Graciela Iturbide, Heliotropo 37 — Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne

[Fall 2022] By Stephen Horne Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 12.02.2022 — 29.05.2022 [Excerpt] The exhibition takes its title, Heliotropo 37, from the street address of the artist’s studio in Mexico City. The artist is Graciela Iturbide, and the studio transposed to the Fondation Cartier in Paris was created by Mauricio Rocha, who also […]

Sébastien Michaud, Les jardiniers de la forêt — Mathieu Teasdale

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Sébastien Michaud

[Fall 2022] By Mathieu Teasdale Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles, Montréal 19.03.2022 — 15.05.2022 [Excerpt] Presented at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles, Sébastien Michaud’s exhibition Les jardiniers de la forêt walks the line between photographic documentary and realist narrative installation. Both of these positions, carefully articulated, help to contextualize the workers in […]

Clara Gutsche, Portraits d’enfants. Children — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Clara Gutsche

[Fall 2022] By Jérôme Delgado Optica, un centre d’art contemporain, Montréal 9.04.2022 — 11.06.2022 [Excerpt] Gazing at children, as Clara Gutsche has done – and still does – is to lean into thresholds that open to imminent changes. It’s to examine what makes the familiar different or, on the contrary, what familiarity may arise from […]

Steve Giasson, Steve Giasson as Others / Steve Giasson comme les autres — Emmanuelle Choquette

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Steve Giasson

[Fall 2022] By Emmanuelle Choquette Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa 15.02.2022 — 3.04.2022 [Excerpt] When we enter Steve Giasson as Others/ Steve Giasson comme les autres, it’s as if we’re entering a portrait gallery in a museum: the works are hung in a single line at eye level – a succession of photographs of similar […]

Nicolas Baier, Procession — Edward Pérez-González

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Nicolas Baier

[Fall 2022] By Edward Pérez-González Manif d’art 10, Québec 19.02.2022 — 24.04.2022 [Excerpt] A zoom in on a dense and intensely green forest. A slow, continuous move- ment suggests an infinitely dilated time and produces a growing tension as details are highlighted. A slight wind brings the forest out of its lethargy, making leaves and […]

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan

[Fall 2022] By Jill Glessing Mercer Union, Toronto 26.03.2022 — 4.06.2022 [Excerpt] Territorial borders function as economic technologies, designed to protect regional resources and wealth. As borders become increasingly porous for transferring capital and goods thanks to globalized free trade agreements, they correspondingly tighten against human migration. The dissolution of the Berlin Wall in 1989 […]

JJ Levine, Queer Photographs — Didier Morelli

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: JJ Levine

[Fall 2022] By Didier Morelli McCord Museum, Montreal 18.02.2022 — 18.09.2022 [Excerpt] Entering JJ Levine’s most recent solo exhibition at the McCord Museum, viewers are greeted with a wall-sized vinyl photograph titled Boyfriends in Bed (2011). In this image from the ongoing series Queer Portraits, two romantic partners lie on a purple bedcover with red […]

A Trillion Sunsets. A Century of Image Overload — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau

[Fall 2022] By Sylvain Campeau International Center of Photography, New York 28.01.2022 — 2.05.2022 [Excerpt] With its very title, A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload announces its subject and its attitude. Looking at the publicity for the show, we would note that this is a theme very much of our times – maybe […]

Cloud Album — At the Intersection of Science and Art — Karen Henry

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry

[Fall 2022] By Karen Henry [Excerpt] We humans project a great deal onto clouds, as they oat loftily above or gather and settle in around us. They represent the grandeur and mutability of nature but are also intimate to our everyday experience and the subject of idle contemplation – to have one’s “head in the […]

Disraeli – une expérience humaine en photographie — Pierre Dessureault, A Look Back at the Disraeli Adventure

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault

[Fall 2022] A Look Back at the Disraeli Adventure By Pierre Dessureault [Extract] 1972–2022. A half-century has passed since an adventure called Disraeli – une expérience humaine en photographie (Disraeli – A Human Experiment in Photography) took place.1 By no means is it my intention here to commemorate or eulogize this pivotal moment in the […]

Shirin Neshat, Dreams as Acts of Resistance — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Shirin Neshat

[Fall 2022] Dreams as Acts of Resistance By Jill Glessing [Extract] Displacement, loss, longing – these existential experiences settle in us as we settle around the globe. Contemporary surges of human migration – forced either by conditions of war or poverty or in voluntary search of new opportunities – make these states of dislocation increasingly […]

Pierre Blache, L’insolence des villes — Stay Home; Take a Walk, Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Pierre Blache

[Fall 2022] Stay Home; Take a Walk By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] My memory of the early months of the pandemic remains blurry, but these two contradictory, yet simultaneous, injunctions issued at the beginning of lockdown have suddenly popped up in my mind. These imperatives, apparently banal – even apparently insignificant – were to change our […]

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There – New York — Didier Morelli, To Be There, or To Have Been There

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Didier Morelli

[Fall 2022] To Be There, or To Have Been There By Didier Morelli [Extract] Here I want to add that the architecture does not solely permit such levels of comfort and discomfort, but also the body comportment – the body movements of men and women, whites, blacks, or otherwise racialized people – in these spaces […]

Justine Kurland, Highway Kind (A Love Story) — Moyra Davey, Young Men at Risk

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Moyra Davey | Artists: Justine Kurland

[Fall 2022] Young Men at Risk By Moyra Davey Anything you feel you better be able to feel out loud. – Kathleen Collins, in a workshop for students at Howard University, 1984 Kathleen Collins went on to say in that workshop, “Good work is dependent on detachment.” It is not obvious how to reconcile the […]

Wanderings

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Artists: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Justine Kurland, Pierre Blache

[Fall 2022] Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the works brought together […]

Looking for Places that Speak to Us

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Justine Kurland, Pierre Blache

[Fall 2022] By Jacques Doyon Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the […]

Ciel variable 121 – Wanderings

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS

[Fall 2022]

Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the works brought together here, which are rooted in the desire to show the underside of America, to invert the icons of planetary tourism, or to take stock of the hypertrophy of major urban centres.

Paul Roth, Finding Purpose: Burtynsky’s Archive at RIC — Jérôme Delgado

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Interviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2022] Finding Purpose: Burtynsky’s Archive at RIC An interview by Jérôme Delgado [Excerpt] The internationally renowned artist and environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky was born in St. Catharines, on the shore of Lake Ontario – just a few pulls of the oars from Toronto, where he went to Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (today Ryerson University), graduating […]

Jocelyn Philibert, Metamorphosis of the real — Mona Hakim

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert

[Summer 2022] By Mona Hakim. This major monograph on the photographer Jocelyn Philibert covers his production over more than thirty years. We know Philibert for his nocturnal landscapes focusing essentially – one might say obsessively – on the figure of the tree…

Jean Gagnon, Vidéocaméléon — Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Jean Gagnon

[Summer 2022] By Sylvain Campeau Vidéocaméléon. Chroniques de l’art vidéo au Québec Montréal, Éditions Somme toute, 2021, 239 p. [Excerpt] Let’s start by saying it straight out, without splitting hairs: this book will be highly useful to everyone interested in the visual arts in Canada, and particularly in the emergence of video art in Quebec. […]

Matt Johnston, Photobooks & — Louis Perreault

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Matt Johnston

[Summer 2022] By Louis Perreault Photobooks & A critical companion to the contemporary medium Onomatopee, Eindhoven, Pays-Bas, 2021, 210 p. [Excerpt] Much has been written about the effervescence of the photobook as a medium since the early 2000s. The importance of books that retrace the history of the medium – celebrating the genre’s classics and […]

Sarah Moon, At the Still Point — Ariane Noël de Tilly

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Sarah Moon

[Summer 2022] By Ariane Noël de Tilly Fotografiska, New York 15.10.2021— 6.02.2022 [Excerpt] It was La robe à pois (1996), a large-format photograph placed at the entrance to the exhibition, that invited visitors to immerse themselves in the enigmatic universe, sometimes in colour but usually in black and white, of French photographer Sarah Moon. In […]

Myriam Yates, Parcs. Playgrounds — Josianne Poirier

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

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

Sorel Cohen, Métaphores conceptuelles — Johanne Sloan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luther Konadu, Portraiture en gestuelles — Nicolas Mavrikakis

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

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