[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 […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Matt Johnston
[Summer 2022] By Louis Perreault Photobooks & A critical companion to the contemporary medium Onomatopee, Eindhoven, Pays-Bas, 2021, 210 p. [Excerpt] Much has been written about the effervescence of the photobook as a medium since the early 2000s. The importance of books that retrace the history of the medium – celebrating the genre’s classics and […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Jean Gagnon
[Summer 2022] By Sylvain Campeau Vidéocaméléon. Chroniques de l’art vidéo au Québec Montréal, Éditions Somme toute, 2021, 239 p. [Excerpt] Let’s start by saying it straight out, without splitting hairs: this book will be highly useful to everyone interested in the visual arts in Canada, and particularly in the emergence of video art in Quebec. […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert
[Summer 2022] By Mona Hakim. This major monograph on the photographer Jocelyn Philibert covers his production over more than thirty years. We know Philibert for his nocturnal landscapes focusing essentially – one might say obsessively – on the figure of the tree…
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Interviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Edward Burtynsky
[Summer 2022] Finding Purpose: Burtynsky’s Archive at RIC An interview by Jérôme Delgado [Excerpt] The internationally renowned artist and environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky was born in St. Catharines, on the shore of Lake Ontario – just a few pulls of the oars from Toronto, where he went to Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (today Ryerson University), graduating […]
[Fall 2022]
Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the works brought together here, which are rooted in the desire to show the underside of America, to invert the icons of planetary tourism, or to take stock of the hypertrophy of major urban centres.
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Justine Kurland, Pierre Blache
[Fall 2022] By Jacques Doyon Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Artists: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Justine Kurland, Pierre Blache
[Fall 2022] Walking in the city, travelling down country roads, discovering the country, exploring foreign capitals – in short, getting moving – we confront different perspectives, contextualize or a rm our values, and take the measure of the world we live in. Such mobility, such constant travels, are the basis for the works brought together […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Moyra Davey | Artists: Justine Kurland
[Fall 2022] Young Men at Risk By Moyra Davey Anything you feel you better be able to feel out loud. – Kathleen Collins, in a workshop for students at Howard University, 1984 Kathleen Collins went on to say in that workshop, “Good work is dependent on detachment.” It is not obvious how to reconcile the […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Didier Morelli
[Fall 2022] To Be There, or To Have Been There By Didier Morelli [Extract] Here I want to add that the architecture does not solely permit such levels of comfort and discomfort, but also the body comportment – the body movements of men and women, whites, blacks, or otherwise racialized people – in these spaces […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Portfolios
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Pierre Blache
[Fall 2022] Stay Home; Take a Walk By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] My memory of the early months of the pandemic remains blurry, but these two contradictory, yet simultaneous, injunctions issued at the beginning of lockdown have suddenly popped up in my mind. These imperatives, apparently banal – even apparently insignificant – were to change our […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Shirin Neshat
[Fall 2022] Dreams as Acts of Resistance By Jill Glessing [Extract] Displacement, loss, longing – these existential experiences settle in us as we settle around the globe. Contemporary surges of human migration – forced either by conditions of war or poverty or in voluntary search of new opportunities – make these states of dislocation increasingly […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Fall 2022] A Look Back at the Disraeli Adventure By Pierre Dessureault [Extract] 1972–2022. A half-century has passed since an adventure called Disraeli – une expérience humaine en photographie (Disraeli – A Human Experiment in Photography) took place.1 By no means is it my intention here to commemorate or eulogize this pivotal moment in the […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry
[Fall 2022] By Karen Henry [Excerpt] We humans project a great deal onto clouds, as they oat loftily above or gather and settle in around us. They represent the grandeur and mutability of nature but are also intimate to our everyday experience and the subject of idle contemplation – to have one’s “head in the […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau
[Fall 2022] By Sylvain Campeau International Center of Photography, New York 28.01.2022 — 2.05.2022 [Excerpt] With its very title, A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload announces its subject and its attitude. Looking at the publicity for the show, we would note that this is a theme very much of our times – maybe […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: JJ Levine
[Fall 2022] By Didier Morelli McCord Museum, Montreal 18.02.2022 — 18.09.2022 [Excerpt] Entering JJ Levine’s most recent solo exhibition at the McCord Museum, viewers are greeted with a wall-sized vinyl photograph titled Boyfriends in Bed (2011). In this image from the ongoing series Queer Portraits, two romantic partners lie on a purple bedcover with red […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan
[Fall 2022] By Jill Glessing Mercer Union, Toronto 26.03.2022 — 4.06.2022 [Excerpt] Territorial borders function as economic technologies, designed to protect regional resources and wealth. As borders become increasingly porous for transferring capital and goods thanks to globalized free trade agreements, they correspondingly tighten against human migration. The dissolution of the Berlin Wall in 1989 […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Nicolas Baier
[Fall 2022] By Edward Pérez-González Manif d’art 10, Québec 19.02.2022 — 24.04.2022 [Excerpt] A zoom in on a dense and intensely green forest. A slow, continuous move- ment suggests an infinitely dilated time and produces a growing tension as details are highlighted. A slight wind brings the forest out of its lethargy, making leaves and […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Steve Giasson
[Fall 2022] By Emmanuelle Choquette Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa 15.02.2022 — 3.04.2022 [Excerpt] When we enter Steve Giasson as Others/ Steve Giasson comme les autres, it’s as if we’re entering a portrait gallery in a museum: the works are hung in a single line at eye level – a succession of photographs of similar […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Clara Gutsche
[Fall 2022] By Jérôme Delgado Optica, un centre d’art contemporain, Montréal 9.04.2022 — 11.06.2022 [Excerpt] Gazing at children, as Clara Gutsche has done – and still does – is to lean into thresholds that open to imminent changes. It’s to examine what makes the familiar different or, on the contrary, what familiarity may arise from […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Sébastien Michaud
[Fall 2022] By Mathieu Teasdale Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles, Montréal 19.03.2022 — 15.05.2022 [Excerpt] Presented at the Maison de la culture de Pointe-aux-Trembles, Sébastien Michaud’s exhibition Les jardiniers de la forêt walks the line between photographic documentary and realist narrative installation. Both of these positions, carefully articulated, help to contextualize the workers in […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne
[Fall 2022] By Stephen Horne Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 12.02.2022 — 29.05.2022 [Excerpt] The exhibition takes its title, Heliotropo 37, from the street address of the artist’s studio in Mexico City. The artist is Graciela Iturbide, and the studio transposed to the Fondation Cartier in Paris was created by Mauricio Rocha, who also […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Book Reviews
Authors: Cheryl Simon
[Fall 2022] By Cheryl Simon Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan (editors) Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021, 368 p. [Excerpt] The spectacular photograph on the cover of Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City perfectly condenses the themes addressed throughout the book. Made by photojournalist Louise Abbott in the early morning of September 8, […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Book Reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri
[Fall 2022] By Claudia Polledri Dialogue photographique sur la Route de la soie Nadar/Payram Paris, Éditions Le bec en l’air, 2021, 112 p [Excerpt] One book, two trajectories, a single “road” and photography: Dialogue photographique sur la Route de la soie is a surprising voyage through space, time, and the history of photography. Iranian photographer […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Book Reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Daniel Canty
[Fall 2022] By Daniel Canty Écrans motiles Montréal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2021, 280 p. [Excerpt] “Motility.” That’s the idea that Sylvain Campeau has chosen to summon for the title of his most recent book, Écrans motiles. If, like me, you’re wondering about the term, it is borrowed from the life sciences, in […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Interviews
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée, Zoë Tousignant
[Fall 2022] Zoë Tousignant, The Continuing History An interview by Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] Zoë Tousignant is the curator of photography at the McCord Museum. She holds a PhD in art history from Concordia University and an MA in museum studies from the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary photography produced in […]
[Winter 2023] No matter what the adage says, all cats are not grey in the dark. Night-time brings out a throng of personalities, countless activities, and – without a shadow of a doubt – a rich colour palette. More often than not, it suits us to close our eyes to what’s happening once the light […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Editorial
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Éliane Excoffier, Emmanuelle Léonard
[Winter 2023] By Jérôme Delgado. No matter what the adage says, all cats are not grey in the dark. Night-time brings out a throng of personalities, countless activities, and – without a shadow of a doubt – a rich colour palette.
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Portfolios
Artists: Éliane Excoffier, Emmanuelle Léonard
[Winter 2023] No matter what the adage says, all cats are not grey in the dark. Night-time brings out a throng of personalities and countless activities. In nature, that’s when the wild animals finally take over. ..
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Portfolios
Authors: Yannick Marcoux | Artists: Éliane Excoffier
[Winter 2023] By Yannick Marcoux. The forest doesn’t belong to us. We have chopped down its trees, hunted its animals, and polluted its rivers, but one aspect of its intrinsic forces still evades us. Like oceans, forests, though absolutely concrete, inhabited, and alive, sometimes seem intangible…
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Portfolios
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Santiago Tamayo Soler
[Winter 2023] By Edward Pérez-González. Tracing means running a pencil over a line that is already drawn. Inking it again to make it thicker; correcting it, putting it back on its feet, in a way…
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Portfolios
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard
[Winter 2023] Those Who Wait for Us By Gabrielle Sarthou [Excerpt] Going from place to place in the city. The sidewalk unfurls under our feet. The stores scroll by, one after another. Sometimes, we no longer notice the neon signs or the people we pass. The faces fade. We classify, we consider, then we forget. […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: John Max
[Winter 2023] John Max, Line Leading through Photography By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] To sum up an artist’s career apparently takes just a few major works, some biographical references, and several general remarks on how the artist’s work was received, all in chronological order. No need to write a novel. But to achieve such a level […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Essays
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Michael Snow
[Winter 2023] Michael Snow, The Artist’s Maman Book By Jean Gagnon [Excerpt] At age ninety-four, Michael Snow has published My Mother’s Collection of Photographs,1 which he called his “maman book” during its production. As the title does not indicate, the photographs in question were not taken by an artist but are typical family pictures, a […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Essays
Authors: Mona Hakim
[Winter 2023] Daniel Hausmann, Backstage among the Urban Ruins By Mona Hakim [Excerpt] I first encountered the work of the photographer Daniel Hausmann several years ago, during a visit to his studio, which had been opened to a group of guests. His urban images were unique – at once baroque, dark, and striking. Abandoned lots […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Guignard
[Winter 2023] By Sophie Guignard Galerie FOFA, Montréal 26.06.2022 — 20.08.2022 [Excerpt] During summer 2022, Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery turned outward to the street. Ten large and arresting black-and-white portraits were displayed in the gallery’s windows. What stood out at first glance was the diversity of people portrayed. It was obvious, given […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Hiwa K
[Winter 2023] By Jill Glessing The Power Plant, Toronto 20.05.2022 — 28.08.2022 [Excerpt] Hiwa K manages an uneasy balance among being an artist, an activist, a teacher, a philosopher, a musician, and, since his recent return to Iraq, a farmer. Resistant to the professional and academic boxes that most artists and intellectuals inhabit (he calls […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michèle Cohen Hadria | Artists: Judith Joy Ross
[Winter 2023] By Michèle Cohen Hadria LE BAL, Paris 16.03.2022 — 18.09.2022 [Excerpt] Portraiture is not my favourite photographic genre. However, when I visited the first exhibition of Judith Joy Ross’s work in France, I felt that it opened a world to me – one built of respect for and a subtle approach to human […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Michelle Bui
[Winter 2023] By Didier Morelli Contemporary Art Gallery and Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Vancouver 1.04.2022 — 28.08.2022 [Excerpt] On a rainy Vancouver day, when most of the city’s vibrant colour is sapped and replaced by greyscale, the downtown core is especially downcast. Postmodern steel-and-glass skyscrapers appear starved for light, desperately reaching out toward cloud-filled skies. As I […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Alexander Henderson
[Winter 2023] Sophie Bertrand McCord Museum 10.06.2022 – 16.04.2023 [Excerpt] In 2021, the McCord Museum celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary against the backdrop of COVID-19. As a result of the forced closure of museums due to the pandemic, the retrospective exhibition of photographs by Alexander Henderson – who had fallen into obscurity for more than a […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Manon Labrecque
[Winter 2023] Sylvain Campeau Maison des arts de Laval 01.05.2022 — 03.07.2022 [Excerpt] For some ten years, as foretold in her previous works, Manon Labrecque has been producing unique visual and animation devices, including ones in which the images apparently move, forming an utterly original cinégénie (a wonderful term coined by Dominique Païni). She did […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Earl Miller | Artists: Ken Lum
[Winter 2023] By Earl Miller Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 25.06.2022 — 02.01.2023 [Excerpt] The forty-year survey of Ken Lum’s work, Death and Furniture, marking his receipt of the 2019 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, is timely. Like other members of the Vancouver School, Lum has had a grounding in first-generation post-modernism and Marxism. However, he is […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Omer Fast
[Winter 2023] By Nicolas Mavrikakis Campus für Demokratie, Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst 11.06.2022 — 18.09.2022 [Excerpt] The idea is aptly striking. The section of the 12th Berlin Biennale addressing issues about surveillance – its title is Still Present! – and dealing with its weighty heritages from modernity was set in the gigantic former headquarters […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Book Reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Tendance Floue
[Winter 2023] Sophie Bertrand Tendance Floue Paris, éditions Textuel, 2022, 190 p. [Excerpt] Fragiles is the most recent project of Tendance Floue, a French collective founded in 1991 that today comprises sixteen photographers – thirteen men and three women – with varied visual signatures. Although each member practises independently, the collective regularly produces joint projects […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Book Reviews
Authors: Étienne Ardaens | Artists: Justine Kurland
[Winter 2023] Étienne Ardaens Justine Kurland New York, Aperture, 2020, 144 p. / New York, Aperture, 2021, 144 p. [Excerpt] Two photobooks recently published by Aperture provide an opportunity to rediscover the work of Justine Kurland. The series Girl Pictures, featured in a show at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in 2018, appeared in book […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Book Reviews
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Carlos & Jason Sanchez
[Winter 2023] By Gary Michael Dault Adam Leith Gollner Montréal, Anteism, 2022, 158 p. [Excerpt] This book’s apparently truncated title, The Mystery of – whether chosen by its subjects, photographers and filmmakers (and brothers) Jason Sanchez and Carlos Sanchez, or by the book’s author, Adam Leith Gollner – is as provocatively incomplete (or at least […]
Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx, Jacynthe Carrier
[Winter 2023] Jacynthe Carrier and Anne-Marie Proulx, Photography, care and community An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] Jacynthe Carrier and Anne-Marie Proulx, co directors of VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie since 2015, share a community spirit that is manifested in how they have worked together in the roles of executive […]
[Summer 2023] The intimate is where we first experiment and affirm our own identity – an existential issue that plays out essentially between self and self. At the same time, such identification can occur only in interrelation with people with whom one has strong affinities. Identity is also a relationship with the other: what we […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Evergon, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Raymonde April
[Summer 2023] By Jacques Doyon Theatres of the Intimate, the major exhibition of Evergon’s work at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, mea- sures the scope of an approach that celebrates the gay body and homosexual desire. Throughout his body of work, Evergon deploys a highly personal theatre of intimate relationships, desires, and impulses […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Portfolios
Artists: Evergon, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Raymonde April
[Summer 2023] The intimate is where we first experiment and affirm our own identity – an existential issue that plays out essentially between self and self. At the same time, such identification can occur only in interrelation with people with whom one has strong affinities. Identity is also a relationship with the other: what we […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Portfolios
Authors: Nathalie Côté | Artists: Evergon
[Summer 2023] The Liberated Gaze By Nathalie Côté [Excerpt] The retrospective dedicated to the artist Evergon by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec1 provided an overview of his contribution to photography over fifty years of creation and more than two hundred images. His virtuosity is fascinating, and the issues that he has addressed over […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Raymonde April
[Summer 2023] Snapshots of Memory By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] “During the spring and summer, I make a lot of photographs. My contact sheets are filled with outdoor scenes, with landscapes and, most of all, with people in landscapes. . . . Then, before fall sets in, I go back home. I pore over my contact […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Michèle Pearson Clarke
[Summer 2023] Queer Black Masculinities: Middle-aged Boyhood By Dayna McLeod [Excerpt] An exercise in confronting shyness, shame, and fear about singing, Quantum Choir1 is a moving enactment of queer kinship and vulnerability in which Michèle Pearson Clarke invites three other queer masculine people with no singing experience to learn to sing with her and ultimately […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis
[Summer 2023] Photography and Ukraine, Keeping Eyes Open to the War By Érika Nimis [Excerpt] Since February 24, 2022, when Russia instigated its full-scale military assault on Ukraine, there has been a constant ow of images of the conflict, both via traditional media outlets and on social networks. This is perhaps the first war to […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Phyllis Lambert
[Summer 2023] Phyllis Lambert, A Way of Life By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] Photography is inextricable from Phyllis Lambert’s career. Architectural surveys, studies of urban space, activism, advertising, project documentation, archives, media relations, and exhibition catalogues are based on this tool, which is as essential to modern life as con- crete. Nevertheless, it is only in […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Essays
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Fiona Tan
[Summer 2023] Fiona Tan, Travel Stories By Ariane Noël de Tilly [Excerpt] Travel and the human relationship with time, nature, and history are among the themes that Fiona Tan most often addresses in her work. Born in Pekanbaru, Indonesia, Tan grew up in Australia and then moved to Amsterdam, where she studied at the Gerrit […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Jessica Eaton
[Summer 2023] By Daniel Fiset Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal 10.11.2022 — 17.12.2022 [Excerpt] Although Jessica Eaton is best known for her photographic series that establish a formal dialogue between geometric abstraction and modernist painting, a new body of work presented in late 2022 at Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran introduced an entirely unexpected motif into her practice. The […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Philippe Depairon | Artists: Michel Huneault
[Summer 2023] By Philippe Depairon Musée McCord Stewart, Montréal 16.09.2022 — 22.01.2023 [Excerpt] How do we remember the recent COVID-19 pandemic? And what do we remember? In a recent issue of Ciel variable, Michel Hardy-Vallée underlined, behind the Legault government’s injunction to take walks (for our health) and stay home (for the health of others), […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
[Summer 2023] By Baptiste Grison Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, Rivière-du-Loup 14.10.2022 — 05.02.2023 [Excerpt] The Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent (MBSL) has built its 2022–23 program of activities, exhibitions, and workshops around different environmental issues. A high point is undoubtedly the exhibition Histoires d’eau, a survey of recent works by the Lanaudière-based photographer Isabelle Hayeur. It is worth […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau
[Summer 2023] By Fanny Bieth Musée McCord Stewart, Montréal 28.10.2022 — 19.02.2023 [Excerpt] Commemorating an experiment conducted fifty years ago, the exhibition Disraeli Revisited: Chronicle of an Event in Quebec Photography is the result of an extraordinary collaboration between the team at the McCord Stewart Museum and those involved in the original project. The show […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Angela Grauerholz
[Summer 2023] Gabrielle Sarthou Occurrence, Montréal 4.11.2022 — 17.12.2022 [Excerpt] Despite its title, this second iteration of Angela Grauerholz’s installation The Empty S(h)elf, presented at Galerie Occurrence in Montréal, is not at all empty: it is polymorphous and dense, at the intersection between language and image, words and thoughts. We discover it fortuitously, as we […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Christian Marclay
[Summer 2023] By Stephen Horne Centre Pompidou, Paris 16.11.2022 — 22.02.2023 [Excerpt] There is a song written and performed by Paul McCartney in 1968 that provides a succinct introduction to the work and career of Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay (b. 1955). It’s simple lyric, repeated – “Why don’t we do it in the road” – […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
[Summer 2023] By Neil Price Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto 03.12.2022 — 14.01.2023 [Excerpt] Black feminists have long been concerned with what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as “controlling images.” They have consistently pointed out (and called out) ways in which such images have hamper and harm Black women’s struggle for freedom by reducing their experiences […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Laeticia Barrere | Artists: Diane Arbus
[Summer 2023] By Laetitia Barrere Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal 15.09.2022 — 29.01.2023 [Excerpt] The exhibition Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 features some one hundred images, selected from a major acquisition of 522 silver gelatin prints by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2017. Mounted first in Toronto, then in Montreal – after a detour to […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Natascha Niederstrass
[Summer 2023] By Emmanuelle Choquette Galerie Patrick Mikhail, Montréal 19.11.2022 — 4.02.2023 [Excerpt] The exhibition The Vanishing Woman, presented at Galerie Patrick Mikhail, follows on from a series produced during a residency at Centre VU. This is a new iteration of the project, which was first shown during Manif d’art 10 – La biennale de […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Book Reviews
Authors: Michel Hellman | Artists: Elena Perlino
[Summer 2023] By Michel Hellman Elena Perlino Paris et New Richmond, éditions Loco et éditions Escuminac, 2022, 176 pages [Excerpt] The expression “Indian time” has a pejorative connotation. It implies that “Indians” lack discipline and a sense of responsibility, in contrast to the supposed self-control of “Whites.” Saying that a person is on Indian time […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Book Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Olga Smith
[Summer 2023] By Jill Glessing Olga Smith Louvain, Leuven University Press, 2022, 230 pages [Excerpt] France, as a birthplace of photography, dominated surveys of the medium until the early twentieth century. It lost its primacy when the centre of the art world crossed the Atlantic, after the Second World War. Since then, international hegemony has […]
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Interviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon
[Summer 2023] Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas, From Digital Writing to Artificial Intelligence An interview by Jean Gagnon [Excerpt] In 1993, Eva Quintas and Michel Lefebvre co-founded Agence TOPO, the original mission of which was to organize collective and multidisciplinary projects combining photography and literature. For a time, TOPO was distributing interactive and nonlinear literary […]
[Fall 2023] These are images that disrupt, catch our attention, and thus intensify our gaze. What they show us is clear and precise, and yet there is something we can’t place, sometimes almost imperceptible, that encourages us to look more closely and ask more questions about the context of image production. So, what we are […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Interviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth, Ji-Yoon Han
[Fall 2023] Ji-Yoon Han lives and works in Montreal. In her projects, she highlights the relevance of the visual arts and their inscription in moving social, cultural, and mental contexts. She was the curator at Fonderie Darling from 2017 to 2020; currently, she is a research fellow for the Photography and Commission project at the […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Nicolas Baier, Thomas Demand
[Fall 2023] By Jacques Doyon These are images that catch our attention and intensify our gaze. What they show us is clear and precise, and yet there is something we can’t place, something that encourages us to look more closely and to question the context of their production. In Nicolas Baier’s work, it is the […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Artists: Adad Hannah, Nicolas Baier, Thomas Demand
[Fall 2023] These are images that disrupt, catch our attention, and thus intensify our gaze. What they show us is clear and precise, and yet there is something we can’t place, sometimes almost imperceptible, that encourages us to look more closely and ask more questions about the context of image production. So, what we are […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Nicolas Baier
[Fall 2023] [Excerpt] An Almost Spontaneous Appearance of the Machine in the World An interview by Jacques Doyon On the occasion of Nicolas Baier’s major exhibition held in Montreal in early 2023,1 we sat down with him to talk about its main themes. Jacques Doyon: It seems appropriate to start with the video titled Vases […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Thomas Demand
[Fall 2023] Second Seeing Stephen Horne [Excerpt] I must be getting mixed, confusing here and there, now and then, just as I confused them then, the here of then, the1then of there. — Samuel Beckett What is this “confusion” of which the playwright Beckett speaks? He wrote this some seventy years ago, before electronic media […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Adad Hannah
[Fall 2023] Posing Bodies and Works Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] At Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain,1 Adad Hannah recently presented a panorama combining new works, in the first gallery, with others still underway, in the second gallery. Hence the logic of grouping them under the title Recent Exposures. There is in allusion here to one of Hannah’s […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri
[Fall 2023] Décadrage colonial Decentring the Gaze [Excerpt] Based on a rereading of French photographic production in the 1930s, the exhibition Décadrage colonial1 underlines the contradictions of an era fascinated by cultures from “elsewhere” and concerned with redefining the image of a nation. Décadrage: leaving the frame, shifting the image, decentring the subject and, thus, […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Edward Pérez-González
[Fall 2023] Capturing the Image, Grasping What’s Human Edward Pérez-González [Excerpt] The idea that documentary photography is a neutral means of capturing reality has been utterly debunked. Photographs are not, and never were, simple recordings of reality, which is always complex and subjective. They are imbued with the preconceived ideas – values, feelings, social construction […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Essays
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Edward Hillel
[Fall 2023] Framing the Sequel Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] I would love to go to the Main for a smoked meat right now, but it’s closed. I mean: the Main Deli has just closed. It was the one right across the street from Schwartz’s. It served the same kind of sandwiches that are too fat to […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Alain Paiement
[Fall 2023] By Sylvain Campeau [Excerpt] Galerie Hugues Charbonneau Montréal 15.03.2023 — 23.04.2023 Theodor Adorno wondered whether it was still possible to write poetry after the horrors of Auschwitz. The same question can no doubt be asked today, of the entire field of art, as we wait uneasily to find out how climate change will […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Fanny Bieth
[Fall 2023] By Fanny Bieth [Excerpt] The Image Centre, Toronto 25.01.2023 — 1.04.2023 In winter 1975, Mary Ellen Mark was the on-set photographer for the shooting of Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on location at a psychiatric institution, the Oregon State Hospital, where she first met and photographed patients. She returned the […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hellman
[Fall 2023] By Michel Hellman [Excerpt] Musée McCord Stewart, Montréal 31.03.2023 — 10.09.2023 When the director and photographer Joannie Lafrenière was approached by the McCord Stewart Museum to take part in the second edition of Evolving Montreal (a program of photographic commissions on the theme of transformation of the city’s neighbourhoods), she had no doubt […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Marisa Portolese
[Fall 2023] By Sophie Bertrand [Excerpt] Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal 20.01.2023 — 11.03.2023 Once upon a time, there was Goose Village – also called Village-aux-Oies or Victoriatown – a working-class district in Montreal, adjacent to the port on one side and the Canadian National Railway train yards on the other. This enclave […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuel Galland | Artists: Bert Danckaert
[Fall 2023] By Emmanuel Galland [Excerpt] Galerie Laroche / Joncas, Montréal 11.01.2023 — 11.02.2023 The Belgian artist Bert Danckaert’s regular visits to Cuba seem to have created a new opening in his work, as can be seen in his recent series Teatros (2018–22). In his previous projects, he collected fragments of urban life in tight […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Hornstein | Artists: Sanaz Sohrabi
[Fall 2023] By Stéphanie Hornstein [Excerpt] VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal 14.01.2023 — 4.03.2023 In an all-new body of work commissioned by VOX, Sanaz Sohrabi traces the imperialist legacy of Britain’s involvement in the exploitation of Iranian oil resources from the first concession, in 1901, to the forced nationalization of the British Petroleum Company […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen
[Fall 2023] By [Excerpt] Centre Pompidou, Paris 12.04.2023 — 28.08.2023 “It’s not that I don’t care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning.” — James Welling The exhibition Laboratories/Observatories comprises large bodies of work by two contemporary photographers: the late American/Canadian Lynne Cohen (1944– 2014) and the French Marina […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Karl-Gilbert Murray | Artists: Evergon
[Fall 2023] By Karl-Gilbert Murray [Excerpt] Ellephant, Montréal 25.02.2023 — 28.04.2023 The exhibition Nitty Gritty: Male Toilet Angst at Galerie Ellephant presents a group of Evergon’s photographs from the series Manscapes. Bathed in backlighting that indicates an aesthetic choice, the images suggest a sense of reflection that oscillates between study of morals and analysis of […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews
Artists: Edward Burtynsky
[Fall 2023] By Anaïs Castro [Excerpt] African Studies Edward Burtynsky Göttingen, Steidl, 2022, 208 pages Edward Burtynsky’s most recent book, African Studies, is a visually stunning journey across the second-largest and widely misunderstood continent that is Africa, and the forces of industrialization and globalization that are shaping its diverse landscapes. Burtynsky enlisted esteemed collaborators on […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews
Artists: Joan Fontcuberta
[Fall 2023] By Nicolas Mavrikakis [Excerpt] Manifeste pour une post-photographie Joan Fontcuberta Arles, Actes Sud, 2022, 80 pages The artist, critic, professor, and theoretician Joan Fontcuberta has written a manifesto in which he takes an unvarnished look at issues and, especially, anxieties surrounding how photographs, and the image in general, seem to be changing in […]
Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Josée Pedneault
[Fall 2023] By Jérôme Delgado [Excerpt] Clément Brochet et Marvin Serandrei, Conversations, sous la direction d’Anick Arsenault et Geneviève Thibault, Matane, Cégep de Matane, 2022, non paginé Josée Pedneault, Contre-jour, Montréal, Free Pony Press, 2022, non paginé [bilingue] Guy Tremblay, À la vitesse que poussent les arbres. Guide de survie en temps de morosité, Montréal, […]
[Winter 2024] Cities are born from clusters of structures that provide shelter for human life and activities. Through them flow grids of thoroughfares that form patterns of movement and exchange. That’s what an urban agglomeration is: a dense knot, large or small, placed at a certain point in a rhizomatic lattice that runs through an […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Éric Tabuchi, Nelly Monnier, Suzanne Lafont
[Winter 2024] Cities are born from clusters of structures that provide shelter for human life and activities. Through them flow grids of thoroughfares that form patterns of movement and exchange. That’s what an urban agglomeration is: a dense knot, large or small, placed at a certain point in a rhizomatic lattice that runs through an […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Luce Lebart | Artists: Éric Tabuchi, Nelly Monnier
[Winter 2024] Photographic Tour of France By Luce Lebart [Excerpt] Soleil Gris, Éric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier’s exhibition in Arles,1 opened under a blazing sun in the Ground Control industrial site on the edge of the historic city in the Bouches-du-Rhône department. This big hangar, to which attendees to Rencontres d’Arles photography festival rarely return […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Jean Gagnon
[Winter 2024] By Jean Gagnon Sous la direction de Suzanne Paquet et Alexandrine Théorêt Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2023, 201 pages [Excerpt] This book, published by a university press in spring 2023, bears a title that might lead one to believe that it addresses the publics for works circulating in digital networks. It […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing
[Winter 2024] By Jill Glessing Edited by Jorge Ribalta Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia, 2023, 263 pages [Excerpt] Important technologies are designed for and controlled by those holding wealth and power. Photography, as a potent information medium, is one of these. It was developed during the mid-nineteenth century in France and England – Europe’s imperialist heartland […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade
[Winter 2024] Bénédicte Ramade Photographie contemporaine & anthropocène Danièle Méaux Paris, Éditions Filigranes, 2022, 288 pages [Excerpt] How do we photograph the hyper-object that is the Anthropocene? How do we capture the geological and atmospheric dimensions of this human-determined epoch, the chronology of which stretches back centuries, according to research on the Capitalocene (Andreas Malm), […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin
[Winter 2024] Urban Intrusion By Julie Martin [Excerpt] Here, petals in subtle variations of red. There, the intricately traced veins of a leaf. Elsewhere, delicate yellow stamens; and farther on, a clean green sepal and half-open cottony buds. In her series Nouvelles espèces de compagnie, produced in 2017 for a commission from the city of […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
[Winter 2024] Landscape and Automobile By Michel Hardy-Vallée [Excerpt] Recently, driving home from Quebec City, I stopped for hot dogs in Neuville. The setting wasn’t elegant: a gas station with a food concession, surrounded by a lot with vague edges. I wanted something shapeless and soft after spending a full day with intellectually and aesthetically […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Christian Roy | Artists: Jocelyne Alloucherie
[Winter 2024] The Image Set in Motion Between Non-Place and Monument By Christian Roy [Excerpt] Selected to contribute to the design of the Viau station, one of the five that will extend the Montreal metro’s blue line, Jocelyne Alloucherie developed a proposal around images of clouds. She recently offered an overview of it, for which […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Wolfgang Tillmans
[Winter 2024] From Banal to Beautiful By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] To Look Without Fear – the title of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans’s traveling exhibition presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario1 – is an invitation to look around us, unflinchingly, at the real world that we inhabit, an approach modelled throughout Tillmans’s career and […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Didier Morelli | Artists: Peter Hujar
[Winter 2024] Performing After the Fact By Didier Morelli [Excerpt] In the Art Institute of Chicago’s lower level, the Photography and Media galleries are a bit of a vault. The drop ceiling hangs low, and the rooms pale in comparison to the museum’s tall and light-flooded galleries above. While Georges Seurat’s emblematic A Sunday on […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sophie Guignard | Artists: Shelley Niro
[Winter 2024] By Sophie Guignard National Museum of the American Indian, New York 27.05.2023 — 1.01.2024 [Excerpt] The exhibition Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is the first major retrospective for Shelley Niro, a multidisciplinary Mohawk artist from the Bay of Quinte Kanyen’kehá:ka Nation and member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Turtle Clan. […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean-Michel Quirion | Artists: Emmanuel Galland, Josué Azor, Roberto Stephenson
[Winter 2024] By Jean-Michel Quirion Art-image et espace Odyssée de la Maison de la culture de Gatineau 6.07.2023 — 27.08.2023 [Excerpt] The travelling exhibition Haïti – Territoires informels, an initiative by the Montreal artist and curator Emmanuel Galland, is deployed in three series of images by three photographers: Galland himself and the Haitian photographers Josué […]
Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Emmanuelle Choquette | Artists: Shirin Neshat
[Winter 2024] By Emmanuelle Choquette Centre PHI, Montréal 28.06.2023 — 20.08.2023 [Excerpt] Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s exhibition The Fury resonates strikingly with current events. Neshat addresses the subject of violence perpetrated on people imprisoned for political reasons in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a specific focus on the treatment of women and girls, many […]