Full North / Vrai Nord

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 […]

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH

[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. […]

Sébastien Hudon – Discovering and Collecting Modern Photographs in Quebec – Jacques Doyon

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 …

New and worthy – Sonia Pelletier

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., […]

Nathalie Boulouch, Le ciel est bleu. Une histoire de la photographie couleur – Érika Wicky

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.

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada – Cheryl Simon

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.

Lynne Marsh, Stage Backstage – Sylvain Campeau

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.

Adad Hannah, Les Russes – Eloi Desjardins

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.

Normand Rajotte, Like a Whisper (The Continuation) – Isa Tousignant

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.

Philippe Hamelin, Transe – Louis Cummins

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.

Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs 1858 to Today – John K. Grande

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.

Steichen. Glamour, mode et célébrités – Alexis Desgagnés

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.

Scott Chandler, Fordlândia – James D. Campbell

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.

Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale africaine de la photographie – Dominique Fontaine

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.

David Askevold, Disorientation Artist – Robert Evans

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…

Springtime of South African Photography – Érika Nimis

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…

Nadia Seboussi, Le dernier été de la raison – Pierre Rannou, Looking Back at the Image

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…

Jacky Georges Lafargue et Louis Couturier, Resolute Bay : Voyage du jour dans la nuit – Sonia Pelletier, A Wall of Snow, or Northern Studies Visited

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…

Tendance Floue : MAD IN INDIA – Bruno Chalifour, A Future to Define

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?…

Edward Burtynsky, Oil – Sylvain Campeau, Between the Perceptible and the Ethical

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…

Our world

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 […]

That Which the Image Bespeaks – Jacques Doyon

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 […]

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD

[Spring-Summer 2012] 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.   […]

Bastien Gilbert, Librairie Formats – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon

April 3, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Le BAL: A New Photographic Institution in France? – Michel Poivert

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Essays
Authors: Michel Poivert

April 3, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — We present an analysis of the context and strategic positionings that prevailed at the foundation of bal, a French photography institution with its roots in the field of independent press agencies. Although such a reality does not have its equivalent here, Michel Poivert’s viewpoints on the emergence of institutions, the recognition of documentary photography, and the issues in visual media education provide an interesting perspective on the initiatives taken by, and shortcomings of our institutions with regard to photographic issues.

New and Worthy – Sonia Pelletier

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Sonia Pelletier

[Winter 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 The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (edited by Carole Payne, Andrea Kunard, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011, 270 p., angl.) Sylvain Campeau (Chantiers de l’image, Éditions Nota […]

B. Plossu et D. Le Breton, Des millions d’années / F. Nuñez et D. Le Breton, mu-jô – Maxime Coulombe

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Maxime Coulombe

April 10, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Ouvrir le document : Enjeux et pratiques de la documentation dans les arts visuels contemporains – Felicity Tayler

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne Bénichou, Felicity Tayler

April 12, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — The title of this volume, which translates as “Open the document,” is an imperative: it urges you to unfold the cover, printed in solid gold ink, of a perfect-bound paperback. This materiality suggests that the contents are both precious and brilliant, and that there is urgency in its message…

Boris Mikhailov – Johanna Mizgala

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Boris Mikhailov

April 18, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — During the Soviet era, it was unlawful to photograph anything that contradicted the reigning political ideology. As images were seen to be an extremely forceful argument to support the cause, anything that might show signs of rust on the well-oiled machine would not be tolerated. The negation of an outlet for visual evidence to the contrary of the accepted narrative attests to the very power of the documentary photograph, for it bears silence witness when it is too dangerous to speak the truth.

Bertrand Carrière – Sandra Fillion

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sandra Fillion | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

April 19, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Guy Tillim – Jen Hutton

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jen Hutton | Artists: Guy Tillim

April 24, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — Guy Tillim’s sizable exhibition (initially organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photo at Columbia College in Chicago) at the Design Exchange was a provocative inclusion in 2011’s Scotiabank contact Festival. The title of the exhibition evokes the spirit of Patrice Lumumba, a staunch supporter of African nationalism and the first elected prime minister of the Congo after it gained independence from Belgium in June 1960…

Captatio oculi – Barbara Garant

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Barbara Garant

April 26, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

André Cornellier – Zoë Tousignant

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: André Cornellier

May 1, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — Two photographic panoramas evocative of nineteenth-century popular entertainment were on view at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. The first was a panoramic vista made by the Wm. Notman & Son studio in 1896. The larger of the two, titled The Great Mural, was created by photographer André Cornellier in 1996, exactly a century later. Both show a 360-degree bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view of Montreal, as seen from the southwest…

Emmanuelle Léonard, Juste une image – Nicolas Mavrikakis

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard

May 3, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Suzy Lake – Sholem Krishtalka

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sholem Krishtalka | Artists: Suzy Lake

May 8, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — In general, the art world is not kind to older women artists. Nan Goldin recently gave an interview in which she was brutally frank on the subject. She remarked that three-quarters of the art world wants her dead; her work has changed, but the market would rather have the Nan of yore: documents of seedy underbellies and demi-mondes. Now that she has the life perspective of a woman in her sixties, her hard-won ease does not square with the woman the art world wants her to be. Suzy Lake has made this harsh truth the core of her work. But then again, this is not a recent development…

Déclic 70 – Jean Lauzon

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Lauzon

May 10, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Les Rencontres d’Arles – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne

May 15, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — The fourty-second edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles adopted the challenge of exploring the image economy, as well as photography’s relationship with the World Wide Web and with social networks, within the ambit of forty-seven diverse exhibitions. “From Here On,” the centrepiece exhibition at the Rencontres, presented photography in the context of the Web, the “digital revolution,” and how they circulate images.

Lucidity. Inward Views. Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal – René Viau

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Essays
Authors: René Viau

May 17, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — Bringing together twenty-six artists under the title Lucidity. Inward Views, the twelfth edition of Le Mois de la photo à Montréal made the theme that served as its title, if not a template for comprehension, the pivot of its articulations. Through the works in this dense, enriching event, a strongly subjective vision was proposed to viewers. For the artists, “interrogating the world goes hand in hand with interrogating oneself (and vice versa),” according to event curator Anne-Marie Ninacs.¹

La Biennale di Venezia 2011 – Alice Ming Wai Jim

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Essays
Authors: Alice Ming Wai Jim

May 22, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — “Navinland needs YOU,” according to the s.w.a.g. (souvenirs, wearables, and gifts) cum recruitment material of Thai artist of Indian descent Navin Rawanchaikul’s latest staging of his fledgling non-nation. Set up in a bar and restaurant at the entrance to the Giardini, where the permanent national pavilions of the Venice Biennale have been since 1885, Paradiso di Navin: A Mission to Establish Navinland is a parody as astute as it is amusing of the year’s theme of ILLUMInations.

Serge Emmanuel Jongué, Capturing and Narrating the Unspeakable – Mona Hakim

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Essays
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Serge Emmanuel Jongué

May 24, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — The name Serge Emmanuel Jongué (who died in 2006) was not unknown in the photographic community. In his important essay titled “The New Photographic Order,” published in 1990,¹ Jongué cast a lucid eye on the issues in Quebec documentary photography in the 1970s. His reinterpretation of the official discourse attached to this photographic school has become a classic for those interested in the history and comprehension of Quebec photographic practices.

Patrick Dionne et Miki Gingras, Mémoire – Sylvain Campeau, Self-document and Rediscovered Sociability

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

May 29, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — For a number of years, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras have been working on large-scale photographic projects that encourage artistic engagement in society. In 2002, to better fulfil this mission, they founded Diasol, a charitable organization the objective of which is to use art photography as a means of intervention with marginalized people and young people and adults with difficulties with school or family, in psychological distress, or in the process of social reintegration.

MoAD, The face of African Diaspora – Alexandra Martin, Old and New Photographs of African Diaspora

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexandra Martin

May 31, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — In downtown San Francisco, at the corner of Mission and Third streets, is a huge picture window before which passersby can stop to look at a photo-mosaic several metres high inspired by the famous portrait Girl from Tamale (1973) by Chester Higgins Jr., which is also one of the “tiles” in the mosaic.

JR, The Wrinkles of the City – John K. Grande, Image Bridge Builder

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: JR

June 5, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — JR’s photography faces real life. The human faces that engage us in the real environments of the First and Third worlds are an exercise in self-identification within a larger matrix that is a seemingly invisible population of everyday people. Largely unrecognized, these people are off the map when it comes to social, political, or economic rights.

Creating Visibility through Collaboration – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: JR, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

Bringing to the walls and façades of cities the oversized faces of their inhabitants, reappropriating the urban space to advertise a presence and affirm an identity – these are the concerns that lie at the heart of the projects that we present in this issue. As a collaborative tool, photography becomes the instrument of a […]

Collaborations

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Artists: JR, Miki Gingras, MoAD, Patrick Dionne

See the oversized faces of a city’s inhabitants emerging on its walls and façades. These people came together to find ways to reappropriate the urban space, and to advertise their presence and identity. Here, photography is a tool for affirmative collaboration. JR The Wrinkles of the City Presentation of Wrinkles of the City, produced for […]

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS

  [Winter 2012] See the oversized faces of a city’s inhabitants emerging on its walls and façades. These people came together to find ways to reappropriate the urban space, and to advertise their presence and identity. Here, photography is a tool for affirmative collaboration.   ÉDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES   Purchase this issue

Marie-Josée Jean, A renewed Vision for Centre VOX – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Marie-Josée Jean

January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Marie-Josée Jean became director of VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine in 2002, after organizing the sixth and seventh presentations of Mois de la Photo à Montréal. For the last ten years, her research has focused on the theory and practice of image-based and conceptual art. For VOX, she has organized exhibitions by John Baldessari, Bill Vazan, Marcel Duchamp, Maria Eichorn, …

New and Worthy – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

[Fall 2011] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011, 376 p., angl.) The Dead (Toronto, The Magenta Foundation, 2010, n.p., angl.) Angela Grauerholz. The Inexhaustible image… épuiser l’image (Ottawa, […]

Vincent Lavoie, Photojournalismes : Revoir les canons de l’image de presse – Érika Wicky

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Erika Wicky, Vincent Lavoie

January 26, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Charles Gagnon, 4 Films – Christian Roy

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Charles Gagnon

January 31, 2017 [originally published in French in CV89 in 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Wang Qingsong, When Worlds Collide – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Wang Qingsong

February 2, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Wang Qingsong’s photo scenarios focus on the ambiguities of China’s changing cultural identity and internal clash of ideologies. Pick Up the Pen, Fight to the End (1997) mimics a late Cultural Revolution poster, Take Up the Struggle of Polemics and Struggle to the End (1975), also on view. We see a girl wearing a Young Pioneers red scarf; Mao’s Little Red Book is on the table.

Wanda Koop, On the Edge of Experience – Sheena Ellison

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sheena Ellison | Artists: Wanda Koop

February 7, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “Wanda Koop: On the Edge of Experience” is a major attraction of the Prairie Scene festival, the fifth presentation of this biannual event organized by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to showcase Canadian regional art scenes. Koop’s show, a mid-career retro­spective of sorts, consists of four chronologically arranged sections and offers a sampling from eight of the artist’s many series.

Chih-Chien Wang, Short Sentences – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang

February 9, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — In Short Sentences, an aptly titled show of recent photographic and video work, Chih-Chien Wang offers a moving photographic journey that is also a poetic reverie on words and things, life and death. The show is fittingly bracketed by an image of the artist’s son asleep, and another of his son being breastfed by his partner, Yushan. In the former, Shaore Lies on Futon, a photograph of his son lying prone on a futon in deep sleep, Wang evokes the fragility of young life.

Fiona Tan, Rise and Fall – Virginie Doré Lemonde

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Fiona Tan

February 14, 2017 [originally published in French in CV89 in Fall 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Greg Staats, Condolence – Elizabeth Kalbfleisch

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Elizabeth Kalbfleisch | Artists: Greg Staats

February 16, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Grief and loss are guiding principles in Greg Staats’s exhibition “Condolence,” but so, too, are more complex notions of alliance and reconciliation. The exhibition, co-presented by Oboro and Articule galleries and split between these two sites, offers Montrealers rare access to the work of an artist whose works are not often seen in this city.

Shadow Catchers Camera-less Photography – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Adam Fuss, Susan Derges

February 21, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “Shadow Catchers” takes off from the tra­­dition of camera-less photography initiated by William Henry Fox-Talbot, whose photogenic drawings, first displayed to the public in 1839, preceded photography with a camera – a “little bit of magic realized,” as he put it. And we sense his influence on photographers who followed, such as Christian Schad, Lucia Moholy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray, whose photogenic drawings…

Pascal Grandmaison – Anja Bock

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anja Bock | Artists: Pascal Grandmaison

February 23, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Blue-tinged icebergs? Handmade plaster sculptures? The sleek, cool signature of Pascal Grandmaison is hard to discern when we first enter his recent exhibition at Galerie René Blouin. His new works hold several surprises: while they continue his investigation of the mediated photographic act, the figure-ground relationship, and the representation of the invisible, the three works included here are rich in metaphor, melancholy, and artistic modesty.

Claude-Philippe Benoit, Société de ville – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Claude-Philippe Benoît

February 28, 2017 [originally published in French in CV89 in Fall 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Patrick Ward, Monologue – Robin Simpson

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Robin Simpson | Artists: Patrick Ward

March 2, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — With Monologue, Patrick Ward has skilfully edited together a pool of handheld footage culled from video-sharing Web sites. In silence, a single and anonymous viewpoint scans, probes, and travels through a laby­rinthine interior. As the viewer follows, ambling down dark halls, peering into basements, moving from room to room, an impossible ruin begins to take form. Ward’s exhibition is the first part of Skol’s novel thematic program, Unknown Artist.

Hervé Guibert, The Image of Words – Franck Michel

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Essays
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Hervé Guibert

March 7, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — From 9 February to 10 April 2011, the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris presented the first-ever retrospective of the works of photographer and writer Hervé Guibert, comprising some 230 images.¹ I had a chance to visit the exhibition on a weekday morning when the museum opened, so I was just about alone in the galleries (something rare at this museum).

John Max: The Vertigo of the Free Gaze – Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Essays
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: John Max, Michel Lamothe

March 9, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — In John Max, a portrait, Michel Lamothe proves that an attentive gaze trained on the other may be transmuted into a deep meditation. To create this work, which is as fluid as a fiction film, Lamothe followed the photographer John Max for three years (from 2000 to 2003), accumulating 40 hours of footage – film that he spent months pruning and then editing, in collaboration with Louise Dugal…

Leaping Forward: The Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s New Photographic Collecting Practices – Zoë Tousignant

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Alain Chagnon, Brian Merrett, Gabor Szilasi, John Max, Normand Rajotte, Roger Charbonneau

March 14, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — The acquisitions of Quebec photography from the 1960s to the 1980s are thus part of the institution’s current recognition of – and seemingly unquenchable gusto for – photographic imagery of all kinds, and these acquisitions have added considerably to the growing photography collection, which now totals over 1,500 works.

Making Light: The Emergence of Modernist Photography in Quebec Revealed – Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Albert Dumouchel, Conrad Tremblay, Gordon Webber, Guy Borremans, Jauran, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Jean-Pierre Beaudin, Omer Parent, Rodolphe de Repentigny

March 16, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the history of Quebec photography. I realized this after seeing “Photographes rebelles à l’époque de la Grande Noirceur (1937-1961),” which was held at Maison Hamel-Bruneau in Quebec City. Devoted to photography during the Duplessis era, the exhibition comprised about eighty works…

Sylvie Readman, À contretemps – René Viau, Utopia Out of Focus

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Sylvie Readman

March 21, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — What do we see? Somewhere on the urban periphery, a parallelepiped of concrete topped with an azure tarp sits on a rectangle of asphalt. Elsewhere, the whitewashed wall of a shed rises behind a section of suspended electrical wires. We come upon other indeterminate pieces of land, other uninhabited buildings. The photographs’ titles correspond to the toponymy of industrial sectors that appear more or less abandoned…

Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Of time, lost – Paule Mackrous, One Imagination, a Thousand Stories

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Paule Mackrous | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

March 23, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “The issue is clear: truth or life; history or art,” writes Nietzsche in the opening pages of his Seconde considération intempestive¹. The living, fragile and fleeting, are lost from the objective spectacle of history. This will remain so as long as we make history a succession of factual data rather than a return to an “internal time consciousness.”² Words engender linearity, whereas the experience of time is formed of simultaneities and twists.

Lynne Cohen, Photographies – Stephen Horne, Rooms of Screens/Screens of Rooms

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

March 27, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Lynne Cohen has been photographing generic architectural interior spaces for several decades. Photo­g­raphing rooms is, and has always been, her subject. Some of these rooms are health spas, classrooms, and hotel lobbies, while others are more sinister – laboratories, control rooms, and military sites. In a Cohen photograph, however, even an innocent health and relaxation facility can appear in an unusually “posed” mode.

Places

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Lynne Cohen, Sylvie Readman

[Fall 2011] Being attentive to the environments that one passes through. all these passageways, these enigmatic and inhospitable spaces, all those buildings that one sees on urban access roads, sometimes abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment. This, compared to the old city, to sites shaped by time, proximity, a different pace of life … […]

Looking at Places

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Lynne Cohen, Sylvie Readman

[Fall 2011] Being attentive to the environments that one passes through. All these passageways, these enigmatic and inhospitable spaces: entrance halls, waiting rooms, and showrooms with incongruous décors, laboratory rooms with indecipherable functions. All these buildings that one sees on urban access roads, some of them abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment, with no […]

Ciel variable 89 – PLACES

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES

[Fall 2011] Being attentive to the environments that one passes through. all these passageways, these enigmatic and inhospitable spaces, all those buildings that one sees on urban access roads, sometimes abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment. This, compared to the old city, to sites shaped by time, proximity, a different pace of life . […]

Anne-Marie Ninacs – Regarding Lucidity: Inward Views – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Interviews
Authors: Anne-Marie Ninacs, Jacques Doyon

October 27, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — Anne-Marie Ninacs was the guest curator for the Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011, with the theme Lucidity: Inward Views. From 2002 to 2006, Ninacs was the curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, where she organized the exhibitions Massimo Guerrera. Darboral, L’emploi du temps, Avancer dans le brouillard, and Chimère/Shimmer.

New and Worthy – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

[Spring/Summer 2011] Photography and national history Three books recently received combine photography and national history or national imaginary. Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011, Eng) by Maria Antonella Pelizzari offers a dialogue between the devel- opment of photography as a medium and the political, social, and cultural changes in Italy since its unification in […]

Alfredo Cramerotti, Aesthetic journalism. How to inform without informing – Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Vincent Lavoie

November 1, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Suzanne Paquet, Le paysage façonné – Luc Lévesque

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Book Reviews
Authors: Luc Lévesque, Suzanne Paquet

November 3, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Terrance Houle, GIVN’R – Fiona Wright

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fiona Wright | Artists: Terrance Houle

November 8, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — At the opening for Terrance Houle’s solo show “givn’r” on September, most people mingled in the foyer of the Art Gallery of York University. Sure, it was where the free wine and cheese could be safely consumed, but it also felt strangely appropriate for Houle, a Calgary-based artist from the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta, whose performances are done primarily outside the gallery.

Corine Lemieux, En cours de route – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Corine Lemieux

November 10, 2016 [originally published in French only in Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Vera Frenkel, Cartographie d’une pratique / Mapping a Practice – John Bentley Mays

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John Bentley Mays | Artists: Vera Frenkel

November 15, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — The mythographer Mircea Eliade once recalled an interesting belief about memory that is (or was) widespread in the world’s folk cultures.¹ In the terrifying moment just before death, so the story goes, everything that has happened in a person’s life, “down to the minutest details,” flashes before his or her eyes. This sudden, sweeping apprehension is, in fact, a sign that death is swiftly approaching.

Sophie Calle, Rachel, Monique – Marianne Cloutier

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marianne Cloutier | Artists: Sophie Calle

November 17, 2016 [originally published in French only in Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

John Baldessari, Pure Beauty – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: John Baldessari

November 22, 2016 [originally published in Spring 2011] — Conceptual art ideas are pervasive in John Baldessari’s art, from his videos, to his photographs, to his hybrid photo-painted works. Presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate Modern in London, and following on from the Hirshhorn Museum’s “2007 Ways of Seeing” show, “Pure Beauty” puts another feather in John Baldessari’s cap as a West Coast progenitor of all that conceptual art was, is, or can be. His blending of photography, performance, video, and painting treads the edgy border between visual and textual with a natural affinity.

Lee Friedlander, America by Car – Bruno Chalifour

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Lee Friedlander

November 24, 2016 [originally published in French only in Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Four Directions, No.9, Public Film and Video Exhibition – Blake Fitzpatrick

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Blake Fitzpatrick | Artists: Dana Claxton, Isabelle Hayeur

November 29, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — “Four Directions: A No. 9 Public Film and Video Exhibition” juxtaposes Werner Herzog’s film Lessons of Darkness (1992), a documentation of the oil fields burning at the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, with video works by Isabelle Hayeur, Val Klassen, and Dana Claxton.

Keren Cytter, Out of Genres, in Gender – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Keren Cytter

December 1, 2016 [originally published in French in CV88, Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Lise Beaudry, Bolerama – Petra Halkes

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Petra Halkes | Artists: Lise Beaudry

December 6, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — An egg-shaped camping trailer nuzzles up to the large plate-glass windows of Galerie Axenéo7. It is faced by a series of photos of its relatives, Boler camping trailers all of which share the same compact, rounded form but vary endlessly in their fittings and colours. The light-weight fibreglass trailer was first designed in Winnipeg by Ray Olecko, and was produced in various places in Canada from 1968 to 1988.¹ Lise Beaudry, a young photographer based in Toronto, is the proud owner of this particular Boler, and the artist behind the exhibition, “Bolerama” (the name Boler owners give to their yearly camping meets).

Artur Żmijewski, Scénario de dissidence – Jean-Philippe Uzel

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Philippe Uzel | Artists: Artur Żmijewski

December 8, 2016 [originally published in French in CV88, Spring 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Bernd & Hilla Becher: Reading Between the Grids – Philippe Guillaume

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Essays
Authors: Philippe Guillaume | Artists: Bernd & Hilla Becher

December 13, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — When we think of the work of Bernhard and Hilla Becher, a classical eighteenth-century mansion, pristine gardens where Madame de Staël walked, and a spectacular landscape overlooking a lake with the Alps as backdrop is hardly the scene that comes to mind. Strikingly different from the industrial landscapes that captivated the photographers during the second half of the twentieth century, this locale, the Musée de l’Elysée, is the setting for the latest exhibition of their work.

Doina Popescu. Envisioning the Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre – Claude Baillargeon

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Essays
Authors: Claude Baillargeon

December 15, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — For the last few years, the campus of Ryerson University in downtown Toronto has been abuzz with the redesign and expansion of the School of Image Arts to accommodate the emerging Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre. Slated to open in fall 2012, this major facility is intended to become an international centre dedicated to photography and related media. To learn more about this ambitious project and the evolving vision guiding it, Ciel variable met with Doina Popescu, who is overseeing the endeavour as its initial director.

Pierre Gaudard, Documentary Photographer – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Pierre Gaudard

December 20, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — Pierre Gaudard is one of the rare photographers whose photographs are not on the Web. Absent from the photography scene since the mid-1980s because he returned to France and because of the gradual disappearance of the documentary genre from institutions devoted to photography, his name was suddenly resurrected in a press release announcing his death…

Martin Schoeller, Close up, Female Bodybuilders – Johanna Mizgala, Accumulating and Dispersing Perspective : The Portraits of Martin Schoeller

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Martin Schoeller

January 10, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — It is nice to stare – particularly at beautiful people who in part make their living as the object of your gaze, each making a concerted effort to appear as though they might actually exist solely for the purpose of your continuing adoration.

Tony Fouhse, USER Portraits of Crack Addicts – Emily Falvey, Use value

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Emily Falvey | Artists: Tony Fouhse

January 12, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — The pressure placed upon contemporary artists to produce socially critical, politically engaged works of art is both enormous and confusing. On the one hand, galleries and other visual-arts organizations expect artists to mobilize the population via certain “artistic strategies,” such as subverting cherished yet secretly oppressive idols or breaking out of traditional exhibition formats to …

JJ Levine, Queer Portraits – Dayna McLeod, Queering the Heteronormative Matrix

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: JJ Levine

January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — Vivid colours and rich, symbolic domestic detailing underscore the confident, self-possessed gazes of JJ Levine’s subjects in their series Queer Portraits. An exploration of identity, gender politics, community, public vs. private, radical queer life, and deviant gender presentations, Queer Portraits confronts us with a group of subjects that ultimately reflect a portrait of the artist themselves. An intimate look at Levine’s community, this series plays with …

Faces

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Artists: JJ Levine, Martin Schoeller, Tony Fouhse

[Spring/Summer 2011] Queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a highly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strengths or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. JJ Levine, Queer Portraits Levine offers a series of intimate, touching portraits of friends and close relations in […]

Faces: Beyond Appearances

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: JJ Levine, Martin Schoeller, Tony Fouhse

[Spring/Summer 2011] In this issue, queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a highly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strengths or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. They captivate us, enticing us to stop and study a series of details that prove […]

Ciel variable 88 – FACES

Ciel variable 88 - FACES

  [Spring – Summer 2011] Queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a higly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strenghts or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READING VOICES   Purchase this issue

Vincent Bonin, Exhibiting Art in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s – Anne Bénichou

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews
Authors: Anne Bénichou, Vincent Bonin

August 22, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — An artist, archivist, historian, and art theoretician by training, the independent curator Vincent Bonin has recently organized, alone or in collaboration, a series of exhibitions that shed light on a turning point in the history of Canadian contemporary art: the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bonin’s principal subjects of reflection are discursive productions, the conditions for their expression and …

Maxime Coulombe, Imaginer le posthumain – Marianne Cloutier

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Book Reviews
Authors: Marianne Cloutier

August 24, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Susan MacWilliam, Remote Viewing – Pierre Rannou

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Book Reviews
Authors: Pierre Rannou

August 29, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Perspectives 2010 – Stephanie Gibson

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephanie Gibson | Artists: Hong-An Truong, Lena Herzog, Matthew Porter

August 31, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — “Perspectives,” at the International Center of Photography in New York, is a new exhibition series focusing on emerging photographers and filmmakers. The inaugural presentation features the work of five young artists – Carol Bove, Lena Herzog, Matthew Porter, Ed Templeton, and Hong-An Truong – who employ various strategies in image-making that highlight the ever-apparent fact that the medium can take on any subject and show itself in a myriad of forms.

Nicolas Baier – Pierre Bertrand

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Bertrand | Artists: Nicolas Baier

Septembre 6, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Runa Islam – Julien Champagne

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Julien Champagne | Artists: Runa Islam

Septembre 7, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Marisa Portolese – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

September 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — While acclaimed Montreal-based photographic artist Marisa Portolese has always used people she knows as subjects in her work, her new photographic series, Dream Weavers (of which this show, “Pietà,” is a stand-alone excerpt), marks something of a departure. Here, she turns inwards, essaying an up-close-and-personal narrative involving members of her own family while constructing a poetic meta-narrative that is rife with feelings, memories, and the numinous.

Catherine Bodmer, Duo – Nathalie Guimond

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Guimond | Artists: Catherine Bodmer

September 15, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Johanne Biffi, Route 389 – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Johanne Biffi

September 20, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Susan Dobson, Dislocation – Gary Michael Dault

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gary Michael Dault, Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Susan Dobson

September 22, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — All of the large-scale colour photographs making up Susan Dobson’s recent Toronto exhibition “Dislocations” contribute in varying ways to her notion of dislocation as a modification – as she puts it on her Web site – of “time, space and geography, where surroundings can seem both familiar and foreign.” She notes, as well, that “a pervasive and persistent form of déjà vu dominates the work, derived in part through the combination of digitally manipulated images with photographs shot in the documentary mode.”

Les 41e Rencontres d’Arles, Du lourd et du piquant – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault

September 27, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

William Kentridge, Five Themes – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: William Kentridge

September 29, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — A resurrection of hand-drawn film animation as a procedure to be presented in museum installations in this era of digital abstraction is a brilliant move. The simplicity of this strategy highlights the delusion resident in the efforts of so many contemporary artists to produce a critical art practice using technologically “advanced” techniques. In many cases, these attempts simply play a role in confirming the cultural status quo.

Jocelyne Alloucherie, Climats – René Viau

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Jocelyne Alloucherie

4 octobre 2016 [originellement publié à l’hiver 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Bodies in Trouble / Corps en péril – Carol Payne

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Carol Payne | Artists: Gretta Pratt, Lana Slezic, Yves Klein

October 6, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — A limp body brought back to life, a figure leaping impossibly into the air, a gun wielded by a faceless hand: with images like these, “Bodies in Trouble,” Galerie SAW Gallery’s concise but ambitious exhibition of photo-based work, explores the body, performance, media, and danger. Mounted as part of Festival X, Ottawa’s biennial city-wide photography festival, “Bodies in Trouble” pairs photojournalistic images with performance art, implicitly critiquing the news image and stressing a visual poetics through juxtapositions of these forms.

Michel Campeau, La chambre noire – Richard Baillargeon, On Obsolescence and Being Photographic

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Richard Baillargeon | Artists: Michel Campeau

October 11, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Michel Campeau, who has been a contemporary-art photographer for four decades, has received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize (2010), the Jean-Paul-Riopelle Career Grant (2009), and the Higashikawa International Photography Prize in Japan (1994). His work, which explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of images, questions the conventions of documentary photography. A retrospective exhibition of his work in 1996 at the Canadian Contemporary Photography Museum covered his production from 1971 to 1996. Campeau is represented by Galerie Simon Blais (Montreal), and lives and works in Montreal.

Chuck Samuels, Before Photography – Chuck Samuels, The Figure of the Photographer

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

October 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Chuck Samuels’s photographs have been exhibited, published, and collected extensively in Quebec, Canada, and abroad. His installation and video works have been presented in various venues, including several Canadian film and video festivals, and his photographs are in numerous collections in Canada, France, Belgium and the United States.

Yan Giguère, Attractions – Sylvain Campeau, Gravity and Tropism

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Yan Giguère

October 18, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Yan Giguère has been a well-known figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene since the mid-1990s. His most recent photographic works were in solo exhibitions at Galerie Optica in 2009, Centre VU in 2008 and 2002, and Galerie B-312 in 2002. His pieces, which are in a number of collections, highlight the poetry of the everyday in series with strong narrative potential arranged on the walls of the exhibition space.

Alain Pratte, Histoires – Mona Hakim, A Thousand Journeys

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Alain Pratte

October 20, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Since 1973, Alain Pratte has produced numerous photographic projects, a number of which have been in exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including France and Venezuela. His work bears witness to passing time, the permanence or fleeting aspect of objects, unpredictable fates, and illusory ambitions.

Series

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Pratte, Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, Yan Giguère

[Winter 2011] Fragmented narratives, recording of traces, and role playing within the image are some of the ways in which the artists presented in this issue approach the notion of series. Systematic or scattered, the series provides a means to gather multiple images to evoke a personal universe, possible dramas, a disappearing world, or the […]

Narrative Series

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alain Pratte, Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, Yan Giguère

[Winter 2011] The works presented in this issue are characterized by the accumulation of a large number of images and the creation of series that may be systematic, or may be intuitive and fragmentary. In some of these works we can discern an iterative mode that operates in the formal arrangement, the object of investigation, […]

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES

[Winter 2011] Fragmented narratives, recording of traces, and role playing within the image are some of the ways in which the artists presented in this issue approach the notion of series. Systematic or scattered, the series provides a means to gather multiple images to evoke a personal universe, possible dramas, a disappearing world, or the […]

Edward Burtynsky, Oil & Water – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Interviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

June 2, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Edward Burtynsky […] has captured iconic images of human intervention in the landscape in works of a scope and scale that evidence how the activities and the layerings of nature and culture change a place. His recent books include China, Quarries, and Oil…

Benoit Aquin, Far East, Far West – Claude Baillargeon

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Book Reviews
Authors: Claude Baillargeon | Artists: Benoit Aquin

June 7, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — According to journalist Patrick Alleyn, Aquin’s co-traveller and collaborator of choice, this scourge constitutes “one of the most severe environmental disasters of our time.” In 2006, intending to raise public awareness, the two gained the sponsorship of the Canadian International Development Agency and made the first of three journeys to the affected areas…

William Eggleston, Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: William Eggleston

June 14, 2015 [originally published in French only Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Laurent Guérin, Samayou – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Laurent Guérin

June 16, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — World Press Photo included his [Laurent Guérin] photographs of street children in India in a show held at the Maison de la Culture Frontenac in Montreal in 2004. These photographs – in which all the chaos and beauty of India, from street life to more contemplative imagery, are captured – became the book Hindi Pop.

Donigan Cumming, Kincora – Matthieu Brouillard

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Matthieu Brouillard | Artists: Donigan Cumming

June 21, 2016 [originally published in French in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Péripéties – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Bettina Hoffmann, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Chih-Chien Wang, Eve K. Tremblay, Milutin Gubash

June 23, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — This exhibition highlights narrative disruption and its consequences in five mature bodies of photographic and video work, and demonstrates how the uncanny seeps in and out of those ruptures in an auratic and seismic way, even as meaning and dénouement are delayed. Works by Bettina Hoffman, Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Milutin Gubash, Eve K. Tremblay, and Chih-Chien Wang…

Shirin Neshat et Shoja Azari, Women Without Men – Mylène Joly

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mylène Joly | Artists: Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari

June 28, 2016 [originally published in French in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.