Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED

[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?

Full issue available here: Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED

Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED

[Summer 2021]

What Is It Exactly about Human Life?

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?

Shifted

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.

Steve Giasson, Nouvelles Performances invisibles — Didier Morelli, The Artist’s Body, a Camera, and Various Performative Interactions

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.

Vincent Lafrance, Savoir vivre — Zoë Tousignant, The Artful Life (according to Vincent Lafrance)

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.

Franck Gérard, En l’état — Jacques Leenhardt, Franck Gérard’s Photographic Encounters

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Leenhardt | Artists: Franck Gérard

[Summer 2021] Par Jacques Leenhardt “I [the photographer] don’t invent anything. I imagine everything.” – Brassaï [Excerpt] Containing a “diary” written by Franck Gérard during his wanderings and an avalanche of photographs, En l’état1 is a book that is difficult to classify. This mélange refers to notebooks kept by travellers and characterized by stylistic hybridity. […]

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Araki Nobuyoshi / Juergen Teller. Correspondence and Adventures in Book Form — Jérôme Delgado

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.

Évariste Desparois. A Disappearance Story — Sébastien Hudon

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.”

Chih-Chien Wang. A Gift of Images — Sylvain Campeau

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.

Judith Bellavance — Mona Hakim

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.

Sandra Brewster — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.

Isabelle Hayeur, (D)énoncer — Jean De Julio-Paquin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.”

Stan Douglas, Penn Station’s Half Century — Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.

Gagnon-Forest, Séquence aérienne — Élisabeth Recurt

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.

Sara A. Tremblay — Paule Mackrous

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.”

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea — Jill Glessing

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.”

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Querelle entre deux puces pour savoir à qui appartient le chien sur lequel elles vivent — Noémie Fortin

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | 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.”

Rejouer le vivant – Amélie Giguère

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.

Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes — Claudia Polledri

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.

Ron Jude — Louis Perreault

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.

Bertrand Carrière, Learning photography from books — Serge Allaire

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.”

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