put Google Street View to artistic and critical use. The best-known case is no doubt Jon Rafman, who is pursuing – inexorably, I might be tempted to say – his 9-eyes project, for which he shamelessly pillages the Internet image bank that contains pictures taken by directional cameras affixed to Google Street View (GSV) cars…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf
August 7, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Since 2012, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf has been working on a series of artworks titled Études préparatoires (dessins d’explosions), which he has presented in various venues and contexts. As he has often done in the past, Phaneuf revives found objects by inscribing them in a system of his own making.
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Moyra Davey
August 12, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Moyra Davey’s Copperheads series has had a few existences. It was born in 1990, soon after the Canadian-born artist moved to New York, where she still resides. In those early days it was a project that lived a practically private life…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Paul Paper | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin
August 15, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Scarti is a recent photographic series, and a book of the same title, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The project revives the photographers’ 2003 series Ghetto. It is, however, by no means a straight reprint. The title – Italian for “scraps” – gives away an important aspect of this reuse…
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Moyra Davey, Oliver Chanarin
In geology, the concept of stratification refers to a process during which sediments accumulate in layers, which eventually form more or less heterogeneous sedimentary ensembles but nevertheless remain distinct units of meaning. We often find such ensembles on the edges of paths or roads; they offer the possibility of a simultaneous reading of many strata […]
Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
Is fantasizing always diametrically opposed to the truth? Or does it tend to become an inherent component of reality – to blend with it, be superimposed on it – to the point that the two shape each other? The recent Bugingo affair – involving a Montreal journalist who apparently invented a series of facts and […]
[Fall 2015] STRATA features works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Moyra Davey, and Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf. The comprehension of these bodies of work assumes a peeling away of the various strata of signs that form them. ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Interviews
Authors: Clément Chéroux, Rémi Coignet | Artists: Ugo Mulas
April 1, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — In the fall of 2014, the Pompidou Centre inaugurated a new exhibition space devoted to photography. Beyond the strictly local consequences involved, such a decision by a world-class museum may be understood as unequivocal recognition of the legitimacy now granted to this medium within the contemporary art system and canonical institutions…