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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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
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 | 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 […]
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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)…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
[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 […]
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 | 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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
[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
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 | 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 […]
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 …
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 …
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
[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 . […]
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 | 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 … […]
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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).
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, […]
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, …
[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
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 | 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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
[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. […]