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.

Living Things, Carte grise à Roy Arden – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Moyra Davey, Roy Arden

June 29, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — True to its title, this exhibition consists of photographic images grouped thematically by way of their subject, “living things.” In this case, the sample extends from images of algae in a pond, to a dog’s foot, to a family portrait. What these photographs all have in common is that they are “of” some “thing,” they all depict a living thing (with the exception of one dead rabbit)…

Emanuel Licha, Pourquoi photogénique ? – Virginie Doré Lemonde

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Emanuel Licha

July 5, 2016 [originally published in French only in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Esther Shalev-Gerz, Ton image me regarde ? – Elizabeth Matheson

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Elizabeth Matheson | Artists: Esther Shalev-Gerz

July 7, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Within participatory arts there is often an implicit, yet compelling, assumption that media and public attention to issues that figure into public art attest to their social significance, while lack of interest evidences their irrelevance. That which is not spoken of, it seems, is assumed to have little or no consequence. However, as Esther Shalev-Gerz knows, it is often silent moments, ones that not only shape private lives…

Pascal Dufaux, Le cosmos dans lequel nous sommes – Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Pascal Dufaux

July 11, 2016 [originally published in French only in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Performance Images, Image Performances – Anne Bénichou

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Anne Bénichou

August 1, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — In 2004, at Dazibao, “Performance et photographie: Point and Shoot” explored the close connections between performance and photography. In this exhibition, performance images were envisaged beyond their documentary function, as works in their own right. In 2007, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University presented “9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966,” an exhibition devoted to the eponymous evening of experimental performances held in New York in 1966…

Re-creating Danse dans la neige – Mario Côté

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Mario Côté | Artists: Françoise Sullivan

August 3, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — In October 2005, my chance meeting with the multidisciplinary artist Françoise Sullivan at the café of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels led to the idea of reviving, almost sixty years later, an early masterpiece of modern dance: Danse dans la neige.

Rearticuling Performance on SecondLife – Cyril Thomas

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Cyril Thomas | Artists: Eva et Franco Mattes, Joseph DeLappe, Lynn Hershman Leeson

August 8, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — It is obvious – given the statements and actions of the SecondLife Liberation Army, the 3D reconfiguration of the Guantanamo prison filmed by Nonny de la Peña, Liberate Your Avatar by Paul Sermon, works by Agnès de Cayeux, and the productions of Nicolas Boone – that SecondLife, created by LindenLabs, is a territory and space that is widely used by artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and musicians…

Archives of Inspiration – Barbara Clausen

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Barbara Clausen | Artists: Daniel Guzman, Kelly Walker, Luis Felipe Ortega, Seth Price

August 10, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — A man walks into frame and presses his body into a corner. The camera zooms in on him as he forces his entire body into the confines of the triangular space that he has created. He shifts his hips and squeezes his arms and hands into the small space left between his body and the corner. His movements are slight, yet strenuous; there is a sexual, yet suppressed, almost violent tension in his striving to be absorbed by the architecture.

Animating the Document, Performing the Spectator: Tim Clark, Reading the Limits, 2008. – David Tomas

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: David Tomas | Artists: Tim Clark

August 15, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Tim Clark. Reading the Limits” was produced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University. On one level, the exhibition was a retrospective devoted to Tim Clark, a Montreal-based performance artist who produced a series of important works between 1977 and 2003. On another level, it was designed to reopen the question of the contemporary status of the artist and the interstitial – post-1970s/contemporary academic – function of the artwork…

Guest editor : Anne Bénichou

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Anne Bénichou

[Fall 2010] documents [de] PERFORMANCE Historic performances are currently being updated in different forms: exhibitions, appropriations, remediations, and re-enactments. These practices raise a number of questions about the status of performance documentation (photos, videos, and films in particular) and how it is interpreted, adressed here through multiple recent examples. DAVID TOMAS Tim Clark. Reading the […]

Documents

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2010] by Jacques Doyon MoMA’s major retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović marks museum institutions’ full recognition of the field of performance. In a way, this exhibition is the logical outcome of a movement of reactualization of historic performances that has been underway for more than a decade and to which Abramowic has […]

Ciel variable 86 – PERFORMANCE

Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE

[Fall 2010] Historic performances are currently being updated in different forms: exhibitions, appropriations, remediations, and re-enactments. These practices raise a number of questions about the status of performance documentation (photos, videos, and films in particular) and how it is interpreted, addressed here through multiple recent examples. ÉDITORIAL DOSSIER EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES   Purchase this issue

The Malcolmsons Collection : A passion for Photography – Claude Baillargeon

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Interviews
Authors: Claude Baillargeon

March 30, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The complete interview with Ann & Harry Malcolmson is now available online. For the past twenty years, they have dedicated themselves to the study and collecting of photography. With a particular interest in historical material drawn from the medium’s diverse aesthetic history, they have assembled one of Canada’s most distinctive collections.

Raymonde April, Equivalences 1-4 – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Raymonde April

April 6, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — Why is it that Raymonde April’s art always occupies the foreground of my consciousness when I think about photography – about what it is and what it can be ? Even as flashier and more graphically cinematographic photography rules the proverbial roost in the art world right now, April, a maverick artist, has long since staked out her territory and made it her wholly and uniquely her own.

Isabelle Hayeur, L’envers du décor – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

April 14, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Entracte : films d’un futur héroïque – Virginie Doré Lemonde

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde

April 18, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

La subversion des images : Surréalisme, photographie, film – Matthieu Brouillard

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Matthieu Brouillard | Artists: BrassaÏ, Claude Cahun

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

Contrainte / Restraint – Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: José Carlos Martinat

April 25, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

David Hoffos, Scenes from the House Dream – Petra Halkes

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Petra Halkes | Artists: David Hoffos

April 28, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — Despite the impending calamities hidden in many of the works in Scenes from the House Dream, David Hoffos’s gathering of twenty installations into one, dark, enveloping space feels warm and fuzzy. True, a monster lurks under a boat, vapours rise in a noisy forest, and snow drifts through the open windows of a deserted house, but the exhibition curated by Shirley Madill remains appealing and enchanting.

Nelson Henricks – Charles Guilbert

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Nelson Henricks

May 2, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, INT-SCÈNE-JOUR – Colette Tougas

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Eija-Liisa Ahtila

May 5, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Chuck Samuels, Before Photography – Virginie Doré Lemonde

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Chuck Samuels

May 9, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Art et activisme, Un monde dans lequel plusieurs mondes s’inscrivent – René Viau

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Exhibition reviews
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Gregory Sholette, John Jordan

May 12, 2016 [originally published in French only in Summer 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Stan Douglas, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 – Karen Henry

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Essays, Portfolios
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Stan Douglas

May 16, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The impressive piece of public art addresses the very nature of public space. It is named after the two streets that cross at the north corner of the Woodward’s building, on which the artwork is installed. The image inhabits space like a sculpture, grandly overlooking the public and private courtyards of the new complex in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

War at a Distance. Blake Fitzpatrick, Karyn Sandlos, Roger Simon, curators – Amish Morrell

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Amish Morrell | Artists: Allyson Mitchell, Graeme Smith, Louie Palu, Richard Johnson, Stephen Andrews, Suzanne Opton

May 19, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The theme of the exhibition War at a Distance, presented by the TPW Gallery in Toronto, was media representations of war in the context of debates over the Canadian presence in Afghanistan.

Emanuel Licha, R for Real & Bagdads – Stephen Horne, Dwelling : A Set-up

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Emanuel Licha

May 24, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — These two works by Emanuel Licha are based on his interest in urban settings re-created for police or military training camps. The intention is to reveal the fully operational role of fiction in the reality of conflicts and in the composition of our portrayals of the foreign.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups – Jacinto Lageira, The Poetics of Facts

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Sophie Ristelhueber

May 26, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — In Eleven Blowups, Sophie Ristelhueber uses elements of her own photographs to re-create images of bomb craters produced by the media. In showing the traces of destruction, these images, true and false at once, portray not the specificity of a single story and place but the experience of collapse.

Conflict

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Artists: Emanuel Licha, Sophie Ristelhueber, Stan Douglas

Bombs opening up craters in streets, training camps that look like urban neighbourhoods, media perceptions of the war in Afghanistan, a look back at the riot as background for an urban renewal project… and images that use representation and fiction to try to convey these realities. SOPHIE RISTELHUEBER Eleven Blowups Poetics of Facts Jacinto Lageira […]

Representation of conflict

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2010] by Jacques Doyon This issue looks at the representation of conflicts and wars. Whether they are distant battles, terrorist attacks, or riots taking place in the heart of our cities, their communication to the public is often dominated by spectacularization and slanted views. The artists whose works brought together here address situations that […]

Ciel variable 85 – CONFLICT

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT

[Summer 2010] Bombs opening up craters in streets, training camps that look like urban neighbourhoods, media perceptions of the war in Afghanistan, a look back at the riot as background for an urban renewal project… and images that use representation and fiction to try to convey these realities.   EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS VOICES   […]

Interview with Collector Glen Bloom – Johanna Mizgala

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Interviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: John Massey, Lynne Cohen, Roy Arden

[Spring 2010] Glen Bloom’s interest in contemporary art began during his first year of law school in Edmonton. The building adjoining the law faculty was that of the fine arts faculty; by chance or design, Bloom found that he was spending more time in the latter than the former, and it piqued his interest in […]

Recent Publications – Anne Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Book Reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

[Printemps 2010] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV97 – Ouvrages à souligner. By Anne Marie St-Jean Aubre Reviewed books: Marie Perrault, Anne Ramsden. La collection et le quotidien, Rimouski, Musée régional de Rimouski, 2007, 55 p., ill. n. et b. et coul. Texte […]

Lynne Cohen, Cover – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Book Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

[Spring 2010] Lynne Cohen Cover Cherbourg-Octeville : Le point du jour, 2009, 142 pp., col. ills. Bilingual text Cover, recently put out by the French publisher Le Point du Jour, presents the work of Montreal-based photographer Lynne Cohen. Cohen began photographing domestic interiors and has been pursuing a documentary-style description of institutional interior spaces for […]

Matthieu Brouillard, La Résurrection / Les Enfants de la symétrie brisée – Jean-Pierre Vidal

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Pierre Vidal | Artists: Matthieu Brouillard

[Spring 2010] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Centre Sagamie, Alma Du 3 septembre au 9 octobre 2009

The Edge of Vision – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Chris McCaw, Michael Flomen

[Spring 2010] The Rise of Abstraction in Photography Galerie Pangée, Montreal September 15 to October 12, 2009 Culled from a much larger exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York, curated by Lyle Rexer, author of, among others, How to Look at Outsider Art,1 The Edge of Vision is a very special show that touches on […]

Gwenaël Bélanger, Casser l’image – Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Gwenaël Bélanger

[Spring 2010] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Casser l’image Expression, centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe Du 7 novembre au 20 décembre 2009

Jason DodgeJason Dodge et Rob Kovitz, Into Black… et pas blanc comme neige – Virginie Doré Lemonde

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Jason Dodge, Rob Kovitz

[Spring 2010] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Jason Dodge et Rob Kovitz Dazibao centre de photographies actuelles, Montréal Du 24 octobre au 28 novembre 2009

Michael Schreier, Storyteller / Waiting for Words – Judith Parker

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Judith Parker | Artists: Michael Schreier

[Spring 2010] The Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa September 10 to November 15, 2009. Disquieting, painterly, poetic – these words come to mind on viewing Michael Schreier’s series of large-scale grey/blue/purple semi-abstract photographs, Disappearing Numbers (2007-20-09), and Or-Sarua (2009), which portray empty bunker-like interiors quietly resonating with a sense of tragedy. Despite their softened forms and […]

Nicholas et Sheila Pye, Vanitas – Nathalie Guimond

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Guimond | Artists: Nicholas Pye, Sheila Pye

[Spring 2010] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Galerie Art Mûr, Montréal Du 15 août au 12 septembre 2009

Guido Guidi, Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion: Photographs by Guido Guidi, 1997–2007 – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Guido Guidi

[Spring 2010] CCA, Montreal September 11, 2009, to January 10, 2010 Nestled within the CCA’s Octagonal Gallery in conceptually elegant fashion, this thematic body of photographic work by the Italian photographer Guido Guidi paid tribute to an architectural masterwork while highlighting his own various strengths and idiosyncrasies as a creative artist preoccupied, for the last […]

Yan Giguère, Attractions – Sylvain Campeau

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Yan Giguère

[Spring 2010] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Galerie Optica, Montréal Du 12 septembre au 17 octobre 2009

Andreas Gursky : Werke/Works 80-08 – John K. Grande

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Essays
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Andreas Gursky

[Spring 2010] by John K. Grande Andréas Gursky’s incredible take on the contemporary has much to do with the ascent of photography in the contemporary art world. And yet Gursky, as much as any photographier, is to be credited for raising that profile, thanks to his monumental photographic images. It is therefore ironic that for […]

Hu Yang, Shanghai Living – Lei Ping, Restratified Private Space

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Lei Ping | Artists: Hu Yang

[Spring 2010] Here are selections from a remarkable documentary work produced by Hu Yang, a Shanghai photographer who recently moved to Toronto. Shanghai Living comprises some five hundred portraits of Shanghai residents photographed in their own interiors, along with short excerpts from interviews in which each describes his or her way of life, values, and […]

Olga Chagaoutdinova, From Russia and Cuba – Gary Michael Dault, Back to the Futur

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Olga Chagaoutdinova

[Spring 2010] A résident of Canada for the last ten years, Olga Chagaoutdinova has remained interested in the evolution of the Russian society, where she experienced the early effects of perestroika. She returned to Russia to take photographs of people and interiors that juxtapose artefacts of traditional Soviet life with heterogeneous aspects of Western consumer […]

Gabor Szilasi, Un certain regard – Martha Langford, Gabor Szilasi : An Appreciation

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Gabor Szilasi

[Spring 2010] Over the years, Gabor Szilasi has assembled a remarkable portrait of Quebecers as a community and of the Montreal urban landscape that earned him the Prix Borduas in 2009. Perhaps it took a com- pletely new eye to tease into visibility the multiple fibres woven into Quebec society. Szilasi’s portraits form a major […]

Faces and Places

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2010] by Jacques Doyon This issue presents portraits of people from all walks of life, most of them photographed in their interiors. There are also views of private places filled with things – décor, furniture – that testify to a presence. It is possible to think that individuality, self-representation, is manifested in a person’s […]

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED

Ciel variable 84 – INHABITED

  [Spring 2010]   Portraits convey individualities, but they also express common conditions. Facial features, pose, clothing, and immediate environment contribute to a representation of self, but they also bring us closer to others. These images, like the photographers’ trajectories, portray uniqueness at the crossroads where cultures mix. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITONS READINGS VOICES   […]