Looking for Places that Speak to Us

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 […]

Visible Everywhere

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 […]

Against Nature?

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 […]

Exhibiting Photography to Talk about Global Changes

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2021] By Jacques Doyon The thematic section in this issue presents three recent exhibitions that show how photography can actively contribute to shaping a vision of the world. The first, which features quantity and diversity of images, indicates how an accumulation of points of view and subjects addressed makes it possible to override the […]

What Is It Exactly about Human Life?

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Été 2021] By Jacques Doyon This issue features three artists, with three aesthetic positionings, who share an ironic distancing, sometimes barely perceptible, from themselves and from the world in which they live. One of them, taking a scholarly stance, constructs himself by literally embodying bits of art history; the second, in a more narrative vein, […]

Projecting Ourselves into the World Around Us — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2021] By Jacques Doyon What do the most distant, wild, silent landscapes tell us? How do landscapes of our childhood, those that awoke us to the world, shape us? What reflections of our own future do we find in the chaos of urban sites? Landscapes are like mirrors, utterly shaped by human presence. The […]

Pandemic Vertigo — Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2020] By Jacques Doyon I’m writing this editorial at a time when, to general surprise, paralysis of a significant portion of human activity is gradually spreading across the globe (with some 2.5 billion people in confinement right now). Suddenly, the unthinkable has happened. The immutable rumble of economic activity spurred on by the desire […]

The Aesthetics of the Political

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 […]

Gender Boundaries

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 […]

Assembling Images

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Summer 2019] By Jacques Doyon Three recent exhibitions, by two artists and one collector, offer a rare look at the act of collecting. The thematic section in this issue features different types of collections of images, all of which involve a rereading, a recontextualization: highlighting a way of working that traverses and structures an artist’s […]

The Materiality of Colour

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2019] By Jacques Doyon From the manipulation of light (through decomposition, combination of layers, or diffraction effects) to work on the supporting medium (film, photographic paper, walls) to searching out pictorial compositions on city streets, a space of exploration opens up for photography around the various manifestations of colour. The result is images that […]

Crossing Borders

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2018] By Jacques Doyon More than thresholds, borders have become a kind of non-place – extra-national zones – where migrants’ identities and statuses are examined and held in suspension for periods that are increasingly long and undetermined. In this issue, we examine certain aspects of the crossing of borders with works that explore how […]

Reactivated Memories

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The works brought together in this issue look back at events in relatively recent history that have reverberated to the present day. These are prolific works, with multiple iterations, embodied in artistic forms and processes that reflect the complexity of their subjects: the mobility of fragments of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition at the Christian […]

Making visible

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2018] By Jacques Doyon This issue’s thematic section presents works that come from a wide variety of places and times, but all are marked by the notion of public visibility. These three bodies of work cover a wide spectrum of what defines the public space for artistic expression, ranging from the concrete civic and […]

Three Moments of Ruin

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2017 ] — Editorial of Ciel variable 105 – Ruins

Metonymic Motifs

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert

Each series of images in this issue presents, in a way, work on a motif – a live view of the landscape, in the tradition of landscape painters. Capturing the infinite variations of trees, icebergs, or clouds under different conditions certainly testifies to an interest in nature, but perhaps even more in how it is […]

Neighbourhood Lives

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2017] It is particularly interesting to present the series of images that Robert Walker has made on the subject of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood – where he was born and currently lives – in light of the festivities for Montreal’s 375th anniversary. The focus of these celebrations – optimistic and perhaps a bit facile – […]

Another look at things

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] The works in this issue’s thematic section are anchored in realities diametrically opposed to each other – the seal hunt, social marginality, and representation of women – and are from different times. These works nevertheless come together in their challenging of prejudices and dominant thought systems. In fact, each proposes to portray people […]

This Nature that Is Our World

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer

[Spring/Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of a […]

Far Away, So Close…

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April

[Winter 2016]   What can hold things together and forge intersections in universes as different as the ones gathered in these pages, if it is not that they address a few aspects of our common condition that is increasingly shaped by the current path of globalization? The opening of borders in the contemporary era, inaugurated […]

Fantasizing

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Is fantasizing always diametrically opposed to the truth? Or does it tend to become an inherent component of reality – to blend with it, be superimposed on it – to the point that the two shape each other? The recent Bugingo affair – involving a Montreal journalist who apparently invented a series of facts and […]

CV100! . . . And what comes next?

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Publishing a contemporary art magazine specializing in photography in 2015 is more relevant than ever. Simply think of all the magazines, galleries, exhibition centres, and events (Mois de la photo and photographic encounters of all kinds) that exist and are being created all over the world around the photographic image. Of course, the time has […]

Environments

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

We are pleased to present in this issue the first thematic section put together by Alexis Desgagnés in his new position as associate editor of the magazine. The section, bearing on the notion of habitat, juxtaposes recent works by photographers Normand Rajotte and Stephen Gill, each of whom stands out for a field practice adapted […]

The Analogue and the Abstract

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff

Each in its way, the works in this issue’s portfolio speak of photography and analogue images by inscribing them in other artistic media (digital simulation, film, video, sculpture, painting). The imprint of light is thus materialized in abstract, simplified forms that multiply the images’ referential registers while relativizing the privileged link between photography and the […]

Dignity and Distinction

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord

What, in fact, could the people (gypsies, miners, aristocrats, models, night owls, and others) gathered here in portraits have in common but the dignity conferred upon them by the photographers who took their picture? These artists’ approaches also share crossreferences, as well as photographic and pictorial skills displayed in chiaroscuros, framings, poses, textures and drapings […]

Making Image

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese

The thematic section of this issue presents recent works by three Montreal artists from the perspective of the performative dimension of their images. In these works, the artists stage bodies in situations of intimacy, intrusive proximity, or confrontation with their own fears, to bring to light how loved ones, strangers, and even animals help to […]

Broadening the Public Space

Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The thematic section CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC examines some of the issues related to the digital regime of images and their circulation on networks. It explores the many correspondences and reciprocities that are being woven between concrete spaces and various technological devices, whether portable (smartphones, applications of all types, geolocation instruments) or anchored in […]

Other Ways of Inscribing Public Art in the City

Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Dominique Auerbacher, Nicolas Baier

[Spring/summer 2013] In this issue, we return to the question of public art, a subject we previously addressed in issues 82 and 90. The artworks chosen for this portfolio stand out for the acuity with which their context for integration has been managed. Each of these artworks, in its way, offers an exemplary response to […]

A Forensic Aesthetic

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

This issue of Ciel variable includes a fifty-page special section on the appropriation by visual artists of questions related to forensic evidence. Organized by guest editor Vincent Lavoie, professor of art history and photography at UQAM, this issue continues in the spirit of some of our previous issues focusing on specific aspects of photographic studies […]

Full North / Vrai Nord

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Eamon Mac Mahon, Thomas Kneubühler

Today, the North is making economic headlines, as it has become a new Eldorado for societies stalked by the dream of continual growth. This territory – homeland to First Nations, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast pool of natural resources – is nevertheless mostly unknown to the general public. National mythology […]