[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 […]
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Essays
Authors: Serge Allaire
August 8, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Attending the inaugural week of the Rencontres is always a rather frenetic experience, with almost fifty exhibitions to see, as well as the associated programming and a three-day colloquium, not to mention the daily encounters and debates during which artists, curators, and critics comment on the exhibitions, and the evenings at the Théâtre antique. And then, there are the after-hours activities…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Barbara Probst, David K. Ross, Donovan Wylie, Elina Brotherus, Ilse Bing, Jules Spinatsch, Michel Campeau, Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Véronique Ducharme
August 13, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — The challenge faced by theme-based biennials is to propose a conceptual framework that allows a great number and wide diversity of artworks to be brought together while providing an original viewpoint that positively inflects the reading of the works gathered. Rarely has Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal offered such a cohesive and powerful curatorial statement as in its 13th edition, Drone: The Automated Image…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Andrew Wright, Arnaud Maggs, Marie Cosindas, Marlene Creates, Meryl McMaster, Oliver Chanarin, Robert Flaherty, Sebastião Salgado
August 15, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — In its fifteenth year, Contact, the world’s largest photography festival, offered an expanded schedule of photography-based adventures that included films, workshops, 174 exhibitions, and a three-day symposium featuring international curators and critics. Following a line-up that included Geoffrey Batchen and Joel Snyder…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Kim Waldron
August 20, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Over the years, it has been possible to observe a strong trend in Kim Waldron’s photographic work – a central theme or modus operandi that has been evident in her projects since the very beginning. The artist usually appears in her images, but although she is the central subject, she is not really performing a “spectacle of the self.” …
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Marisa Portolese
August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Walk around in early winter and you may just spot a dash of colour peeking through from under the first coats of snow that blanket the front gardens. That’s a carnation. Long after the peonies, lilies, and daffodils have gone, this sturdy flower still shines its bright hues, in defiance of the season of death…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier
August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Up to now, a certain conception of painting came to mind when I thought of Jacynthe Carrier’s photographic and videographic work, not only because of the emphasis that she places on composition and narration in the creation of her works, but especially because of the type of gaze that these works draw…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese
These three montreal artists have in common the performative dimension of the images in their works. Bodies are staged in situations of intimacy, intrusion, or sacrifice to highlight how loved ones, strangers, and animals help to form our identity. JACYNTHE CARRIER Les Eux Here, we are as close as possible to bodies, in an interwoven […]
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese
The thematic section of this issue presents recent works by three Montreal artists from the perspective of the performative dimension of their images. In these works, the artists stage bodies in situations of intimacy, intrusive proximity, or confrontation with their own fears, to bring to light how loved ones, strangers, and even animals help to […]
[Winter 2014] These three Montreal artists have in common the performative dimension of the images in their works. Bodies are staged in situations of intimacy, intrusion, or sacrifice to highlight how loved ones, strangers, and animals help to form our identity. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Paul Wombell
April 4, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You have articulated the theme of Le Mois de la photo à Montreal around the title Drone: The Automated Image, and you have written, “The camera is a sophisticated instrument with its own laws and its own agency” and “The artists raise an important question: do cameras have a life of their own?” Can you elaborate on the implications of these statements? …
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Fall 2013] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Luis Jacob, Tromper l’œil (Londres, R.-U., Black Dog Publishing, 2013, 224 p., fr.) Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea 1969-1978 (Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2013, 256 pp.,Eng.) […]
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Book Reviews
Authors: Jean-François Thibault
April 9, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Book Reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky
April 11, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne Pilorget | Artists: Jessica Auer
April 16, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuel Simard | Artists: Nicolas Lévesque, Stéphane Pichard
April 18, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang
April 23, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
April 25, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Alain Pratte
April 30, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Obituaries, I am told, become a part of everyday life once you reach a certain age. At one point, these public announcements of death made in local newspapers on a daily or weekly basis take on more significance as you begin to recognize, either literally or figuratively, the names and faces of those who have died. Regularly reading obituaries is a way to both defy and ease oneself into death…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Sébastien Cliche
May 2, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Laurent Vernet | Artists: Alfredo Jaar
May 7, 2018 [originally published in French in CV95 in Fall 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Philippe Guillaume | Artists: Lynne Cohen
May 9, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Lynne Cohen’s recent exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents much more than a display of captivating and masterful large-size photographs of interior spaces. At first glance, False Clues could be described as an imposing photographic project documenting ordinary interior spaces. However, the titles of the twenty-five chromogenic prints and fifteen gelatin-silver prints selected for the show (like those of most of her photographs) discourage any documentary connotation…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Donald McCullin, Helen Doyle, Michael Mitchell
May 14, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — By a strange coincidence, two exhibitions – a Donald McCullin retrospective and Collision: Conflict and Its Consequences – at the National Gallery of Canada, as well as a film, Dans un océan d’images, featured at the recent International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) in Montreal, have presented a wide range of practices related to how photographs portray war and social conflict…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: John Gossage
May 16, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — If there is one category that seems to have escaped the crisis in the book-publishing sector engendered by the rise of digital publishing, it is photobooks, which are currently appearing at such a rate that it is legitimate to think they will eventually supplant exhibitions as the main means of dissemination of photography and, especially, photographic creativity…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Janine Marchessault | Artists: Dave Colangelo, Jean-Michel Crettaz, Jennie Suddick, Mark-David Hosale, Michael Snow, Patricio Davila, Philip Hoffman
May 22, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Images are connected to our physical environments more dramatically than ever before – literally opening up new spaces of interactivity and connection that transform the experience of being in the city, its semiotic forms, and its modes of public gathering, navigation, and movement…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christine Ross | Artists: George Bures Miller, Janet Cardiff
May 23, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Since the 1990s, spatial art – a category that has broadened to include installation, architectural environments, relational interventions, (…) – has led to a major redefinition of the relationship between art and the public space…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Karen Elaine Spencer
May 28, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In the autumn of 2012, a large brown envelope addressed to me arrived at my apartment. Inside it was a signed inkjet print of a colourful typographic exercise, announcing via an enigmatic sentence – hey mike please wipe up any spills that may occur – the genesis of the latest project by Montreal artist Karen Elaine Spencer…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christelle Proulx | Artists: Jon Rafman
May 30, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — The “nine eyes” in Jon Rafman’s project refer to the photographic device mounted on the roofs of Google cars. These cars have been travelling the world’s roads since 2007, equipped with cameras with nine lenses, taking pictures of streets – images automatically in street view – for use with the Google Maps tool…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Élène Tremblay | Artists: Dominic Gagnon
June 4, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In his Web trilogy – the films RIP in Pieces America, Pieces and Love All to Hell, and Big Kiss Goodnight (2009–13) – Dominic Gagnon finds video excerpts on the Internet, which he describes as a cinémathèque or film archive, and recombines them to produce what he calls “films about people who film themselves.”
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet
June 6, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Roland Barthes once attempted to define the nature of photography as “a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.” In the photograph, he wrote, was produced “an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.” Some thirty years later, Francis Jauréguiberry remarked that there is always a great deal of elsewhere in our here; he was talking about the portable telephone…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet
With essays by Suzanne Paquet, Élène Tremblay, Christelle Proulx, Daniel Fiset, Christine Ross, Janine Marchessault and works by Dominic Gagnon, Jon Rafman, Karen Elaine Spencer, Janet Cardiff et George Bures Miller and the exhibition Land/Slide: Possible Futures Even though, in the view of many authors, it seems that we are now living only in the […]
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
The thematic section CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC examines some of the issues related to the digital regime of images and their circulation on networks. It explores the many correspondences and reciprocities that are being woven between concrete spaces and various technological devices, whether portable (smartphones, applications of all types, geolocation instruments) or anchored in […]
[Fall 2013] The transition to the digital image regime entails a series of permutations that noticeably modify our relations with a common public space and how art is produced. Our experience of concrete spaces and temporality, as well as the distinctions between private sphere and public exhibition, between amateur and professional productions, are totally […]
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Interviews
Authors: Bonnie Rubenstein, Jacques Doyon | Artists: Erik Kessels
January 31, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Bonnie Rubenstein has been a director at CONTACT since 2002, and the festival’s artistic director Originally from Toronto, she holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. As curatorial assistant for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, she worked on several groundbreaking exhibitions.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Spring-Summer 2013] By Sonia Pelletier Des monographies Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography (London UK: Black Dog Publishing; Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012, 352 pp., Eng.) This publication, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition curated by Daina Augaitis, is the most comprehensive publication devoted to the work of Canadian artist Ian Wallace. Reflecting […]
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
February 5, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Book Reviews
Authors: Felicity Tayler
February 8, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — The title phrase of this catalogue, Light Years, is a pun on an oft-misused term. Although widely thought to refer to a measurement of time, it is actually an astronomic unit measuring the distance travelled by light over one year. What meanings can this term have when applied to a historical survey exhibition of photographic practices around 1970? Aside from the obvious…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Andrea Carson | Artists: Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Michael Snow
February 12, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Curator Peggy Gale and Ryerson Image Centre director Doina Popescu smartly chose to inaugurate Ryerson University’s new building and gallery with an exhibition specifically about “The Archive.” In this case, the focus was the world-renowned Black Star Collection, comprising over 290,000 photojournalistic prints, which had been donated anonymously to Ryerson University in 2005.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christelle Proulx | Artists: Charles-Antoine Blais-Métivier, Serge-Olivier Rondeau
February 14, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Birthe Piontek
February 19, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lorna Bauer
February 21, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — The title of Lorna Bauer’s exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert offers a simple paradigm for what she explores with her series of photographs. Bauer initially sets us up for a documentary-style tour of some storefronts in New York’s celebrated garment district. Storefronts have been a tried-and-true subject for photographers since the early days of the technology…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Alain Laframboise
February 26, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Manon Tourigny | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier
February 28, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Robert Duchesnay
March 5, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Caroline Hayeur, Jean-François Leblanc
March 7, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Milutin Gubash
March 12, 2018 [originally published in French in CV94 in Spring 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Artists: Alain Paiement, Angela Grauerholz, Chuck Samuels, Gabor Szilasi
[Spring/summer 2013] Works created for the first Ciel variable fund-raising campaign 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 a place” – a place selected by the collector and interpreted by the artist. The exercise offers a […]
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Blake Fitzpatrick | Artists: Omer Fast
March 14, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Omer Fast is not a documentarian, but his solo exhibition at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery did draw attention to the strategies of an artist working, as Jeff Wall put it, “near documentary.” Spanning the last decade, the exhibition referenced sites of recent global conflict with three video works that quoted documentary or journalistic convention…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Richard Baillargeon
March 19, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Richard Baillargeon’s Anticoste is presented as a complex composition of heterogeneous materials organized in groups to create vast networks of significances, echoes, and resonances and to constitute a reflection both on the history of Anticosti and on the narrative processes implemented in knowledge and the relationship with the past.
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne
March 21, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Far from fitting the image of picture chasers and big-time reporters, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras seem, rather, to present themselves as pedagogues of photography, as their projects are intended both to document the contemporary world and to teach the rudiments of photography…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Emmanuel Hermange | Artists: Dominique Auerbacher
March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Dominique Auerbacher’s early career was bound up in the emergence of photographic commissions devoted to landscape in Europe, starting with the Mission photographique de la Datar, which brought her to the public eye in the mid-1980s. She sparked a lively debate by choosing, against all expectations, to photograph a number of major European cities…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Nicolas Baier
March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — To judge by his works, Nicolas Baier has never been anything but a photographer, as these works are replete with all the potentialities, components, and mechanisms of the medium. This is so even when the works he creates are not photographic…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Artists: Dominique Auerbacher, Miki Gingras, Nicolas Baier, Patrick Dionne
[Spring/summer 2013] A thematic section on public art featuring the works of nicolas baier, dominique auerbacher, and patrick dionne and Miki gingras, highlighting the issues of community affirmation in the public space and the revelation, or contestation, of its customs and regulations. Somewhere between group portrait, “objective” self-portrait, and urban anti-aesthetic . . . NICOLAS […]
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Dominique Auerbacher, Nicolas Baier
[Spring/summer 2013] In this issue, we return to the question of public art, a subject we previously addressed in issues 82 and 90. The artworks chosen for this portfolio stand out for the acuity with which their context for integration has been managed. Each of these artworks, in its way, offers an exemplary response to […]
[Spring-Summer 2013] A thematic section on public art featuring the works of Nicolas Baier, Dominique Auerbacher, and Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras, highlighting the issues of community affirmation in the public space and the revelation, or contestation, of its customs and regulations. Some where between group portrait, “objective” selfportrait, and urban antiaesthetic . . […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Interviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés, Joan Fontcuberta | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta
November 6, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After forty years of international recognition and numerous exhibitions, today catalonian artist Joan Fontcuberta is a major voice in the discourse on photographic issues in the era of Web 2.0. In 2011, he was co-curator of the controversial exhibition “From Here On,” presented at the rencontres d’Arles…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Winter 2013] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Par Sonia Pelletier Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012; edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, 264 pp., Eng.) Le langage des […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Bernard Schütze
November 8, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Live rightly, die, die…, the book that accompanies the two-part exhibition organized by the artist-curator David Tomas at Dazibao, is no ordinary exhibition catalogue with its requisite visual documentation and explanatory theoretical essay. Live rightly, die, die… does in fact contain ample visuals and a lengthy essay, but instead of cataloguing and contextualizing the exhibition the book is an experimental extension and integral part of the overall Live rightly, die, die… project. The unusual nature of the publication is made immediately apparent as one opens the book and flips to the page facing the title page…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Book Reviews
Authors: Carol Payne
November 13, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Mutations : Perspectives sur la photographie / Perspectives on Photography, the major publication marking the 2011 edition of the Paris Photo biennial exhibition, is an omnibus collection of current thinking about photography theory and recent photo-based art. Edited by Chantal Pontbriand, founder and editor of the now defunct (and still much lamented) Montreal-based journal Parachute…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Catherine Lebel Ouellet | Artists: Ivan Binet
November 15, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Guy Sioui Durand | Artists: Edward Curtis
November 20, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Eloi Desjardins | Artists: Larry Clark
November 22, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Berenice Abbott
November 27, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Toronto, being such an architectural and photographic city, seems the perfect venue for a Berenice Abbott show. In collaboration with the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre mounted a fine, comprehensive survey exhibition of Abbott’s life in photography. Early on, Abbott got to know Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in Greenwich Village, New York, before heading for Paris to become Man Ray’s apprentice and assistant…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Serge Allaire | Artists: Luc Delahaye, Simon Norfolk
November 29, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Nicolas Baier
December 4, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Jan Švankmajer, Melanie Gilligann
December 6, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julien Champagne | Artists: Ryoji Ikeda
December 11, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Henri Robideau
November 6, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Who would have thought that the 1980s were such a stimulating time. There is so much emphasis in cultural memory on the 1960s and 1970s that it seemed like it was all over by the 1980s – but not so, as revealed in the two-part exhibition on photography in Vancouver c. 1983…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Essays
Authors: Jean-François Nadeau | Artists: Beatrix von Conta, Gabor Szilasi, Guillaume D. Cyr, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Martin Beaulieu, Maryse Goudreau, Yana Ouellet
December 18, 2017 [originally published in French in CV93 in Winter 2013] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Phil Chadwick
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Meteorology is a science of prediction. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are analyzed in order to anticipate precipitation, predict temperatures, and so on.1 The weather report, on tv or radio, has become an indispensable barometer, and there are now countless weather “aps” available…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Gaëlle Morel | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After devoting a number of projects to the world of work, Montreal photographer and videographer Emmanuelle Léonard investigates the notions of visual traces and information in her most recent works…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: William E. Jones
January 10, 2018 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio, police department, convinced that homosexual practices created a predisposition to perpetrate serious predatory crimes, decided to put the public restroom in a large park in its town under surveillance. The site was suspected of being the scene of clandestine sexual activities…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Marianne Cloutier | Artists: Paul Vanouse
January 15, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — The American artist Paul Vanouse, known for his collaboration with the collective Critical Art Ensemble, has had a practice involving diversion since the early 1990s. He appropriates techniques, tools, materials1 , and knowledge from the techno-sciences in order to better examine what is at stake in those disciplines…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Lussier | Artists: Corinne May Botz
January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Ever since Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) first took his metric photographs, in which he tried to produce accurate maps of crime scenes, legal photography has always been, in spite of itself, a “photography of interiors.” This involved considerable technical constraints (cramped quarters with no place to pull back, poor of insufficient lighting, and so on), as Rodolphe Reiss (1875–1929) often demonstrated…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Susan Schuppli | Artists: Errol Morris
January 22, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris, offers a concise example of a methodological shift – what we (in the European Research Council project that I am affiliated with) have elsewhere called a forensic turn – within the investigation of human rights violations and war crimes…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: Taryn Simon
January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — On 6 June 1985, the international press was invited to the small Embu das Artes cemetery in Brazil to witness an extraordinary discovery. A team of police officers and medico-legal experts had just exhumed the presumed remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. A series of photographs taken on this occasion by reporter Robert Nickelsberg show the press’s infatuation with this event…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie
Since the 1990s, there has been a rise to pre-eminence of forensic imaginaries. This phenomenon can be observed in contemporary literature, as in novels by Kathy Reichs (Déjà Dead, 1997), herself a forensic anthropologist by profession, and in television series (Crime Scene Investigation, 2000; Forensic Files, 2000; Bones, 2005) that promulgate a belief in the […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of photographic studies […]
[Winter 2013] This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of […]
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Stephen Bulger
September 5, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Stephen Bulger studied at Ryerson University in Toronto. He was the founding director of the Ryerson Gallery, where he managed over thirty exhibitions. in 1994, he opened the Stephen Bulger gallery to exhibit and sell contemporary and historical photographs, with a special emphasis on the documentary tradition and Canadian historical photographs.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Fall 2012] Des essais Mutations, perspectives sur la photographie / Perspectives on Photography (Paris Photo, Steidl, France / Allemagne, sous la direction de / edited by Chantal Pontbriand, 2012, 414 p., fr. / angl.) a été publié à l’occasion de la foire Paris Photo et constitue un ouvrage de premier plan sur l’évolution et l’état […]
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Book Reviews
Authors: Peter White
September 7, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — On the one hand, there are the snaps by career civil servant Warren Langford who, in 1963, unaccountably found himself part of domestic and overseas military-civilian familiarization tours of Cold War hot spots.1 On the other hand, there are his daughter Martha, an authority in the scholarly study of vernacular photography, and son John, a political scientist whose expertise includes public sector ethics…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Dan Antonat | Artists: Linda-Marlena Bucholtz Ross
September 11, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Martin Désilets
September 13, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Catherine Lebel Ouellet | Artists: Emmanuel Galland, Jon Rafman
September 18, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Pierre Blache
September 21, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Matthieu Brouillard
September 26, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Curated by Erin Silver, this bilingually (and cleverly) titled exhibition juxtaposed works by Matthieu Brouillard and Donigan Cumming, two artists who, although they are separated by a generation and consequently possess different measures of experience, are both well known to the Montreal art scene. The act of juxtaposition is, in itself, a strong curatorial statement…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Hélène Brunet Neumann | Artists: Patrice Duhamel
September 28, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Caroline Bem | Artists: Jeremy Borsos
October 2, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese
October 4, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — UMA, Montreal’s estimable Maison de l’image et de la photographie, has taken a valuable and highly laudatory initiative in seeking out vacant commercial spaces throughout Montreal and installing photographic works in their windows. What was once a forlorn blank slate of the inner city becomes a vibrant forum for the photographic image. The works remain on view until the spaces are rented or sold…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Christian Marclay
October 2, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Paul Graham
October 12, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — This spring, the Pace Gallery in New York, a temple to photography since the early 1980s, had a show of recent works by English photographer Paul Graham in one of its locations in the Chelsea neighbourhood. The Present, the works which have also been published in a book by the English publisher MACK, is the third part of a photographic trilogy begun at the turn of the century with American Night (1998–2002), followed by the ambitious series A Shimmer of Possibility (2004–06)…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Essays
Authors: Mirna Boyadjian | Artists: Taryn Simon
October 16, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Howard Becker wrote an essay called “Do Photographs Tell the Truth?” in 1986, and the question still seems pertinent. Although today we admit that the photographic image constitutes a (re)construction of the world and not a reproduction of reality, a certain legalistic conception of photographs tends to be maintained…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Essays
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: José Toirac, Omer Fast, Philippe Parreno, Taryn Simon
October 18, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Sometimes, thanks to a curator’s insight, a group exhibition be comes a work of art in itself. This is the case for “Chronicles of a Disappearance,” in which John Zeppetelli not only presents five artworks of an extraordinary density but, in bringing them together, weaves networks of meaning that greatly strengthen each artwork.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Eamon Mac Mahon
October 23, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — My first encounter with Canadian photographer and artist Eamon Mac Mahon was when I worked as an editor for a travel magazine, at which he was the stuff of local legend. He had shot a story about the Bahamas for which he’d risked life and limb: on a tiny, rickety plane with, lore dictates, more holes than a fisherman’s net, he hung out of the main cavity – tied in place with only a rope – to capture aerial shots of the turquoise swirling waters. The story won awards.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas
October 25, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — I found out about the Virtually There project in 2009 during a brief visit to the Gushul Studio, which offers a residency program run by the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. At the time, Andreas Rutkauskas was staying there and preparing to make another of his outings in the mountains. The Gushul Studio is located in the small town of Blairmore, in the Crowsnest Pass area of the Rocky Mountains in the southwest part of Alberta…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler
October 30, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Thomas Kneubühler’s Under Currents takes us through the hydroelectric installations at James Bay and the complex network of exchanges between North and South that their construction has established. What is initially striking in this coherent whole is the rigorous organization of various elements in a series of groupings to form a well-marked path that is constructed bit by bit, in successive layers, with each of the carefully defined and delimited components opening new perspectives and adding a stratum of meaning to the plural discourse that has been set in motion.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Eamon Mac Mahon, Thomas Kneubühler
Three experiences of the north, real or perceived, that bring us face to face with the realities of a little-known region undergoing accelerated transformation. The north is at once home to a sparse population, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast resource base that is in the sights of developers as ever […]
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Eamon Mac Mahon, Thomas Kneubühler
Today, the North is making economic headlines, as it has become a new Eldorado for societies stalked by the dream of continual growth. This territory – homeland to First Nations, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast pool of natural resources – is nevertheless mostly unknown to the general public. National mythology […]
[Fall 2012] Today, the North is making economic headlines, as it has become a new Eldorado for societies stalked by the dream of continual growth. This territory – homeland to First Nations, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast pool of natural resources – is nevertheless mostly unknown to the general public. […]
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Albert Dumouchel, Jean-Onésime Legault, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Sydney Jack Hayward
June 12, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Now the artistic director of La Bande Vidéo, Sébastien Hudon has been, in turn, a bookseller, an author, a critic, and an independent curator. He was nominated for the young curator of the year award at the first agac gala following his presentation of two successive exhibitions mounted in 2010 and 2011 at Maison Hamel-Bruneau, in Quebec City: “Concerto en bleu majeur,” on the links between the visual arts and music, and …
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier
[Spring/summer 2012] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. New and Worthy Gwenaël Bélanger. Casser l’image (Expression, Centre d’exposition, Musée régional de Rimouski, 2011, n. p., fr. / angl.) Richard-Max Tremblay, Portrait (les éditions du passage, 2011, Montréal, 192 p., […]
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Book Reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky
June 14, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Book Reviews
Authors: Cheryl Simon
June 19, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — This Is Not a History of Canadian Photography. Less a history of Canadian photography, more a Canadian history told through photography, The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada considers how photographic representation is deployed to shape identity. Co-edited by Carleton University professor Carol Payne and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography curator Andrea Kunard, the book represents the most extensive contribution to scholarship on Canadian photography in more than twenty years and may be one of the most important.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Lynne Marsh
June 21, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Eloi Desjardins | Artists: Adad Hannah
June 27, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Normand Rajotte
June 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Every summer until we were teenagers, my sister and I spent three entire months running like wild things through the dense forest of the Laurentians. With our two neighbour friends and a borrowed husky dog, we explored every nook, cranny, brook, and blueberry bush of a stretch of about two kilometres around our cottage all day, every day. They were some of my favourite times, times of excitement, serenity, and free-spiritedness that I’ve attempted to re-create since – with only a modicum of success.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Bernardino Femminielli, Philippe Hamelin
July 4, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande
July 6, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The landscape tradition in North American photography extends back into the colonial era. In “Songs of the Future,” photography is an instrument that documents the unfolding of an industrial heritage. Some of the flavour of this show is akin to Gordon Lightfoot’s song Canadian Railway Trilogy, but, sadly, no images of Chinese or Irish workers or of Sir William van Horne figure in it.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Edward Steichen
July 31, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Scott Chandler
August 2, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Scott Chandler’s recent work opens a window on a place and a time unknown to us. With an “under-the-radar” documentary ethic and his cumbersome camera equipment, he travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to photograph eloquent ruins hidden for generations from the outside world.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Dominique Fontaine
August 7, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Essays
Authors: Robert Evans | Artists: David Askevold
August 9, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — David Askevold’s work is variously labelled as post-minimal, conceptual, narrative, story art, and post-movement, although none of these is adequate. Westerns, country-and-western music, poltergeists, ghosts, spirits, games, rules, narratives, dreams, history, geography, scientific imaging, and anthropology all inform his work. The list of materials and approaches with which he worked is similarly eclectic…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis
August 14, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — A number of events (exhibitions, publications, and awards) have recently highlighted the growing success of South African photography on the international contemporary scene. Since the abolition of apartheid, and then the election of Nelson Mandela as president of the country in 1994, South Africa has become the spearhead of contemporary African photography, reinforced by a long and rich history that begins with the invention of photography itself, imported to Cape Town in the 1840s.1…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Essays
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Nadia Seboussi
August 16, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — When we enter the exhibition space at the UQAM gallery, what we see first are two television screens with headphone sets, and then we see two more screens on the wall to the right. As we continue to look around, we note the large-format photocopies of newspaper front pages on two of the four walls and, standing alone on the left side of the exhibition space, a pedestal on which a book sits…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier
August 21, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Jacky Georges Lafargue and Louis Couturier’s project Resolute Bay – Voyage du jour dans la nuit finds a way to take viewers on a sort of voyage to the far reaches of our country and an encounter with people who live in a remote Inuit village with only about two hundred inhabitants…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Tendance Floue
August 23, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Tendance Floue is a collective of French photographers open to the world and the power of expression who reject labels and preconceptions. They are fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities that documentary photography, which they see as subjective, may offer them – whence, no doubt, the name of their group: “Tendance” (tendency), which tends toward without ever reaching the goal, and “Floue” (vague or blurred), resolutely evading precise definitions. The result?…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Edward Burtynsky
August 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The images are supreme. Of rather respectable dimensions – when they are not downright immense – and brightly coloured, they please us, dazzle us, force us to admire them. They show landscapes, openings into our immediate environment. But this environment does not have the bucolic accents of yore, for it is increasingly occupied by signs of exploitation of natural resources. Its wild – truly wild – territories are rarer and rarer…
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD
Artists: Edward Burtynsky, Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier, Nadia Seboussi, Tendance Floue
From Alberta to Azerbaijan, from Resolute Bay to Mumbai, and from Oran to Johannesburg,this issue reveals images of an industrious, prosperous world that includes numerous dysfunctions and aberrations. With aesthetic strategies combining the documentary and the sublime, a multitude of perspectives, narrations, and installations, the image sometimes retreats to the background. EDWARD BURTYNSKY Oil A […]
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Edward Burtynsky, Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier
From Alberta to Azerbaijan, from Resolute Bay to Mumbai, via Oran, Johannesburg, Chittagong, Shanghai, and Tucson, this issue presents images of an industrious, prosperous world that has its (un)fair share of dysfunctions and aberrations. In all of these images, the documentary component, embodied within very different aesthetic strategies, attests to and interprets various facets of […]