[Fall 2019]
The artists brought together in this issue’s thematic section explore different issues related to the boundaries of sexual identity and their transgression. Personas, transvestism, and role mutations are core to these artists’ approaches, as they address various issues fundamental to establishing a society based on inclusion rather than on narrow concepts of identities and, by extension, cultures…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
[Fall 2019] By Jacques Doyon The artists brought together in this issue’s thematic section explore different issues related to the boundaries of sexual identity and their transgression. Personas, transvestism, and role mutations are core to these artists’ approaches, as they address various issues fundamental to establishing a society based on inclusion rather than on narrow […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Portfolios
Artists: Erasmus Schröter, JJ Levine, Kent Monkman
[Fall 2019] The artists brought together in this issue’s thematic section explore different issues related to the boundaries of sexual identity and their transgression. Personas, transvestism, and role mutations are core to these artists’ approaches, as they address various issues fundamental to establishing a society based on inclusion rather than on narrow concepts of identities […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Kent Monkman
October 25, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Dayna McLeod. Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is the muse and alter ego of Kent Monkman, a Cree artist who confronts the violent and systemic consequences of colonialism on Indigenous peoples in North America, with attention to Canada and Quebec.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: JJ Levine
November 8, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Charles Guilbert. What strikes the eye in JJ Levine’s work is a unique way of challenging gender norms. But when we look more closely, we discover that Levine wants to erase many borders – in both photography practice and in addressing subjects such as family, time, and space…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Portfolios
Artists: Erasmus Schröter
November 15, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Andreas Höll. Our image of the world has always been very fragile, and it has severely jolted on several occasions. Sigmund Freud, for example, cited the three insults to humanity that overturned our view of the world: Copernicus expected us to believe that we weren’t at the centre of the universe; Darwin proved we were descended from apes and warned us not to assume we were the pinnacle of creation; and Freud himself revealed that, following the discovery of the unconscious, we were no longer master even in our own house…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Luigi Ghirri
February 6, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Stephen Horne. The Map and The Territory is a large and intricate exhibition of colour photographs by the late Italian artist Luigi Ghirri at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.1 No doubt the curator of the exhibition, James Lingwood, adopted this title following up on a note that Ghirri wrote in 1970 in which he explained that “his aim was not to make photographs, but rather charts and maps.”2…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
February 13, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Pierre Dessureault. In a body of work accumulated over more than sixty years, Dave Heath (1931–2016), a Canadian photographer born in the United States, challenged the qualities of the photographic medium and its techniques. He constantly probed, through images, Montaigne’s dictum that “every man carries the entire form of the human condition.”1…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Carrie Mae Weems
February 28, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Jill Glessing. Violence runs through our lives, experienced directly or through media representations. We are subject to its power to varying degrees depending on our geographical location, race, class, gender, and access to high-speed internet. We are well acquainted with the variety of ways that humans inflict harm – whether physical, social, or psychological – upon one another…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Martin Bureau
March 7, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — Par Sophie Bertrand. “The number of walls has tripled since the Cold War, and it has kept growing since 2001; it now consists of almost 30,000 km of armed borders.”1 This observation, made in 2013 by the researchers of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques et diplomatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal, during a conference on issues around walled borders, conveys much more than a malaise inherited from history…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Ansley West Rivers
March 22, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Myriam Jacob-Allard
March 22, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Guy Tillim
April 4, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Clément Willer, Fanny Bieth | Artists: Denis Rioux
April 16, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Andrea Szilasi
April 23, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By James D. Campbell. Intimate Portraits brought together works by four artists whose preoccupation with the human body is a longstanding one: Donigan Cumming, JJ Levine, George Steeves, and Andrea Szilasi. Their works interrogate the nature of portraiture itself…
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michèle Cohen Hadria | Artists: Barbara Breitenfellner
April 30, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Michelle Bui
[Fall 2019] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Parisian Laundry, Montréal Du 18 avril au 25 mai 2019 Par Jean-Michel Quirion (French only) [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article.] Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Steve Leroux
[Fall 2019] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Occurrence, centre d’art et d’essai, Montréal Du 9 mai au 15 juin 2019 Par Franck Michel (French only) [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article.] […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Guillaume Tomasi | Artists: Birthe Piontek
[Fall 2019] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. New York, Gnomic Book 2019, 112 pages Par Guillaume Tomasi (French only) [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article.] Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Book Reviews, Readings
[Fall 2019] [Excerpt] David McMillan, Growth and Decay, Göttingen, Steidl Verlag, 2019, 260 p. Guillaume Simoneau, Murder, Londres, Mack, 2019, 96 p. Greg Girard, Tokyo Yokusaka, 1976-1983, Toronto, Magenta Foundation, 2019, 160 p. Louis Perreault, Les affluents, Montréal/Québec, Les Éditions du renard/VU, 2019, 96 p. Kim Waldron, Une autre femme_ Another Woman, New York, Galerie […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: Audrey Genois, Jacques Doyon
[Fall 2019] An interview by Jacques Doyon Audrey Genois has been the executive director of MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image (formerly Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal) since 2016. She was assistant curator at the Galerie de l’UQAM from 2002 to 2016. Over fifteen years, she organized more than sixty exhibitions and ten national […]
[Winter 2020]
In this issue’s thematic section, we look at collective action in society. Against a background of social conflict and war, the artists evoke the impact of collective actions on the common good by re-examining and recontextualizing images plucked from the mass of media images that form our relationship with the world.
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
[Winter 2020] In the thematic section of this issue, we take a look at collective action in society. Against a background of social conflict and war, the artists evoke the impact of collective actions on the common good by scrutinizing multitudes of media images that help to form our relationship with the world. Through re-examination […]
[Winter 2020] In this issue’s thematic section, we look at collective action in society. Against a background of social conflict and war, the artists evoke the impact of collective actions on the common good by re-examining and recontextualizing images plucked from the mass of media images that form our relationship with the world. DOMINIQUE BLAIN […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Portfolios
Authors: Louise Déry | Artists: Dominique Blain
[Winter 2020] By Louise Déry As Dominique Blain’s exhibition Déplacements was being presented in Paris,<sup>1</sup> Venice was suffering a flood so terrible that we were once again anguished about the possibility of seeing this incomparable treasure of world heritage disappear. Not so long ago, it was Notre-Dame de Paris that was severely damaged, this time […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Portfolios
Authors: Alain Paiement | Artists: Alain Paiement
[Winter 2020] Demonstrations. From Occupy Wall Street to Extinction Rebellion actions, popular resistance demonstrations have become an integral part of international news over the last decade. We are almost accustomed to seeing, over and over, spectacular images of uprisings against dictators, altercations among citizens, identity-related confrontations, movements of crowds in war and in desperate migrations. […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Portfolios
Authors: Gisele Amantea, Jacques Doyon | Artists: Gisele Amantea
[Winter 2020] An interview by Jacques Doyon Jacques Doyon: What is the origin of the work Aleppo, Syria December 17, 2016? How did the idea emerge? Why Syria? And what prompted you to work from an existing image of a disaster? Gisele Amantea: I was invited by curator Emily Falvey to participate in the group […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Portfolios
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Mélissa Pilon
[Winter 2020] By Claudia Polledri What is a crowd, and how can a photograph teach us about this protagonist of twentieth-century history? In her photobook Foules, Mélissa Pilon underlines the visual complexity of crowds as living organisms, casting an original gaze upon them. In this work, defined as photojournalism, Pilon aims to offer a new […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Stephen Gill
[Winter 2020] Par Alexis Desgagnés On the threshold of my teenage years, my greatest passion was to observe birds. I spent countless hours, binoculars hung around my neck, prowling slowly, silently, through woods and meadows, looking out for a rare gem! When I was thirteen, a camera, a gift from my stepmother, replaced the binoculars, […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Laurie Milner | Artists: Geneviève Cadieux
[Winter 2020] Par Laurie Milner Is it the greyness of the April afternoon that makes the Rene Blouin Gallery seem so luminous as I enter Geneviève Cadieux’s exhibition Ghost Ranch?1 I had heard the buzz among artists and colleagues that this was a show to be seen – a virtuoso production by an august Montreal […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Babacar Traoré (Doli), Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Bouna Médoune Sèye, Élise Fitte-Duval, Fatou Kandé Senghor, Ibrahima Thiam, KhéraBaba, Mabeye Deme, Malick Welli
[Winter 2020] Par Erika Nimis Dakar, a cosmopolitan capital city and crossroads on the Atlantic coast, open to all creative currents, has grown under the gaze of its photographers. An independent field of professional photography emerged in the 1990s, and the institution of the Mois de la Photo has contributed to legitimizing an increasingly engaged […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Guignard | Artists: Rebecca Belmore
[Winter 2020] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Braver le monumental Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal Commissaire : Wanda Nanibush Du 20 juin au 6 octobre 2019 Par Sophie Guignard (French only) [See the printed or digital version of […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Marie-Ève Leclerc-Parker | Artists: Janick Burn
[Winter 2020] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Plein sud, Longueuil Du 18 mai au 22 juin 2019 Par Marie-Ève Leclerc-Parker (French only) [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article. On sale throughout […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Yan Giguère
[Hiver 2020] Galerie La Castiglione May 15–June 15, 2019 By Stéphanie Hornstein The day that I first make it to Yan Giguère’s solo show at Galerie La Castiglione, Montreal’s construction season is in full swing. St. Catherine Street is a gaping trench and the jackhammer’s thrum hounds me all the way up four flights of […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Isuma, Mari Katayama, Tamás Waliczky, Voluspa Jarpa, Zanele Muholi
[Winter 2020] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. May You Live in Interesting Times May 11 to November 24 2019 By Daniel Fiset Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexia Pinto Ferretti | Artists: Michel Depatie
[Winter 2020] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Ashu-Takusseu : la traversée photographique Centre d’exposition de Val-David Du 22 juin au 8 septembre 2019 Par Alexia Pinto Ferretti (French only) Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Gagnon-Forest, Hua Jin
[Winter 2020] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Galerie La Castiglione, Montréal Du 28 août au 28 septembre 2019 Par Christian Roy (French only) Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: André Kertész, Bruce Charlesworth, Ellen Carey, Kunihiro Shinohara, Paolo Gioli, Toshio Shibata
[Winter 2020] Le projet Polaroid – Art et technologie Musée McCord, Montréal Du 13 juin au 15 septembre 2019 Par Sophie Bertrand (French only) Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Jodi Bieber
[Winter 2020] Ryerson Image Centre, Guest curator: Sandrine Colard September 11–December 8, 2019 By Jill Glessing Photography extends the gaze, making material its spectrum of desires and subject positions – whether violence, control, submission, negotiation, or resistance. Once etched as image – on plate, print, or screen – the momentary exchange circulates and is entrenched […]
Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Readings
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Cy Twombly, Ewa Monika Zebrowski
August 11, 2022 [originally published in CV114 in Winter 2020] — By James D. Campbell. Since 2014, noted Canadian artist Ewa Monika Zebrowski has been exploring the universe of artist Cy Twombly on both sides of the Atlantic…
[Summer 2021]
This issue features three artists, with three aesthetic positionings, who share an ironic distancing. One, more scholarly, builds on strata of cultural history; the second, more narrative, fashions, with small strokes, a self-fiction with existential echoes; the last, more direct, affirms the subjectivity of a framing, a gaze. What is it exactly about the visible and the invisible? What wisdom do we need to live better? And what do all these little things that are derailed say about the state of the world?
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
In the feature section of this issue, we encounter three artists, three aesthetic approaches that converge in a certain ironic distance. One, more erudite, draws on the layers of cultural history; another, more narrative, unfolds an autofiction through subtle touches and existential resonances; the last, more direct, affirms the subjectivity of a framing, of a gaze. What, in the end, of the visible and the invisible? What kind of knowledge helps us live better? And what do all these small things that go off track tell us about the state of the world?
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Artists: Franck Gérard, Steve Giasson, Vincent Lafrance
Three artists explore, each in their own way, the visible and the invisible: through erudition, autofiction, and subjectivity, their works reveal an ironic distance from the contemporary world.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Steve Giasson
Steve Giasson continues his Invisible Performances with a series of actions shared on social media during the pandemic. By linking his body to the camera, he creates a poetic and critical imaginary that questions social and media codes.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Vincent Lafrance
In his web series Savoir vivre, Vincent Lafrance stages an alter ego in search of meaning and renewal. Blending autofiction and reflection on creation, the artist explores isolation, failure, and the quest for a new balance with the world.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Leenhardt | Artists: Franck Gérard
[Summer 2021] A story, July 13, 1999, to the present (excerpts) Franck Gérard A press clipping. A few months after my fall, a patron, Löic Francheteau from Flesselles, in a bar where I hang out showed me a newspaper clipping that he had cut out for me. The article tells the story of a young […]
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Alec Soth, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Araki Nobuyoshi, Juergen Teller
Four photographers, three books, two cousins, one prisoner: beyond the heterogeneous content discussed, Jérôme Delgado addresses correspondence as a source of creativity and building closeness among culturally, socially, or physically distant individuals. During the pandemic lockdown, photographer Alec Soth exchanged letters with C. Fausto Cabrera, who was literally locked down in a prison. The result of their epistolary dialogue became a book and two unusual images. For decades, photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti travelled to the Argentinian countryside to visit two cousins who, through images, became both her creative correspondents and the protagonists in their adventures. Photographers Araki Nobuyoshi and Juergen Teller, both of them drawn to flesh and to life, offer a purely visual dialogue. Their book testifies, as a correspondence would, to a deep friendship, mutual respect, and the passage of time.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Évariste Desparois
It was the discovery and acquisition of facsimiles of works by Évariste Desparois that gave the impetus for Sébastien Hudon’s essay. Hudon describes the first layer of a long-term investigation, a noble mission to bring back from oblivion an inventive artist who created photomontages that earned him ephemeral celebrity. Unknown to historians, a mysterious figure even unto his death, Desparois emerged in an era when modernity was taking off in Quebec. Based on sparse documentation, Hudon follows Desparois’s career, finding clues to his stay in Europe in the orbit of Riopelle and Borduas. “What could have happened for a contemporary artist who was among the signatories of Prisme d’yeux and Refus global to be so utterly wiped out of the history of art and photography in Quebec?” Hudon wonders. “The surprising disappearance of Évariste Desparois, and the splitting up of his body of work, bespeaks the fate of so many artists.”
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Essays
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang
In this essay, Sylvain Campeau explores a genre rarely discussed and yet essential to Chih-Chien Wang’s work: the still life – and, in particular, the theme of food. Although fruits and vegetables inhabit Wang’s photographs and videos, that’s not the whole story. Turning to theoretical reflections such as that of Anne Cauquelin and her “table gifts,” Campeau regards the still life as “a fundamental part of a gift, and this is even more obvious in Wang’s work.” The idea of the gift, of a possible “gathering of guests,” leads Campeau to dwell on the artist’s works in which sharing takes the form of speaking, of “confessions.” “Through the exchange and the giving of human beings’ formative stories, there is a question of evading what in them determines us and defines us too closely,” he suggests.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Judith Bellavance
Sensitive to memory, loss, and emotion, Judith Bellavance found the subject for her series Le goût de la durée in an Irish community in the Gaspé – more specifically, in a church basement frozen in time. According to Mona Hakim, Bellavance reconstructs “a personal story through the marks of wear that the site bears and the emblematic objects that it contains.” Favouring a form of “magnification,” she bears witness to the users’ desire to “care for” their living environment. At a time when the fate of our patrimonial and religious architecture is being challenged, writes Hakim, Le goût de la durée sensitively and poetically evokes reflections on our relationship with history and memory – on a heritage just under the surface.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Sandra Brewster
Toronto artist Sandra Brewster, who claims the right to opacity – a concept dear to Édouard Glissant – rethinks Blackness, situating it somewhere “between visibility and invisibility.” This is the conclusion drawn by Érika Nimis in her review of this finely tuned show focused on the deconstruction and representation of racialized people. Brewster transfers images onto a variety of supports (paper, wood, video) as “a metaphor for movement – that, among others, of her family’s migration,” Nimis writes. Long exposure times, models in motion, and random effects are among the means Brewster uses to defy the weighty heritage of photographic practices and crack open the notion of a monolithic Black community. Finally, in Nimis’s view, the most effective response to the stigmatization of appearance may be found in movement.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean De Julio-Paquin | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
An ambitious project in three cities, seventy photographs, six videos, a digital platform, and a monograph, (D)énoncer would have been a major social and political event. The triple exhibition summarizes Isabelle Hayeur’s practice and “reveals, in a dialectic relationship, the fractures between an ideal world and the real world,” notes Jean De Julio-Paquin. Although, in De Julio-Paquin’s view, it was a good idea to divide the programs into themes, the event as a whole “bear[s] witness to the degradation of ecosystems and its repercussions on the social fabric.” De Julio-Paquin dwells on each of the sections, points out Hayeur’s commitment to forms of small-scale resistance – James C. Scott’s concept of infra-politics – and observes that her quest “is not to find beauty or magnificent in devastation, but simply to capture the ambivalence of our relationship with the material world and with life.”
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin | Artists: Stan Douglas
Commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the Empire State Development for a new train-station lobby, Penn Station’s Half Century returns to a historical era of New York City. The artist, Stan Douglas, reconstructed narratives around Penn Station, the demolition of which in 1963 was the catalyst for the modern heritage preservation movement. The four photographic panels, which intermingle fact and fiction, are, in Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin’s opinion, “breath-taking tableaux.” “The composed conceptual work of the Vancouver School of photography here takes on epic new ambition,” Zebrowski-Rubin writes, revealing the audacious technique behind the creative process. He notes that the mastery and scale of Douglas’s work augur well for the approaching 2022 Vienna Biennale, at which Douglas will occupy the Canadian pavilion.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Élisabeth Recurt | Artists: Gagnon-Forest
The duo of Gagnon-Forest, sensitive to the issues linking space and the collective imagination, produce works linked to sociological and aesthetic concerns. The six photographs that they inserted in the large windows of a municipal building alternate scientific (topographic) images and landscapes blurred by the amalgamation of points of view (using the parallax principle). The objectivity of the former, black-and-white digitized cadastral plans, is contrasted against the latter, blue-tinted images. In Élisabeth Recurt’s view, this combination of “informational quality” and “visual quality with fictive content” points to urban constraints and evokes an inaccessible elsewhere. The “sociological and poetic threads” of Séquence aérienne remind her of the practice of Melvin Charney, who reflected “on the domination of the functional dimension over the social dimension in urban planning” and blended reality and fiction in his works.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Paule Mackrous | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay
Created in the context of isolation imposed by the pandemic, the visual and virtual essay Tout t’empêche, posted on Instagram, is a well-thought-out project, resonating with the reality of the health crisis and the food autonomy movement. Through a series of images of harvested flowers, fruits, and vegetables, Sara A. Tremblay displays her daily life on a farm in the Orford region. In the view of Paule Mackrous, the work forms a “ritual,” the scope of which goes beyond intimacy, by highlighting an ecosystem of light, wind, insects, nocturnal animals, and more. “A counterweight is thus offered to both the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19, such as anosmia (loss of the senses of small and taste), physical distancing, and the requirement to touch nothing – effects that prevent us from experiencing all the sensory dimensions of the world.”
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: John Akomfrah
The three-channel video Vertigo Sea offers an immersive and panoramic environment based on “a powerful montage” of still and moving images, as well as juxtaposed and superimposed sounds, including music, recordings of nature, songs, and texts read by off-screen voices. The narrative proposed by John Akomfrah makes the ocean, “site of history, of beauty and bounty,” into “a scene of disaster.” “Human forces” have provoked this transformation, as shown in a succession of images that evoke slavery and water pollution. Despite references to Géricault, Turner, Friedrich, Melville, and Woolf, the work, writes Jill Glessing, “prompts viewers to consider their own contemporary relationship with the savagery perpetrated within and against that watery paradise.”
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | exhibition, Exhibition reviews
Authors: Noémie Fortin | Artists: Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
The videos, installations, and photographs that form the exhibition arising from a residency at the Grantham Foundation offer “a sensitive, well-informed portrait of the use, contamination, and appropriation of land in rural areas,” as Noémie Fortin describes it. Here, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens continue their approach based on the desire to materialize and make “visible” abstract concepts and even censored studies – as the case for the work L’affaire Louis Robert. They also emphasize the contrast between the “violence and care” inherent to cultivating the soil, as in the video Herber, désherber. “The pieces that they have brought together offer different gateways to the issues of ownership and exclusion … in order to provoke both an emotional reaction and a critical reflection.”
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Amélie Giguère, Anne Bénichou
This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Claudia Polledri
This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Ron Jude
Ron Jude’s photobook “vibrates on the table,” according to Louis Perreault, so utterly does the sensory experience offered overflow the edges of the images. In Perreault’s view, Jude, a fundamental figure in the publishing world, has innovated once again, and he also takes a new direction in his practice: here, the landscape is the subject, the narrative thread of the images is less influential, and the strategy turns to accumulation rather than juxtaposition. 12 Hz is like “a musical composition,” Perreault writes, “each image acting as a track added to the others, each vibrating at a different frequency. Like a composer at the mixing console, Jude adjusts the levels of each track, measuring out the abstraction, the textures, the reproduction of space and place.” The reference to low frequencies in the title suggests that sound wave are forces that shape landscapes, imperceptible movements that permeate the dark-toned images.
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Entrevues, Interviews
Authors: Serge Allaire | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
Bernard Carrière, who has produced numerous photobooks over a forty-year career, talks about the process behind the retrospective exhibition and monograph, both titled Solstice, and reveals that he came to photography through print publications. “I really learned about photography through magazines and the LIFE encyclopedia,” he says. “And the discovery of books was fundamental. The first one I had was a short monograph on Henri Cartier-Bresson.” “I learned photography from books,” he continues, and he favours that very medium for deploying his series. Before making this choice, sequential organization of images, as if making a film, was the basis for his creative inspiration. “One creates by subtracting. If I’ve learned one thing with the editor of my films … it’s how to see the tree (the image) and the forest (the book, the film) at the same time: the unique importance of each image, each shot, in a whole that makes sense.”
[Fall 2021]
The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. The first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes affecting global civilization. The second contrasts traditional photography with its mutant, digital, and interactive form. The third is the career of a photography critic whose vision is fed by the act of collecting.
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. By bringing together a large number of images and points of view, the first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes affecting global civilization. Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the “total screen,” the second contrasts traditional photography and its mutant, digital, and interactive form, which augments the real at the scale of a screen interface. The third highlights the career of a photography critic whose vision is fed by his encounter with the works he has collected and their creators, while being attentive to the development of a photographic community.
[Fall 2021] Thematic presentation by Jacques Doyon The thematic section in this issue presents three exhibitions that show how photography can actively contribute to shaping a critical vision of the world. By bringing together a large number of images and points of view, the first sets out to offer an overall sense of the changes […]
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin | Artists: Massimo Vitali
Two hundred works, a hundred and ten photographers, eight sections: this ambitious exhibition, observes critic Julie Martin, “offers a glimpse of the movements that run through today’s world: interrelations, invisible flows, influences, mobility of goods and human beings.” Martin bases her reflection on the principle of “cognitive mapping,” formulated by Fredric Jameson to evoke what escapes our gaze, our senses, and our experience. Although she sees Civilization as a descendant of Edward Steichen’s legendary exhibition The Family of Man, she underlines that this new show is a true panorama of diversity – and not a portrayal of capitalistic hegemony. “The curators do not renounce the idea of a human community,” Martin writes, “but they respect its disparities [and] make visible the mechanisms of power (hidden in The Family of Man) that shape our world.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Charlie Doyon
The result of a research project around Jean Baudrillard’s reflection on the notion of the “total screen,” this exhibition brings together seven artists who comment on the omnipresence of the screen and its effects on our lives. According to critic Edward Pérez-González, “the works that form the core of the exhibition are based on the critical vision of the world of Baudrillard the philosopher … a world in which the statement becomes the screen itself.” Baudrillard the photographer, whose images are present in the exhibition, proposes, as Pérez-González writes, “to capture the value of experience … of the ‘I’ that I am.” It is this subjectivity, linked to a body of work attentive to light, that is tending to disappear in the era of screens. “Through the accumulation of sequences, decontextualization, and schematization,” Pérez-González summarizes, “a disconnected world is shown and scrutinized soullessly.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Michel Campeau, Tom Gibson
A reflection on Robert Graham’s activities as a critic and collector, this exhibition of three Montreal photographers (and more) opens broad perspectives. It accounts for an approach that combines the acquisition of artworks and spending time with their creators (in this case, Tom Gibson, Donigan Cumming, and Michel Campeau) with the development of a critical vision of photography. Zoë Tousignant defends the principle that an image is appreciated as much for what it doesn’t show as what it does show. She notes that Graham, whose collection comprises works that are “visual correlatives” of his thought, is interested in the parergon, Jacques Derrida’s concept that has it that “what resides outside of a work of art is in fact fundamental.” “Telling the history of photography in Montreal cannot involve the exclusion of all that is foreign,” writes Tousignant, who sees the inclusion in the exhibition of images by Muybridge, Tichý, and Parr as reflecting “the total imbrication of the local scene with the international.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Moyra Davey
In reaction to “left-wing extremism” and campaigns for “art that is moral and bland, with no grey areas,” critic Nicolas Mavrikakis offers an impassioned reading of Moyra Davey’s practice, and specifically her video i confess (2019). This work, which addresses polarizing themes, leads, in Mavrikakis’s view, to reflection “beyond the opposition between good and evil.” Unclassifiable and complex, based on plays of images within the image, the video is “a sort of Russian doll” with multiple references, and Davey quotes James Baldwin and Pierre Vallières, among others. Like i confess, and Joyce Wieland’s film Pierre Vallières (1972), upon which Mavrikakis also comments, this essay rises against dogmas and suggests that we not get bogged down in fixed, simple readings of cultural history, including when we discuss Vallières, the author of White Niggers of America.
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Vincent Bonin | Artists: David Tomas
Invited by Ciel variable to re-evaluate David Tomas’s practice, Vincent Bonin offers a cross section of the intellectual trajectory of artist and anthropologist Tomas, who died in 2019. Bonin discusses the importance that Tomas accorded to silence, even up to his final work, which bore the ambiguous words “No Lot.” “This ‘no’ now resonates in the posthumous space, as a last form of the resistance of silence after the interruption of speech,” Bonin observes. The creator of kinetic installations marked by “semiotic complexity,” Tomas was known for his technological innovations (he began to use strobe lights, chronometers, and automatic triggers in the 1980s). He participated in the critical reassessment of the history of photography, as did Jeff Wall and Alan Sekula, while avoiding “statements of intent,” preferring to base his work on fragmentary or performative thought, and he remained silent even “when he was present.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Nicole Gingras | Artists: Luc Bourdon
Luc Bourdon, a major figure in video and film, has produced some fifty works, many on the subject of culture, including La mémoire des anges (2008) and La part du diable (2017), built on material from the NFB archives. In this interview, conducted during celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Vidéographe, with which Bourdon has worked, Nicole Gingras talks to him about his early career, his love of words, and his vision of editing. Bourdon, who adopted video in the 1980s for its “potential of saying ‘I see,’” acknowledges that he was influenced by Gary Hill and Michael Snow. He owes them the idea of using images as “a means of inserting words and phrases” into his work. After creating in the “immediacy” provided by video, Bourdon became involved in productions that required “more energy and research,” such as La mémoire des anges, an “impressionistic” film on which he spent a good deal of time.
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Meryl McMaster
In the exhibition that Meryl McMaster organized during a residency during which she worked with the McCord Museum collection, she explored human beings’ paradoxical relationship with nature. To the birds under glass bell jars conserved by the museum, McMaster responded with works that, in Stéphanie Hornstein’s view, portray struggle and suffering related to the Dutch traditional vanitas style. Although the exhibition embraces “the transience of all lifeforms,” as Hornstein describes it, McMaster’s work is not pessimistic in tone. “Death, McMaster insists, is a natural, if disconcerting, process and instead of denying it – say, by sticking stuffed birds in bell jars – we would do well to learn from life’s cycles.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
A fascinating voice in the growing medium of virtual reality, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s solid reputation was borne out in his installation presented in Montreal, Carne y Arena. Jean Gagnon challenges the enthusiasm shown for this “exceptional storytelling experience,” although he acknowledges its high quality in that respect. “Iñárritu’s work,” he writes, “is even more ingenious, for his installation cannot be summarized simply in narration, and the experience is not simply virtual.” This work, out the ordeal of clandestine migration, “articulates something other than simulated reality” and reaches past the phenomenon of what is perceived. “Carne y Arena,” Gagnon concludes, “questions art’s effectiveness, role, and power to generate change by oscillating between emotion and intellect, the sensory and the intelligible.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: André Lavoie | Artists: Emanuel Licha
After years of creating representations of war, Emanuel Licha immerses himself in a Haiti in constant struggle. His documentary zo reken, closer to linear film than his previous works, draws on both recorded and offscreen images. “This is a habitual posture for him, as he probes the subjective nature of our gaze,” notes André Lavoie. The insurrectional atmosphere in the Haitian capital is viewed through a double frame: that of the camera and that of the windows of a zo reken (literally, shark bone), as the 4×4 vehicles used by foreign powers and humanitarian organizations are called locally. “From within this vehicle, Haiti is revealed in a perfectly defined aesthetic offering, a gaze delineated as if the spectator were also shut into this closed space.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Reilley Bishop-Stall | Artists: Paul Walde
Initially an oratorio performed in situ, then a video installation, Requiem for a Glacier originated in a natural site in British Columbia threatened by a planned (and abandoned) ski resort project. As climate change continues to warm the planet, Paul Walde’s work, evocative of both mourning and struggle, remains relevant, even years after it was first performed. In images, it enhances “temporal and visual effects that mirror the dramatic urgency of the oratorio,” writes Reilley Bishop-Stall. However, the artwork as a whole is questionable in the eyes of the Ktunaxa nation. “The projection of such a … lamentation as a Latin Requiem onto sacred Ktunaxa territory raises … issues that cannot be avoided. That being said, Walde’s rooting of the score in both ancient Euro-Christian traditions and contemporary Canadian politics is potentially productive for evaluating the divergent interests.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karen Henry
Given the multifaceted nature of the Capture festival, Karen Henry decided to focus on the part that took place in the public space. It must be said that the 2021 edition was not without controversy after the sudden removal of Steven Shearer’s series devoted to sleep. “The sleeping subjects are inherently vulnerable,” Henry notes, “and they made a number of people uneasy.” Henry had a number of questions concerning this “debacle.” Had the organizers taken account of the fentanyl crisis raging in Vancouver? Had an advertising company decided what could be seen? Henry also reviews other projects, including those by Anique Jordan and Jordan Bennett, which, by talking about Black or Indigenous communities, “evoke the ongoing experience of loss, but also hold the promise (and challenge) of so much more to be said.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Chuck Samuels
Chuck Samuels has been delving into the mise en abîme of photography, and the photographic portrait, since 1991. Brought together under the title Becoming Photography in exhibitions in two venues, these different bodies of work arise from two paradigms, in Sylvain Campeau’s view: the now-settled issue of the originality of an artwork and the current universe of “unending ramifications.” Campeau acknowledges that the evolution of Samuels’s practice, between appropriation of the reputation of “illustrious forebears” and contestation of the “hierarchy of people and genres,” fits within the “dissolution of barriers among media,” which are now all similar, all digital. “This desire to become the photograph,” he notes, “was deployed at the very moment when it could provoke only out-and-out rejection.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Roy | Artists: Yann Pocreau
Continuing Yann Pocreau’s reflections on the materiality of light, Impermanencies brought together works inspired by the celestial vault. With photographs of all types, including some produced without a camera, Pocreau ventured, as Daniel Roy notes, into a meditation on the cosmos, time, “the fleetingness of life, and the finiteness of living beings and things.” His experiments with the printing of light was redolent with homage to the pioneers of photography. And there’s more. The presence of prints not treated with fixer, “doomed to imminent extinction,” introduced thoughts about “all the creators whose names are lost to history, who have been erased by time.” As Roy observes, “The photograph is not as permanent as might have been desired. It can be altered. Memory, too.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Érika Nimis
Erika Nimis’s photographic practice, both documentary and experimental, leads her to find traces of places and abandoned objects. The body of work titled Mutants – reproductions of documents, close-ups of text excerpts, images of places, people, and objects – is the result of her discovery of the site of the University of Mutants, which no longer exists. The institution, once situated on the Senegalese island of Gorée, supported research on “endogenous alternatives” that might, in Christian Roy’s view, have resulted in a different world, developed in the Southern Hemisphere. This “uchronic utopia” is reflected in Nimis’s melancholic images. “Combining Afrofuturism and retrofuturism, Mutants offers an archaeological immersion in this site left in the planning stage,” Roy notes, concluding that this “photographic research project … is both inspiring and poetic.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly
Like the photograph appearing on the cover, the book’s intention is obvious: to direct our attention toward a woman who is looking. “That is exactly what Women Street Photographers invites us to do,” writes Ariane Noël de Tilly, “to get to know the work of women photographers and the … events that they have captured in the public space.” Noël de Tilly describes this project, compiled from a series of annual exhibitions with the same title, as offering an overview in one hundred photographs whose rather free association “highlights the great variety of approaches to street photography.” This heterogeneous organization underlines “the happy coincidences linked to our experience of the public space.” Of the two essays included in the book, one evokes the intersection since the nineteenth century of two histories: that of photography and that of the status of women.
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Dayna McLeod
“A feast for the heart, head, and soul,” is how Dayna McLeod describes La Fête, the perfect book to look at in the context of deprivation and isolation caused by the pandemic. The hundred photographs gathered from a call for submissions from Quebec and Brazilian artists are documentary, portraiture, and candid images. Freely associated but carefully organized, they offer a “gateway to feelings,” “a journey of party places and people,” “party and reverie … that pull on our memories, longing, and fear of missing out.” Although an audio application gives the images a sound environment, the essays give them meaning by teasing out the political momentum of the theme.
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Readings
Authors: Ève Dorais | Artists: Alexis Desgagnés
Offering views of an industrial neighbourhood in the Montreal district of Hochelaga, Ammoniaque elegantly combines the documentary approach – “the importance of the subject and the picture taking,” as Ève Dorais specifies – and the materiality of the photograph through the use of analogue cameras and photosensitive film. In Dorais’s view, Alexis Desgagnés’s “off-axis photographic gaze” and attention to details give rise to an almost-spiritual dimension. Desgagnés – who is also an art historian, curator, and poet –explores words written on a corrugated-iron wall to uncover urban poetry. Similar to Claude Gauvreau’s Exploréen language, the words are imbued with “pain, incongruity, and euphoria.” This is an essential book, Dorais says, because it makes us aware of an urban space that falls between the cracks but is full of humanity, and it “encourages us to reconsider our conceptions of landscape and of beautiful photography.”
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Entrevues
Authors: Jérôme Delgado
Founder of the only gallery in Quebec devoted exclusively to photography, Marie-Josée Rousseau talks about her motivations and her role in the art market. She came to photography through digital technology – which allowed her “unparalleled exploration” – has become a spokesperson for the image as object. In her view, “photography must be embodied in an object that can be seen and touched.” She sees her gallery, La Castiglione, as a crossroads of currents, disciplines, and schools of thought. The name refers to a historical figure in photography used by Rousseau so that it “could grow outside of me” and with whom everyone would identify – “a concept that isn’t as easy when the name of the owner is front and centre.” Having become nomadic in 2020, La Castiglione and its business model have to be rethought, and Rousseau has given herself a year to consider how its activities will continue.
[Winter 2022]
The title Against Nature might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying that its fate is entirely in our hands.
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
[Winter 2022] Par Jacques Doyon The title might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Geneviève Chevalier, Thomas Kneubühler
[Winter 2022] The title might seem paradoxical, as the artists brought together for this issue’s thematic section are all defenders and lovers of nature and spend a good deal of time in it. But what their works reveal is a “naturality” thoroughly permeated by human activity and entirely shaped by it, implying that its fate […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier
[Winter 2022] By Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] Over the last few years, artist Geneviève Chevalier has become interested in places and methods of classification used in the natural sciences to inventory and analyze flora and fauna. Menageries were, in a way, the ancestors of museums. They contained both collections and live exotic animals, but as an […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler
[Winter 2022] By Louis Perreault [Excerpt] In the first photograph in Alpine Signals, the immaculate white of a horse’s mane offers a reminder of the clouds that overhang the distant mountains. The blue sky spreads above the shrubs positioned in the centre of the composition, which pick up the colour of the verdant nature in […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas
[Winter 2022] By Franck Michel The landscape enwraps, penetrates, it is not before one as an object. . . . It is an atmosphere, a sensory halo, and not simply a visual through-line. – DAVID LE BRETON [Excerpt] The history of landscape photography offers an incomparable source of information on the evolution of territories […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx, Bertrand Carrière, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, Donigan Cumming, Florence Le Blanc, Guillaume Simoneau, John Max, Matthieu Brouillard, Michel Campeau, Sylvain Cousineau
[Hiver 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] It’s a lovely image: my father, who had been taking photographs since the 1960s, had given me his Beseler 23C II enlarger. I went to pick it up in order to flesh out my amateur darkroom, and I was thinking about transmission of culture. The caption might have quoted […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Renaud Philippe
[Winter 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] “We are not in front of the images; we are in the middle of them. Like they are in the middle of us. The question is how we circulate among them, how we make them circulate.”1 The life of images, constantly relaunched in various presentation contexts, is core to […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: James Coleman
[Winter 2022] By Stephen Horne “A being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past two footprints perpetually obliterating one another toe to heel, heel to toe.” – W. B. YEATS 1 [Excerpt] James Coleman´s complex cinematic installations disclose the beauty and pleasure of “looking.” The aesthetic experience to which I refer […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Dawoud Bey
[Winter 2022] Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 17.04.2021 — 3.10.2021 By Ariane Noël de Tilly [Excerpt] Since the very inception of his photographic career, Dawoud Bey has pointed his lens toward people and, especially, marginalized communities. The retrospective of his work presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art highlighted the ethical dimension […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Denis Rioux, Sylvie Readman
[Winter 2022] Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal 8.09.2021 — 9.10.2021 By Mona Hakim [Excerpt] Presented in a single exhibition space and arranged facing each other, the photographs of Sylvie Readman and Denis Rioux highlight their common concern with the issues and properties of the photographic language within which the primary conditions of the visual and conceptual experience […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Dawit L. Petros
[Winter 2022] Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal 3.09.2021 — 30.10.2021 By Claudia Polledri [Excerpt] Gaps, holes, fissures, and frictions – the title defines the perimeter of the exhibition by Eritrean artist Dawit L. Petros, presented as part of the Momenta 2021 satellite program. In this show, composed of photographs and serigraphs on paper and canvas, Petros, […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Lorenza Böttner
[Winter 2022] Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montréal 29.04.2021 — 19.06.2021 By Fanny Bieth [Excerpt] Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm is the first international retrospective exhibition for the Chilean-German artist Lorenza Böttner, a trans person who lost both arms as a child following an accident. Böttner’s practice and life embody, to use the words […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Françoise Sullivan
[Winter 2022] Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal 14.05.2021 — 16.07.2021 By Didier Morelli [Excerpt] Even in her nineties, the seminal Quebec interdisciplinary artist Françoise Sullivan never ceases to inspire. Françoise Sullivan: The 1970s, organized by the Galerie de l’UQAM, delves into her experimentation five decades ago, with particular attention to her time in Italy. Filmed and […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Catherine Bodmer
[Winter 2022] Galerie B-312, Montréal 7.05.2021 — 23.06.2021 By Emmanuelle Choquette [Excerpt] The exhibition Synonymes is an outcome of Catherine Bodmer’s long-term research conducted during residencies in Mexico City between 2010 and 2018. Pairing photography and text, the body of work on display in Galerie B-312’s two exhibition spaces addresses Bodmer’s relationship, developed over time, […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Carlos Ferrand Zavala
[Winter 2022] SBC, galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal 4.09.2021 — 23.10.2021 By Alexis Desgagnés [Excerpt] Peruvian-born Montreal artist Carlos Ferrand Zavala, recipient of the Bourse de carrière Michel-Brault from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec in 2015, is known mainly as a director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. Among his latest films are 13, un […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Yannick Marcoux | Artists: Martin Désilets
[Winter 2022] Les tableaux réunis Musée d’art de Joliette 19.06.2021— 6.09.2021 By Yannick Marcoux [Excerpt] In a poem in his L’art poétique, Nicolas Boileau made a suggestion that has become famous: “Put your work twenty times on the anvil.” It seems that twenty times is not enough for the artist Martin Désilets, who, since 2017, […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: Élisabeth Recurt | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx
[Winter 2022] Paris, Éditions Loco, 2021, 192 p. By Élisabeth Recurt [Excerpt] Freely inspired by a novel by Anne Hébert,1 Anne-Marie Proulx’s photobook is composed of 125 black-and-white and colour photographs (taken on a 35 mm analogue camera and a cell phone), lines from plays (spoken by the protagonist of the novel, Flora Fontanges), and […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Book Reviews
Authors: Serge Allaire
[Winter 2022] Montréal, à compte d’auteur, 2021, non paginé By Serge Allaire [Excerpt] Valérian Mazataud’s most recent work takes us on an adventure to the island of Bobel, a huge rock rising out of the Caribbean Sea fifty kilometres off the coast of La Mosquita, one of the last untouched regions on the planet. The […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, William E. Ewing | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Francesco Zizola, Olivier Christinat
[Winter 2022] An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] Author, exhibition curator, professor, and longtime director of the Musée de l’Élysée (1996– 2010), in Lausanne, William A. Ewing began his career in Montreal; he was the founder of Optica, which he directed from 1972 to 1977. Ewing has been exploring the field of photography for some […]
[Summer 2022]
Indigenous culture has long been oppressed in this country, but strong proud voices are now speaking out in public and are increasingly being heard. Here, we present three of these voices: they stand out for their use of photography as a central vehicle of their approach. Together, they offer a renewed vision of Indigenous identity, drawing on both tradition and contemporary realities and stamping a presence everywhere in the territory.
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Dana Claxton, Jeff Thomas, Meryl McMaster
[Summer 2022] By Jacques Doyon Indigenous peoples have been confined to reservations, cut off from their ancestral lands, subjected to forced assimilation in schools, and had their status denied as Métis or urban residents. They have been forbidden to display the signs of their cultures and were long condemned to invisibility. But the situation is […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Artists: Dana Claxton, Jeff Thomas, Meryl McMaster
[Summer 2022] Indigenous culture has long been oppressed in this country, but strong proud voices are now speaking out in public and are increasingly being heard. Here, we present three of these voices: they stand out for their use of photography as a central vehicle of their approach. Together, they offer a renewed vision of […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Skeena Reece | Artists: Dana Claxton
[Summer 2022] It’s Love or a Photograph – Depends on How You See It By Skeena Reece [Excerpt] The Mustang Suite is a series about more than mobility. Though that’s a great place to start, to introduce you to Dana Claxton’s works; images that include literal modes of transportation are a part of the photographs’ […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Carolyn Hickey | Artists: Jeff Thomas
[Summer 2022] An interview conducted by Carolyn Hickey [Extrait] The exhibition The Indigenous Map Maker’s Room at the Latcham Art Centre1 resurfaced Jeff Thomas’s series Indians on Tour, which he began some twenty years ago. The series has continued to evolve and has generated other, parallel series. In this interview conducted by Carolyn Hickey, the […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Portfolios
Authors: Lori Beavis | Artists: Meryl McMaster
[Summer 2022] By Lori Beavis [Excerpt] I want to plunge into the storage space where Meryl McMaster stores the habiliments that she has created for her performative photographic practice. While there I could closely investigate the cloaks, patterned coats, feathered armbands, hand wraps, plumed plant material, and bird-festooned headwear. Over the past fifteen years, McMaster […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée
[Summer 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] When we try to reach a better understanding of the history of photography in Quebec, we inevitably stumble into three common areas. The first is absence: so, where is this reference book that everyone’s waiting for and no one has written yet? And yet, there are books on the […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González
[Summer 2022] By Edward Pérez-González [Excerpt] It was with my head full of the rave reviews I’d read in the local press – “a show that sends shivers down your spine,” “a blood-curdling exhibition” – that I went to the temporary site of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), in Place Ville Marie, to […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Summer 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] In the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec was experiencing a radical revision of all kinds of models that had previously been seen as immutable. This major transformation swept away obsolete institutions and fossilized ways of thinking inherited from the Great Darkness of the Duplessis period and laid claim to a […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Luther Konadu
[Summer 2022] By Nicolas Mavrikakis SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal 4.11.2021 — 18.12.2021 [Excerpt] Whatever one might do or say, many people continue to see photography as having an aura of truth. Its authoritative status with regard to the potential to capture reality, a historical construction inherited from the nineteenth century, is a persistent cliché. […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Roy | Artists: Michel Boulanger
[Summer 2022] By Daniel Roy Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 14.01.2022 — 19.02.2022 [Excerpt] Through his art practice, Michel Boulanger has developed a specific interest in industrial technologies and how they transform the agrarian landscape. His most recent animation video, Dans ces rangs de lignes pressées, presented at Occurrence, portrays the anxieties and […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Sanaz Sohrabi
[Summer 2022] By Emmanuelle Choquette Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark, Montréal 28.10.2021 — 27.11.2021 [Excerpt] In her practice, Sanaz Sohrabi probes the political structure, the trajectory, and the circulation of the image. She addresses these issues through the prism of the archive as site of representation and as tool of construction of dominant narratives. […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
[Été 2022] Par Daniel Roy MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine 6.06.2021 — 9.01.2022 [Extrait]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Taysir Batniji
[Summer 2022] By Érika Nimis MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine 6.06.2021 — 9.01.2022 [Excerpt] The Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne devoted a solo exhibition to Taysir Batniji, retracing with rare coherence more than twenty-five years of his art career in some fifty works: paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, performances. Born in Gaza […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Emmanuel Galland
[Summer 2022] By Sophie Bertrand HANGAR 7826, Montréal 6.11.2021 — 28.11.2021 [Excerpt] Max, Brad, Tyler, John, Diego, Erik. These disembodied names, crowded together on the walls of the small gallery HANGAR 7826, wordlessly welcome us to the most recent exhibition by Emmanuel Galland, « Mes Dates / Close Friends ». At first glance, the grouping […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Johanne Sloan | Artists: Sorel Cohen
[Summer 2022] By Johanne Sloan VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal 18.11.2021 — 19.02.2022 [Excerpt] The wit, energy, and experimental spirit of Sorel Cohen’s work is as inspiring as ever in an exhibition at VOX, which brings together selected pieces from the 1970s to the 2000s. Cohen’s art practice flourished at the intersection of […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Josianne Poirier | Artists: Myriam Yates
[Summer 2022] By Josianne Poirier Optica, Montréal 6.11.2021 — 18.12.2021 [Excerpt] For the series of photographs and videos comprising the exhibition Parcs. Playgrounds, Myriam Yates aimed her camera at deserted playgrounds. The facilities that she documented in different New York neighbourhoods in 2018 nevertheless bear the traces of past use and suggest bodies in gymnastic […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Sarah Moon
[Summer 2022] By Ariane Noël de Tilly Fotografiska, New York 15.10.2021— 6.02.2022 [Excerpt] It was La robe à pois (1996), a large-format photograph placed at the entrance to the exhibition, that invited visitors to immerse themselves in the enigmatic universe, sometimes in colour but usually in black and white, of French photographer Sarah Moon. In […]