[Winter 2015] The realm of the living includes as many habitats as ways of life. As fragments of the impossible inventory of all inhabited places, these four portfolios cross over into environments that may be real or fantasized, but are always constructed. EDITORIAL PORTFOLIOS FOCUS EXHIBITIONS READINGS VOICES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
We are pleased to present in this issue the first thematic section put together by Alexis Desgagnés in his new position as associate editor of the magazine. The section, bearing on the notion of habitat, juxtaposes recent works by photographers Normand Rajotte and Stephen Gill, each of whom stands out for a field practice adapted […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Allison Tweedie, Normand Rajotte, Stephen Gill, Steve Veilleux
So, here we are, humans and animals (the same thing, really), perforce engaged in the concrete and naked fact of existing. We are – the verb says it with the force of law – sunk into being like a foundation is sunk into the ground. For as long as the few hours, days, or decades […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Iain Sinclair | Artists: Stephen Gill
March 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Our expeditions usually begin at first light. This time, Stephen explained, we would be better to hold off until the worst of the rush hour had burnt itself out. I sat on the church porch and waited, admiring a procession of those bright-red sculptural interventions held long enough at the traffic lights to catch the appreciative eye, the new Stagecoach buses with the NOT IN SERVICE destination windows…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Steve Veilleux
March 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — One can easily imagine the scene, so banal that it is universal. On a moonless night, its highbeams blazing, a new car, with a new couple inside, rolls down a remote road, far from the bustle of the city. The passengers, the nuclear family of the post-atomic era, already see themselves there, deluded by the illusion of an extraordinary suburb – one of a thousand similar suburbs…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Allison Tweedie
March 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The series Cutting Sunsets is composed of small-format collages portraying scenes of daily life around affluent dwellings on the American west coast. A few people, here and there, quietly tend to their land, do maintenance, contemplate, walk around, and converse…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Loncol Daignault | Artists: Normand Rajotte
March 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Le chantier: the first image. Through marks and lines – green, taupe, orange – a wet woodlands glistens. In the foreground, three black tree trunks. The one in the centre is cut open at the base, showing freshly gnawed yellow flesh. It partially hides a pile of branches arranged in an outwardly spreading form – the key, the sun of the image…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Fabien Pinaroli | Artists: Valérie Jouve
March 11, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — For more than twenty years, in her encounters and the resulting portraits, Valérie Jouve has been navigating among reference points composed of historical markers such as architecture in peripheral zones, or the habituses of contemporary human beings…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Béla Egyedi
March 6, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Béla Ferenc Egyedi was born in 1913 in Esztergom, Hungary. He immigrated to Canada in 1951 and lived for many years in Montreal’s Milton-Park neighbourhood, at various addresses on Lorne Avenue and Durocher Street, near Milton Street. He was simultaneously a photographer, a printmaker, a poet, and a ceramicist…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Paco Gómez Martínez
March 4, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — “Mother and teacher mine, my sad and spacious Spain”: this is how the poet, Blas de Otero described his country’s vast geography and serial suffering under the double yoke of monarchy and religion, and then under fascism…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Kelly Lycan
February 27, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The title of Kelly Lycan’s show, Underglow, incorporates her interest in consumer culture, photography, high art, and cultures of display. Lycan uses the connotations of luminous detailing in car culture, cosmetic techniques that add shimmering radiance, and, in general, the use of light to emphasize form to animate the role of light in photography…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Ryoji Ikeda
February 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: David Goldblatt
February 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — David Goldblatt has been photographing in South Africa for many decades. The acuity with which he has recorded the depths of violence and its specific character both during and after the era of apartheid rests on his observation of violence naturalized…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Félix Dufour-Laperrière
February 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala
February 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The Great War: The Persuasive Power of Photography contains over four hundred images, ranging from private portraits to almost-life-size enlargements of battlefields and scenes from the front. The exhibition addresses the multiple means by which photographs circulated during the war years, while at the same time underscoring the profound sense of loss and devastation…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Ada Ackerman | Artists: Julien Magre
February 11, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Elisa Julia Gilmour | Artists: Harun Farocki
February 6, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — On September 17, 2014, the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), an institution that collects, researches, and exhibits historical and contemporary lens-based imagery, opened three new exhibitions on war imagery: how it is produced, constructed, distributed, and received…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Gwenaël Bélanger
February 4, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande
January 30, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Corina Ilea
January 28, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Ryerson Image Centre presented the exhibition Dispatch: War Photographs in Print, 1854-2008, curated by Thierry Gervais, and marking the centennial of the First World War. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication that underscores the intricate connection between war and photography, as well as the not-so-innocent mechanisms of representation activated in recording, transmission, and shaping of conflicts in the visual field…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Book Reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés
[Winter 2015] You can read the bilingual article by switching over to the French version of this page : CV99 – Ouvrages à souligner. Donigan Cumming, The Stage, New York, Errata Editions, 2014, 132 pp., Eng. Catherine Tremblay et Véronique Béland, Elles collectionnent des mondes, Montréal, Les Éditions du renard, 2014, 116 p., fr. ; […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Vincent Lafrance
November 18, 2015 [originally published Winter 2015] — Vincent Lafrance’s work is permeated with the idea of the simulacrum – perception and its faults. Playing with photographic virtuosity and with randomness, he composes visual illusions with traditional photographic means. His body of videographic work uses language as a confusing effect; he produces fictions that fluidly meander between …