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…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
[Spring-Summer 2015] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV100 – Ouvrages à souligner. Antonio Dominguez Leiva, YouTube théorie. Un vertige néobaroque, Montréal, Les Éditions de ta mère, 2014, 112 p., fr. Ola Lanko, Brigiet van den Berg, Nikki Brörmann et al., Ed It: The […]
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
April 3, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne Bénichou
April 8, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mirna Boyadjian | Artists: Akram Zaatari
April 10, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sam Cotter | Artists: Suzy Lake
April 16, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — For over forty years, Suzy Lake has been engaging with the world of representation surrounding her, creating new images to open dialogues and complicate underlying ideologies. Introducing Suzy Lake, the first major museum retrospective of her work, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, looks to Lake’s performative engagement with the camera from the late 1960s to the present…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Serge Allaire | Artists: Rozenn Quéré, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
April 18, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ada Ackerman | Artists: Roman Vishniac
April 23, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Kathleen Ritter
April 24, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — This captivating exhibition of work by Kathleen Ritter is aptly and enticingly titled Camoufleurs. A camoufleur was a person – usually an artist, usually a woman – who designed and installed military camouflage in one of the world wars of the last century. The term relates to all First and Second World War specialists in the art of camouflage…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Guillaume Lafleur | Artists: James Benning
April 29, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Caroline Gagné | Artists: Pierre Bourgault
May 1, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Richard Mosse
May 6, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — One would have to be a seasoned cynic to be indifferent to Richard Mosse’s film installation The Enclave (2012–13). Visually, it is an impressionistic, six-screened montage of beautifully lurid hues of hot pink; politically, it reveals a heretofore unseen side of the conflict that has ravaged the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998; and theoretically, it raises fundamental questions regarding the meaning and function of images of war…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Essays
Authors: Robert Fones | Artists: Michael Snow
May 8, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — As a child, I learned from a book on cartooning that my mother bought me that a cartoon character’s body could be distorted or exaggerated to express astonishment or alarm. I vividly recall an illustration in the book of a character with eyes popped out, jaw dropped to the navel, and the whole body stretched vertically…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Bryan Adams, Geneviève Cadieux, Lida Moser
May 13, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — “The nineteenth-century dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography seems misguided and confused today”. Does Walter Benjamin’s statement, dating from the 1930s, put a final stop to the debate over whether photography naturally belongs in museums?
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Essays
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Abbas Akhavan, Emmanuelle Léonard, Étienne Tremblay-Tardif, Hito Steyerl, Jillian Mayer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Lawrence Weiner, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ursula Biemann
May 15, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — By including artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Krzysztof Wodiczko, two pioneers of conceptual art who, in the late 1960s, combined art and social activism, the curators of the Biennale de Montréal 2014 clearly staked out their position…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Althea Thauberger
May 21, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — From the opening credits, the title of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade as Performed by the Prague-based Experimental Theatre Company Akanda for the Patients and Staff of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital announces the work’s device….
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels
May 22, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — Chuck Samuels: In Before the Camera, you presented yourself in drag to look at the female nude in the history of photography; in Psychoanalysis, you appeared as both the Norman Bates and the Marion Crane characters; in Before Photography, you assumed the roles of photographers in film stills from a specific era…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Denys Arcand
May 28, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — As far back as 2002, multidisciplinary artist Adad Hannah was citing a work by French sculptor Auguste Rodin in his own work. It has been thirteen years since he produced Stills, composed of video captures of Rodin’s first bronze, The Age of Bronze (1877). At the time, no one would have guessed that this was the first manifestation of Hannah’s unique and constant fascination with the Parisian master…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Chuck Samuels, Denys Arcand
Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire: here, a sculpture by Rodin, self-portraits of famous photographers, and a play whose writing is attributed, as part of the fiction, to an author of another era. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and […]
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
Publishing a contemporary art magazine specializing in photography in 2015 is more relevant than ever. Simply think of all the magazines, galleries, exhibition centres, and events (Mois de la photo and photographic encounters of all kinds) that exist and are being created all over the world around the photographic image. Of course, the time has […]
[Spring-Summer 2015] Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and ears of contemporary spectators to justify the reignition of their interrogatory or denunciatory spark. What do these works say? ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Vincent Lafrance
November 18, 2015 [originally published Winter 2015] — Vincent Lafrance’s work is permeated with the idea of the simulacrum – perception and its faults. Playing with photographic virtuosity and with randomness, he composes visual illusions with traditional photographic means. His body of videographic work uses language as a confusing effect; he produces fictions that fluidly meander between …
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
[Winter 2015] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV99 – Ouvrages à souligner. Donigan Cumming, The Stage, New York, Errata Editions, 2014, 132 pp., Eng. Catherine Tremblay et Véronique Béland, Elles collectionnent des mondes, Montréal, Les Éditions du renard, 2014, 116 p., fr. ; […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Corina Ilea
January 28, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Ryerson Image Centre presented the exhibition Dispatch: War Photographs in Print, 1854-2008, curated by Thierry Gervais, and marking the centennial of the First World War. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication that underscores the intricate connection between war and photography, as well as the not-so-innocent mechanisms of representation activated in recording, transmission, and shaping of conflicts in the visual field…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande
January 30, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Gwenaël Bélanger
February 4, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Elisa Julia Gilmour | Artists: Harun Farocki
February 6, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — On September 17, 2014, the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), an institution that collects, researches, and exhibits historical and contemporary lens-based imagery, opened three new exhibitions on war imagery: how it is produced, constructed, distributed, and received…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ada Ackerman | Artists: Julien Magre
February 11, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala
February 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The Great War: The Persuasive Power of Photography contains over four hundred images, ranging from private portraits to almost-life-size enlargements of battlefields and scenes from the front. The exhibition addresses the multiple means by which photographs circulated during the war years, while at the same time underscoring the profound sense of loss and devastation…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Félix Dufour-Laperrière
February 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: David Goldblatt
February 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — David Goldblatt has been photographing in South Africa for many decades. The acuity with which he has recorded the depths of violence and its specific character both during and after the era of apartheid rests on his observation of violence naturalized…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Ryoji Ikeda
February 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Kelly Lycan
February 27, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The title of Kelly Lycan’s show, Underglow, incorporates her interest in consumer culture, photography, high art, and cultures of display. Lycan uses the connotations of luminous detailing in car culture, cosmetic techniques that add shimmering radiance, and, in general, the use of light to emphasize form to animate the role of light in photography…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Paco Gómez Martínez
March 4, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — “Mother and teacher mine, my sad and spacious Spain”: this is how the poet, Blas de Otero described his country’s vast geography and serial suffering under the double yoke of monarchy and religion, and then under fascism…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Béla Egyedi
March 6, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Béla Ferenc Egyedi was born in 1913 in Esztergom, Hungary. He immigrated to Canada in 1951 and lived for many years in Montreal’s Milton-Park neighbourhood, at various addresses on Lorne Avenue and Durocher Street, near Milton Street. He was simultaneously a photographer, a printmaker, a poet, and a ceramicist…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Fabien Pinaroli | Artists: Valérie Jouve
March 11, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — For more than twenty years, in her encounters and the resulting portraits, Valérie Jouve has been navigating among reference points composed of historical markers such as architecture in peripheral zones, or the habituses of contemporary human beings…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Loncol Daignault | Artists: Normand Rajotte
March 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Le chantier: the first image. Through marks and lines – green, taupe, orange – a wet woodlands glistens. In the foreground, three black tree trunks. The one in the centre is cut open at the base, showing freshly gnawed yellow flesh. It partially hides a pile of branches arranged in an outwardly spreading form – the key, the sun of the image…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Allison Tweedie
March 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The series Cutting Sunsets is composed of small-format collages portraying scenes of daily life around affluent dwellings on the American west coast. A few people, here and there, quietly tend to their land, do maintenance, contemplate, walk around, and converse…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Steve Veilleux
March 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — One can easily imagine the scene, so banal that it is universal. On a moonless night, its highbeams blazing, a new car, with a new couple inside, rolls down a remote road, far from the bustle of the city. The passengers, the nuclear family of the post-atomic era, already see themselves there, deluded by the illusion of an extraordinary suburb – one of a thousand similar suburbs…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Iain Sinclair | Artists: Stephen Gill
March 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Our expeditions usually begin at first light. This time, Stephen explained, we would be better to hold off until the worst of the rush hour had burnt itself out. I sat on the church porch and waited, admiring a procession of those bright-red sculptural interventions held long enough at the traffic lights to catch the appreciative eye, the new Stagecoach buses with the NOT IN SERVICE destination windows…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Allison Tweedie, Normand Rajotte, Stephen Gill, Steve Veilleux
So, here we are, humans and animals (the same thing, really), perforce engaged in the concrete and naked fact of existing. We are – the verb says it with the force of law – sunk into being like a foundation is sunk into the ground. For as long as the few hours, days, or decades […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
We are pleased to present in this issue the first thematic section put together by Alexis Desgagnés in his new position as associate editor of the magazine. The section, bearing on the notion of habitat, juxtaposes recent works by photographers Normand Rajotte and Stephen Gill, each of whom stands out for a field practice adapted […]
[Winter 2015] The realm of the living includes as many habitats as ways of life. As fragments of the impossible inventory of all inhabited places, these four portfolios cross over into environments that may be real or fantasized, but are always constructed. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Interviews
Authors: Jill Glessing, MaryAnn Camilleri | Artists: Adam Makarenko, Alma Haser, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Simon Roberts
November 12, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — MaryAnn Camilleri is the executive director of the Magenta Foundation. After completing her BA in photographic arts at Ryerson University, Toronto born Camilleri moved to New York, where she worked at Magnum Photo for ten years. In 2003, she returned to Toronto and, with the goal of publishing high-quality art books and promoting Canadian photographic artists, she started up Carte Blanche…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Automne 2014] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV98 – Ouvrages à souligner. The Photobook: A History Volume III, ed. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, New York: Phaidon Press, 2014, 304 pp. Clément Dirié et Michèle Thériault (dir.), Joana Hadjithomas + Khalil Joreige, Zurich, […]
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Book Reviews
Authors: Michael Frederick Rattray
November 14, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — The book is a collection of essays on contemporary art history written by Pontbriand between 2000 and 2011 (other than the new writing undertaken to contextualize and draw together the at times disparate essays). It is a personal reflection upon and an example of an early-twenty-first-century sensibility that we experience collectively…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Book Reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky
Novembre 19, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Book Reviews
Authors: Cheryl Simon
November 21, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Vera Frenkel, a monograph published last year by German art book publisher Hatje Cantz, offers the most comprehensive study of this Canadian multidisciplinary artist’s work to date. Remarkable for its reach, the book includes twelve essays focused on nine projects completed over a forty-year span, …
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Caroline Hayeur
Novembre 26, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Bettina Hoffmann
Novembre 28, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Line Dezainde | Artists: Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier
December 3, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mirna Boyadjian | Artists: Émile Béchard
December 5, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Juan Betancurth, Nancy Davenport, Søren Lose
December 10, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Véronique Leblanc | Artists: Darlene Laponse, Jean-Maxime Dufresne, Mark Boulos, Virginie Laganière
December 12, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing
December 17, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — The rich-text title CounterIntelligence that introduces an exhibition, writings, workshop, and film screenings considers two cultural nodes and production modes – art and military activity. The project’s formal and thematic eclecticism befits the Berlin-based Canadian curator, Charles Stankievech, whose own work traverses the fields of sound and visual art, writing, and publishing…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Essays
Authors: Philippe Guillaume | Artists: Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, Jim Campbell, Paulien Oltheten, Sohei Nishino
December 18, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Karen Irvine, curator and museum associate director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, recounted that it was after seeing Sohei Nishino’s work in Korea in 2010 and reading Rebecca Solnit that she had the idea for the Of Walking exhibition. Nishino is one of eight international contemporary artists whose works were in the show…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Essays
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Stan Douglas
January 7, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Stan Douglas’s earlier productions include Every Building on 100 West Hastings (2001), a nocturnal panorama of a block of buildings situated in a poor Vancouver neighbourhood, and the series of four photographs Crowds & Riots (2008), depicting reconstructions of crowd scenes and riots that took place in Vancouver during the twentieth century…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Serge Clément
January 9, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — I travelled to Quebec City to see Serge Clément’s exhibition Constellations on a snowy Sunday afternoon in April. I had little prior knowledge of the show, presented at VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie from March 21 to April 20, 2014, save for its basic idea: to showcase Clément’s collection of photobooks…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Henri Venne
January 14, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Henri Venne is a painter. It is painted matter that interests him. It is in this medium that he was educated, and it is also how he defines himself. Henri Venne is also a photographer, as the works that emerge from his creative process are photographs. He is also interested in how images are imbued with visual effects, places for various reflections…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer
January 16, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — It is quite uncommon for the association of two exhibitions to create a dialogue that becomes an artwork in itself. Yet, this is what Dazibao did by bringing together works by Jacinthe Lessard-L. and by the duo formed of Lorna Bauer and Jon Knowles. Their respective works, although different in tonality and look, intertwine to lead viewers into a surprising reflection on darkness…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Thomas Ruff
January 21, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Given the impossible computer-made “photograms” in Thomas Ruff’s recent series – thus in line with Moholy-Nagy’s idea that one can make photographs without a camera (he made his own photograms) – we must immediately consider either a broadening of the notion of photography or its being subsumed, pure and simple…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff
These abstract works involving simple forms evoke methods of analogue photography to challenge the degree of veracity of the image. Imprint, inversion, and casting are some of the components transposed into other artistic media to re-evaluate our capacity to apprehend the real. THOMAS RUFF Photograms Thomas Ruff’s images, made with 3D digital imaging software, are […]
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff
Each in its way, the works in this issue’s portfolio speak of photography and analogue images by inscribing them in other artistic media (digital simulation, film, video, sculpture, painting). The imprint of light is thus materialized in abstract, simplified forms that multiply the images’ referential registers while relativizing the privileged link between photography and the […]
[Fall 2014] These abstract works involving simple forms evoke methods of analogue photography to challenge the degree of veracity of the image. Imprint, inversion, and casting are some of the components transposed into other artistic media to re-evaluate our capacity to apprehend the real. ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Martha Langford | Artists: Clifford Owens
September 5, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Martha Langford is the research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal. Her books on photography include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007)…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Spring-Summer 2014] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV97 – Ouvrages à souligner. Par Sonia Pelletier What Is a Photograph?, New York: International Center of Photography, 2013, 256 pp., Eng. Art and The Internet, London, U.K.: Black Dog Publishing, 2013, 224 pp., Eng. Chantal […]
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Michael Flomen
September 7, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — The origins of camera-less photography go back to the beginnings of photography, with William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings, the process for which he described in 1839: “It is a little bit of magic realized: – of natural magic. You make the powers of nature work for you, and no wonder that your work is well and quickly done…”
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julie Gagné | Artists: Yan Giguère
September 12, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne
September 14, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ivan Tanzer | Artists: Alan Michelson
September 17, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Although he did not set out to organize a comprehensive history of activism in Aboriginal art, guest curator and National Visiting Trudeau Fellow Steve Loft has mounted a significant exhibition that strengthens the living discourse surrounding Aboriginal art production…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Jocelyne Alloucherie, Yann Pocreau
September 19, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Raymond Depardon
September 24, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Robert Evans | Artists: Laura Letinsky
September 26, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — For over a decade, Winnipeg-born photographer Laura Letinsky has pursued still-life photography as a means to explore social structures and the world around us. These works are drawn from five series and range from early compositions that owe obvious debts to the traditional still-life genre to more recent images that challenge the viewer’s understanding of picture space and the nature of photographic representation…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Lorraine Gilbert
October 1, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Michel Lamothe
October 3, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Antoni Muntadas
October 10, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Warning: Perception Requires Involvement, in bold white text on a red background, covers the wall of the Canada Line transit station in downtown Vancouver. It is both a statement about the commitment needed to understand something and a public warning about the tendency these days to limit the onslaught of information to what can be gleaned in a ten-second media clip or an advertising image…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Dominique Blain
October 12, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Michel Campeau, Robert Burley
October 15, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Tacita Dean
October 17, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — This was Winnicott’s response to the difficult challenge of reconciling oneself to one’s own temporality, a favoured problem for artists from On Kawara to Ann Hamilton to Tacita Dean. Artists have tended to handle this challenge in one of two ways: through an art practice that cultivates a relationship with the past or, conversely, by exploring new forms of subjectivity…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
October 22, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — I discovered Marcel Cognac by chance – a chance presented to those who know how to wait for it, to those who want to understand something about their culture and their country. When I came across a copy of his book Visages du Québec, published in 1964, with text by Jean-Charles Harvey…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade
October 24, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — The two last decades have seen the growth of a complex phenomenon: exhibition reproductions. A reprise produced as the inclusion of a “period room” doesn’t have the same effects as a complete restaging of a famous precedent in twentieth-century art history…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Gabriel Coutu-Dumont
October 29, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — In Glasgow, the artist Gabriel Coutu-Dumont set up a minimal photography studio on Sauchiehall Street, a street frequented by the city’s night owls. For several nights, he drew these passersby away from the tumult of the street and asked them to pose in front of an analog camera for a twenty-minute session. The result was The Way of the Willows, a gallery of eighty anachronistic portraits in which the classical composition contrasts with the signs of the models’ contemporary lives…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Christian Tagliavini
November 2, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Portraits are deceptively alluring: we are immediately attracted to admiring the faces of others. As we are drawn under their spell, the images reveal themselves to be carefully crafted manifestations that must be decoded to be fully understood…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Pierre Gonnord
November 5, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Pierre Gonnord’s photographic portraits are fascinating for the experience that they offer us. The models gaze straight at the photographer’s lens, and we are taken aback: we feel like they are staring at us…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord
Three approaches to the portrait sustained by pictorial references and knowledge manifested in chiaroscuro, framings and poses, texture and draping of fabrics, head positions, and, above all, the gazes. And techniques that ennoble their subjects. PIERRE GONNORD Portraits Strong presences with imposing gazes, and yet revealed with a sort of humility. Pierre Gonnord approached anonymous […]
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord
What, in fact, could the people (gypsies, miners, aristocrats, models, night owls, and others) gathered here in portraits have in common but the dignity conferred upon them by the photographers who took their picture? These artists’ approaches also share crossreferences, as well as photographic and pictorial skills displayed in chiaroscuros, framings, poses, textures and drapings […]
[Spring-Summer 2014] Three approaches to the portrait sustained by pictorial references and knowledge manifested in chiaroscuro, framings and poses, texture and draping of fabrics, head positions, and, above all, the gazes. And techniques that ennoble their subjects. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Luc Courchesne | Artists: Luc Courchesne
June 13, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Luc Courchesne is a digital arts pioneer. From interactive portraits to immersive experience systems, he has created innovative and engaging works that have earned him prestigious awards such as the Grand Prize of the ICC Biennale in Tokyo in 1997 and the Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, in 1999…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Essays
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Michael Snow
June 18, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — I had the pleasure of being invited by Chuck Samuels, the director of Le Mois de la photo à Montréal, to join Paul Wombell, the curator of Le Mois de la photo 2013, at the screening of art video shorts and a presentation of Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1970) at La Cinémathèque québécoise…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Winter 2014] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Download this article (Free of Charge) Milutin Gubash, rodman Hall Art Centre / Brock University ; Carleton University Art Gallery ; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery ; Southern Alberta Art Gallery ; Musée d’art de Joliette, […]
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Book Reviews
Authors: Romain Guedj
June 20, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Book Reviews
Authors: Emily Falvey
June 26, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — A substantial overview of the work of Canadian artist Luis Jacob has long been desired. Seeing and Believing, a hefty bilingual catalogue recently published by the British company Black Dog Publishing, proposes to fill this void. Produced in conjunction with a set of three distinct yet interconnected exhibitions organized by the Darling Foundry in Montreal…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Thomas Demand
June 27, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Heather White | Artists: Alison Craighead, Jon Thomson, Marika Dermineur, Stéphane Degoutin
July 3, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — First in the sightline for those entering Googleheim, a group show curated by Horea Avram at Interaccess in Toronto: a wireless mouse on a plinth. It might have been a monument to audience engagement – a succinct overture to a show invested in dialogue between the museum’s interest in artefacts and the Internet’s provision of access. It wasn’t that, though; interaction was not particularly celebrated…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Nathalie Bujold
July 4, 2018 [originally published in French in CV96 in Winter 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Richard Deschênes
July 30, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Richard Deschênes’s exhibition De la piscine aux verts is composed of pared-down images – made entirely of cut-out and recombined press photographs – that shift among painting, collage, photography, and text. This visual and semiotic dynamic thwarts any attempt to definitely qualify them in a single category…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Sven Augustijnen
August 1, 2018 [originally published in French in CV96 in Winter 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Gabriel Coutu-Dumont
August 6, 2018 [originally published in French in CV96 in Winter 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
[Hiver 2014] New works created for the first Ciel variable fund-raising campaign following the first section of works published in the issue 94 of the magazine, in May 2013 This campaign is based on the idea of bringing together a collector and a photographer to create an original artwork on the theme “the spirit of […]