Portfolios

Ed Pien, Presente: Pasado/Futuro – Bernard Schütze, Shaping the Contours of time

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Ed Pien

[Summer 2025] Shaping the Contours of time by Bernard Schütze [EXCERPT] The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. – Rainer Maria Rilke In his two-volume artist book, Presente: Pasado/Futuro, Ed Pien sets out part of a broader ongoing project in which he explores notions of time […]

Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Kiss Landing – Fanny Bieth, Photography as a Talisman

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Fatine-Violette Sabiri

[Summer 2025] Photography as a Talisman by Fanny Bieth [EXCERPT] Fatine-Violette Sabiri is a multidisciplinary artist whose media include photography, textile arts, and installation. Her book Kiss Landing, published in 2024,1 brings together almost two hundred photographs taken in Casablanca, where Sabrini was born, and in Montreal, where she lives and works. Produced over a […]

Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Architecture of the Self ⎻ Érika Nimis, Feeling and Listening to Images

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Mallory Lowe Mpoka

[Summer 2025] Feeling and Listening to Images by Érika Nimis [EXCERPT] By combining photography and textiles, the Cameroonian-Belgian artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka weaves visual stories that explore the blurred boundaries of identity and belonging. She focuses on the way in which an individual may navigate in multiple spaces, constantly redefining what it means to be […]

Thematic presentation: From Continent to Continent

Ciel variable 129 - FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Ed Pien, Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Mallory Lowe Mpoka

Recent news has brought us three artist’s books rooted in a search for identity grounded in duality, encounter, and the passage of memory.

Thematic presentation: Change of Scene

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Thematic presentation for Ciel variable 128: Change of Scene.

Geoffrey James, Canadian Photographs – Kenneth Hayes, A Weakness for Places

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James’s Canadian Photographs offer a paradoxical perspective on the vast country that is Canada. Cities and landscapes appear torn between a not always glorious past and an uncertain future.

Louie Palu, Distant Early Warning – Jill Glessing, The New Battle Lines: Images from the Arctic

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Louie Palu

Louie Palu has traveled to the Canadian Arctic several times, a part of the country whose strategic importance is well known, yet largely inaccessible to most of us due to its inhospitable nature. From his travels, Palu has created a critical project on the militarization of this territory.

Jinyoung Kim, Here – Gabrielle Sarthou, Uprooted, Taking Root

Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Portfolios
Authors: Gabrielle Sarthou | Artists: Jinyoung Kim

Jinyoung Kim’s journey is one of emigration, from South Korea to Canada. Although the places are briefly mentioned, it is the very idea of displacement, and the upheavals associated with such uprooting, that forms the core of his works.

Suzy Lake, Game Theory: Global Gamesmanship – Erin Silver, Queening the Pawn

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Erin Silver | Artists: Suzy Lake

In the series Game Theory: Global Gamesmanship, Suzy Lake presents herself, both as queen and pawn, in a chess game illustrating the power relations of our societies.

Zaynê Akyol, NÛJEN, les combattantes – Claudia Polledri, For “Better and Freer Tomorrows”

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Zaynê Akyol

A documentary filmmaker known for her works showing the importance of women’s commitment to the war against the Islamic State, Zaynê Akyol also creates the NÛJEN, les combattantes photography series, which reflects women’s experiences and solidarity on the frontline.

Caroline Monnet, Sororité – Caroline Nepton Hotte, Living Here: A Voice for Indigenous Women

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Nepton-Hotte | Artists: Caroline Monnet

As part of her wide-ranging, shape-shifting practice, Caroline Monnet’s composite and multigenerational portraits highlight the important role of native women in transmitting values in a context of decolonization.

Theme presentation: Sisters, Fighters, Queens

Ciel variable 127 – SISTERS, FIGHTERS, QUEENS | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The works gathered in this thematic dossier tell the story of women’s affirmation and contributions in various contexts: decolonization, resistance to Islamic fundamentalism and the reconsideration of traditional gamesmanship.

Justin Wonnacott, Figureground — Pierre Dessureault, Observing the Theatre of the Streets

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Justin Wonnacott

[Summer 2024] Observing the Theatre of the Streets by Pierre Dessureault [EXCERPT] Following in the street-photography tradition, Ontario photographer Justin Wonnacott has been scrutinizing life in cities in Canada and elsewhere for more than three decades. The images that he has brought together in Figureground highlight the uniqueness of his approach, which has evolved over […]

Patrick Beaulieu, El Perdido — Julie Martin, On the Road to Nowhere

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin | Artists: Patrick Beaulieu

[Summer 2024] On the Road to Nowhere by Julie Martin [EXCERPT] What story can photographs tell? How can a performance be reconstructed? How can travel be recounted with still images? These questions traverse the histories of performance and of photography, and are at the core of the work of the artist Patrick Beaulieu, who updates […]

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Games — Stephen Horne, Outside/Elsewhere

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Francis Alÿs

[Summer 2024] Outside/Elsewhere by Stephen Horne There is no need to understand it, only to contemplate it, to be struck with wonder and laugh with the universal laugh of creation. – Octavio Paz In his video series Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), the Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs documents the creation of place by children – a space […]

Trajectories

Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios

[Summer 2024] PORTFOLIOS A trajectory involves movement and, implicitly, evolution or even advance ment (read, progress). It is the contrary of a point, which represents immobility, stopping, the status quo. As we move from point A to point B, we change position, context, point of view. The trajectories followed by the three artists in our […]

Bertrand Carrière, Autoroutes 10-20-55 — Michel Hardy-Vallée, Landscape and Automobile

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 […]

Suzanne Lafont, Nouvelles espèces de compagnie — Julie Martin, Urban Intrusion

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 […]

Éric Tabuchi / Nelly Monnier, Exposer l’ARN — Luce Lebart, Photographic Tour of France

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 […]

Agglomerations

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 […]

Adad Hannah, Expositions récentes — Posing Bodies and Works, Sylvain Campeau

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 […]

Thomas Demand, Le bégaiement de l’histoire — Second Seeing, Stephen Horne

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 […]

Nicolas Baier, Vases communicants — An Almost Spontaneous Appearance of the Machine in the World, Jacques Doyon

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 […]

Seeing Through Images

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 […]

Michèle Pearson Clarke, The Animal Seems to Be Moving – Dayna McLeod, Queer Black Masculinities: Middle-aged Boyhood

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 […]

Raymonde April, Traversée — Pierre Dessureault, Snapshots of Memory

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 […]

Evergon, Theatres of the Intimate — Nathalie Côté, The Liberated Gaze

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 […]

The Power of Intimacy

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 […]

Emmanuelle Léonard, Black Out : Les livreurs / The Deliverers — Gabrielle Sarthou, Those Who Wait for Us

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. […]

Santiago Tamayo Soler, Neón — Edward Pérez-González, Tracing to Build: Concealing to Reveal

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…

Éliane Excoffier, Nightlife au mont Pinacle — Yannick Marcoux, Living Creatures Found in the Night

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…

Night Rounds

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. ..

Pierre Blache, L’insolence des villes — Stay Home; Take a Walk, Michel Hardy-Vallée

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 […]

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There – New York — Didier Morelli, To Be There, or To Have Been There

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 […]

Justine Kurland, Highway Kind (A Love Story) — Moyra Davey, Young Men at Risk

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 […]

Wanderings

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 […]

Meryl Mcmaster, As Immense as the Sky — Lori Beavis, The Beginning of Something New

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 […]

Jeff Thomas, Indians on Tour — Carolyn Hickey, The Indigenous Map Maker’s Room

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 […]

Dana Claxton, Portraits & Regalia — Skeena Reece, It’s Love or a Photograph

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’ […]

Figures of Affirmation

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 […]

Andreas Rutkauskas, Refuge: After the Fire — Franck Michel, The Resilience of Landscapes

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 […]

Thomas Kneubühler, Alpine Signals — Louis Perreault, Without Data Loss

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 […]

Geneviève Chevalier, Mirement/Towering : La Ménagerie et L’Herbier — Sylvain Campeau, Arranging the Living

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 […]

Against Nature

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 […]

Robert Graham, Three Montréal Photographers + — Zoë Tousignant, Robert Graham’s History of Photography in Montreal

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Michel Campeau, Tom Gibson

[Fall 2021] By Zoë Tousignant [Excerpt] There are those of us who believe that what lies beyond the photographic frame is as interesting as what is contained within it. This is not founded on a sentiment that the photo graph alone is not enough. Quite the contrary: it comes from a place of such deep […]

Amandine Alessandra, Marine Baudrillard, Carole Lévesque, Katharina Niemeyer et Magali Uhl, Écran total — Edward Pérez-González, The Absence Machine

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Edward Pérez-González | Artists: Charlie Doyon

[Fall 2021] By Edward Pérez-González [Excerpt] The reflections on screens and on relations between image and reality offered by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929– 2007) in his essay Écran total served as a framework for the staging of the exhibition of the same name, presented by the Centre de design at UQAM1 and organized by […]

William A. Ewing et Holly Roussell, Civilization – Quelle époque ! — Julie Martin, A Photographic Mapping of the TwentyFirst Century

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios
Authors: Julie Martin | Artists: Massimo Vitali

[Fall 2021] By Julie Martin [Excerpt] As far back as the 1990s, American literary critic Fredric Jameson was noting that the world is non-narrative and unrepresentable.1 Drawing an analogy with the urban planner Kevin Lynch’s book The Image in the City, Jameson showed that because we, as urban dwellers, are incapable of situating our- selves […]

Exhibiting Photography

Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Portfolios

[Fall 2021] 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 affecting global civilization. Inspired by […]

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. […]

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

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Vincent Lafrance

[Summer 2021] Par Zoë Tousignant [Extrait] Vincent Lafrance and I first met in 1996, when we were both young students in Cégep du Vieux-Montréal’s photography program. I decided early on that I liked his photographs – so much so that I purchased a selection of small prints that he had made for a class assignment: […]

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

[Summer 2021] Par Didier Morelli “The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.” — Amelia Jones Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998) [Excerpt] #SteveGiasson. You probably know Steve Giasson. You are likely to have seen his actions […]

Shifted

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Portfolios
Artists: Franck Gérard, Steve Giasson, Vincent Lafrance

[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 […]

David K. Ross, Children of Kaos — Jeanne Randolph, Sometimes a Name Is Just a Name

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Jeanne Randolph | Artists: David K. Ross

[Winter 2021] By Jeanne Randolph [Excerpt] Vain Pillaging – I told him I was thinking, “Vain Pillaging.” – As in futile? my friend responded. – As in gall-darn hubris, I said. Any one of us can do what we want with names, even four-thousand-year old names. – And, said my friend, who is familiar with […]

Chloé Beaulac, Ces lieux qui nous habitent — Dominique Sirois-Rouleau, Territories of Memory

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Dominique Sirois-Rouleau | Artists: Chloé Beaulac

[Winter 2021] Dominique Sirois-Rouleau [Excerpt] Chosen to take part in the Missions photographiques des Laurentides project,1 Chloé Beaulac set herself the objective of finding the family cottage that had been part of her childhood. This quest motivated the month-long residency, during which her recollections tied to the Laurentian landscape were confronted with reality. For days, […]

Alain Lefort, Résonance des silences — Yannick Marcoux, The Pixel: A Fragile Mirage

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Authors: Yannick Marcoux | Artists: Alain Lefort

[Winter 2021] Par Yannick Marcoux [Excerpt] Looking back upon our origins, it was a long time ago – a very long time, ten thousand years in fact – that the last ice age ended on Earth. What remains of that epoch seems to fascinate Alain Lefort, who, after making his series Eidolôn on drifting icebergs, […]

Landscapes as Mirrors

Ciel variable 116 — LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Lefort, Chloé Beaulac, David K. Ross

[Winter 2021] 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 city is a […]

Mary Kavanagh, Daughters of Uranium – Blake Fitzpatrick, Embodied Politics

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Blake Fitzpatrick | Artists: Mary Kavanagh

[Summer 2020] By Blake Fitzpatrick Uranium is an unstable element. It breaks down over time – a very long time. Naturally occurring uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years, meaning that it takes that amount of time for half of the uranium to transform into other elements in a radioactive decay chain. The elements […]

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance – Érika Nimis, La marche du monde

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: William Kentridge

[Summer 2020] By Érika Nimis Interdisciplinary artist William Kentridge (born 1955 in Johannesburg) is internationally celebrated for his animated films composed of charcoal drawings and as a director of live shows. Born into an activist family intimately involved with the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s, Kentridge works in media as varied as printmaking, sculpture, performance, […]

Benoit Aquin, La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii – Alexis Desgagnés, Anton Bequii : A Spiritual Uprising

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Benoit Aquin

[Summer 2020] [Technology] is no longer opposed to human beings but is being integrated with them and gradually absorbing them. — Jacques Ellul By Alexis Desgagnés I was asked to write about Benoit Aquin’s La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii.1 It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked. I haven’t said […]

The March of the World

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Portfolios
Artists: Benoit Aquin, Mary Kavanagh, William Kentridge

[Summer 2020] The works in this special section address dimensions of human activity that have considerable signiﬁcance in today’s globalized society in view of the role of technology, the use of energy resources, and respect for human rights. These complex works combine multiple voices to reﬂect ethical issues and their impacts on individuals and communities. […]

Mélissa Pilon, Foules — Claudia Polledri, What Is a Crowd? A New Approach to the Photojournalistic Image

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 […]

Gisele Amantea, Aleppo, Syria, December 17, 2016 — An interview by Jacques Doyon

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 […]

Alain Paiement, Masses / Particules — Alain Paiement, Crowds

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. […]

Dominique Blain, Déplacements — Louise Déry, A Painful Beauty

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 […]

Masses | Monuments

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Portfolios

[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 […]

Erasmus Schröter, Contest — Andreas Höll, A Crisis of Masculinity? The Gradual Liquefaction of Identities

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…

JJ Levine, Family — Charles Guilbert, Beyond Borders

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…

Kent Monkman, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle — Dayna McLeod, Disrupting Colonial Comforts and Settler Sensibilities

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.

Trans-identities

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 […]

Collection Lazare : États d’âmes, esprit des lieux — Colette Tougas, Portraits of Families with Nature (Still Life or Other)

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Portfolios
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Nicolas Baier

March 15, 2023 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By Colette Tougas. One purpose of the exhibition devoted to the Lazare collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was to highlight thirtythree photographs that have been donated to the institution by Montreal collector Jack Lazare…

Bertrand Carrière, Tout ceci est impossible — Sylvain Campeau, Time is Impossible

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Bertrand Carrière

March 8, 2022 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By Sylvain Campeau. Bertrand Carrière has had a long relationship with the ﬁlm world. Before establishing himself as an artist, he took many pictures as a soundstage photographer. But such images must not be seen solely as the result of a professional practice that imposed frameworks and constraints on the creation of images…

Serge Clément, Archipel — Alexis Desgagnés, Geography of an Archipelago

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Serge Clément

March 1, 2023 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By Alexis Desgagnés. In 2014 in Quebec City, photographer Serge Clément and I presented the exhibition Constellations, composed of a corpus of photobooks drawn from Clément’s impressive collection…

Collections Revisited

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Portfolios

[Summer 2019] Three recent exhibitions oﬀer a rare look at the act of collecting. In Archipel, Serge Clément presents a collection of all the photobooks that he has made – books that can be seen as sequencings of collections of his own images. Bertrand Carrière immerses himself in the collection of the Cinémathèque québécoise, focusing […]

Bert Danckaert, True Nature — James D. Campbell, Strange Oases of the Seen: Images of the Built World

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Bert Danckaert

June 21, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — By James D. Campbell. The photographs of Belgian artist Bert Danckaert have been likened to abstract paintings, but the family resemblance resides more in the facture than in the finished work of art…

Jessica Eaton, Iterations (I) — Stephen Horne, System or Poem?

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Jessica Eaton

June 21, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — By Stephen Horne. A number of Montreal artists are proposing ambitious responses to the dissolution of traditional artistic genres in what is clearly a “post-medium world.” Jessica Eaton is one of these, as evidenced by her recent exhibition titled Iterations (I) at Galerie Ertaskiran..

Yann Pocreau, Les surfaces de lumière — Bénédicte Ramade, The Life of Colours

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Yann Pocreau

June 14, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — By Bénédicte Ramade. In one of his most recent series, Réponses à la peinture, Yann Pocreau establishes an interplay of brightly coloured superimpositions, transparencies, and opacities…

The Space of Couleur

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Portfolios

[Winter 2019] From the manipulation of light (through filtering, combination, or diffraction) 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 challenge our perceptions. Often, the referent […]

Émilie Serri, The Space Between the Seconds – Émilie Serri, Searching for a Lost Country

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Portfolios
Authors: Émilie Serri | Artists: Émilie Serri

February 2, 2022 [originally published in CV110 in Fall 2018 ] — In March 2017, I crossed the country by train. On board The Canadian, I travelled a total distance of 8,932 kilometres on a return trip as a way to get moving on writing my master’s thesis…

Richard Mosse, The Castle – Sylvain Campeau, Human Traces

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Richard Mosse

January 26, 2022 [originally published in CV110 in Fall 2018 ] — As he had first done in 2011 and 2013 for Infra and The Enclave, Mosse uses a military tracking technology. In those series, it was an infrared film camera capable of detecting human presences in dense foliage…

Michel Huneault, Roxham – Sophie Bertrand, An Intersubjective Artwork for Rethinking the Phenomenon of Migrations

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Portfolios
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Michel Huneault

January 19, 2022 [originally published in CV110 in Fall 2018] — Thanks to their inherent power, images may function to inform or to reinforce prejudices. For a number of years, photographer Michel Huneault has been concerned with deconstructing preconceived ideas about migratory issues. Each of his new series builds on the previous one…

Migration

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Portfolios

[Winter 2018] More than thresholds, borders have become a kind of non-place – extra-national zones – where migrants’ identities and statuses are examined and their statuses 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 migrants […]

Carol Sawyer, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive – Ariane Noël de Tilly, Between Fiction and Reality: How to Shed Light on Artists Who Have Been Left in the Shadows

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Ariane Noël de Tilly | Artists: Carol Sawyer

November 10, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — For twenty years, Vancouver artist Carol Sawyer has constructed a speculative history around her character Natalie Brettschneider, through whom she has introduced the art practices of a number of previously overlooked artists who developed within alternative circles…

Charles Gagnon | Emmanuelle Léonard, Le huitième jour – Pierre Dessureault, Expo 67: The Christian Pavilion and Le huitième jour

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Charles Gagnon, Emmanuelle Léonard

November 17, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — At Expo 67, a huge celebration of human progress and great festival of the image in all of its technological and expressive possibilities, the Christian Pavilion designed by Charles Gagnon offered a counterpoint to the event’s sea of triumphant optimism….

Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics, Freedom Rocks: The Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall – Jill Glessing, The Mobile Ruin and The Labour of Commemoration

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Blake Fitzpatrick, Vid Ingelevics

December 1, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — Movement is elemental to existence. Since we made our slow crawl from sea to land we’ve been “on the road” seeking better environments. But another force – territorialism – counters that drive and stems our free flow with walls, great and small…

Revisit

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios

[Spring-Summer 2019] The works brought together in this issue look back at significant phenomena and events in recent history to bring them back to memory and assess their current relevance. These are prolific works, with multiple iterations, that take forms as complex as their subjects: an entire field of artistic practices, pioneering works and pivotal […]

Iran, Année 38, Rencontres d’Arles – Claudia Polledri, « Persian Letters »

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kowsari, Arash Khamooshi, Azadeh Akhlaghi, Azin Haghighi, Babak Kazemi, Behnam Zakeri, Gohar Dashti, Kaveh Kazemi, Morteza Niknahad, Newsha Tavakolian, Shadi Ghadirian, Sina Shiri, Solmaz Daryani

[Winter 2018] By Claudia Polledri Written in Farsi on a white box abandoned on the black asphalt of Pahlavi Avenue in Tehran, the day after the Islamic revolution prevailed – on February 11, 1979 – is “The nation is victorious.” This is the first image in the exhibition Iran, Année 38,1 presented at the most […]

Gabor Szilasi, The Art World in Montreal, 1960‒1980 – Zoë Tousignant, On Emotion and the Photographic Archive

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Gabor Szilasi

June 29, 2021 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — Photographer Gabor Szilasi was born in Hungary in 1928 and immigrated to Canada in 1957. Soon after settling in Montreal, Szilasi began to photograph the many art openings that he and his wife, artist Doreen Lindsay, regularly attended…

Justin Wonnacott, Pictures of Art – Laurent Vernet, An Oblique Gaze at Artworks in Public Spaces

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Laurent Vernet | Artists: Justin Wonnacott

July 6, 2021 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — “Obsession”: that’s the word that photographer Justin Wonnacott uses to explain his ambitious project Pictures of Art (Images d’art). The subject of this series, which numbers 350 images to date, is the artworks found in public spaces and sites (monuments, works of public art and works integrated with architecture, graffiti) in the National Capital Region….

Going Public

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Portfolios

[Winter 2018] This issue’s thematic section shows 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 societal and cultural context that circumscribes […]

Joan Fontcuberta, Trauma – Sylvain Campeau, Autopsy of a Disappearance

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Joan Fontcuberta

January 11, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — In his work, Joan Fontcuberta explores the effects of the real and the capacity for truth generated by the technological image, in order to denounce the authoritarian discourses regarding information and knowledge. His other subjects include nature and the functions of the image in digital culture.

André Barrette, Fin de Siglo – Alexis Desgagnés, Fin de siècle in Cuba

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: André Barrette

January 18, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — André Barrette likely never wanted his art in the spotlight. That is why, outside of the community of artist-run centres in Quebec City, relatively little is known about his discreet but important contribution to Quebec photography landscape in recent decades.

Michel Campeau, The Donkey that Became a Zebra : histoires de chambre noire – Joan Fontcuberta, Fire, Prayers and the Place of Photography

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Authors: Joan Fontcuberta | Artists: Michel Campeau

January 25, 2021 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — Just when we thought we had all the answers to the enigma of our memory fixed in silver salts, life – without so much as a by-your-leave – changed the questions. Perhaps because life is not a problem to be solved, as Søren Kierkegaard said, but a reality to be experienced…

Ruins

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Portfolios
Artists: André Barrette, Joan Fontcuberta, Michel Campeau

[Fall 2017 ] — Thematic Introduction

Denis Farley, Espaces aériens – Daniel Fiset, Photographs Like Clouds

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Denis Farley

September 1, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Espaces aériens marks a turning point in Farley’s aesthetic, developed since the 1980s, of working mainly in documentation of landscape and architecture. In this series, he gradually abandons horizontal composition and aims his lens upward, letting layers of clouds dictate the composition and perturb the unified reading…

Alain Lefort, Eidôlon – Francine Paul, Hunting for Landscapes in the Spring of Glacial Figures

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Francine Paul | Artists: Alain Lefort

September 8, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Since 2010, Lefort’s photographic series have evidenced his desire to go to increasingly remote regions alone to photograph natural phenomena; most recently, he has been intrigued by icebergs, huge in both dimensions and appeal…

Jocelyn Philibert, Arbres – Franck Michel, The Depths of the Landscape

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Authors: Franck Michel | Artists: Jocelyn Philibert

September 15, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — For more than ten years, Jocelyn Philibert has been photographing trees at night. This near-obsession was triggered during a summer spent in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, on the bank of the St. Lawrence River. Having just acquired a small digital camera, he decided to go out and explore the vicinity of his cottage, photographing everything around him, after the sun went down…

TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert

At first glance, the works presented here might seem to be simply about work on a motif. A more attentive look, however, shows that what is indicated here, in this focus on trees, or icebergs, or clouds, is the shaping of natural elements by human action on a landscape that has become an environment. Jocelyn […]

Images of Montreal. Some notable projects on Montreal neighbourhoods – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Roger Charbonneau

May 12, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Over the years, Montreal has been the subject of a number of major documentary projects. We might think of Gabor Szilasi’s prolific production – in particular, as he recorded development in the city, his photographs of St. Catherine Street (1977–79) in which he immortalized the configuration of the stores along the street…

Robert Walker, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Observations and Recollections – Pierre Dessureault, Looking at Hochelaga-Maisonneuve

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker

February 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — For ten years, Robert Walker has been working on a project called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve: Observations and Recollections. The subtitle conveys the two aspects of his approach…

Montrealities

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Robert Walker, Roger Charbonneau

[Winter 2017] Over the years, many photographers have explored Montreal and its neighbourhoods. Their images have captured portraits of residents, the colour and composition of the streets and commercial arteries, and the mixture of cultures that contribute to the quality and diversity of a city, as well as the commitment of residents who create the […]

Marisa Portolese, Belle de jour III: Dialogues with Notman’s Portraits of Women – James D. Campbell, More than Meets Her Eye: A Dimensional Portraiture

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

March 5, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Montreal-based fine-art photographer Marisa Portolese has garnered well-deserved acclaim for the clarity and lush chromatic and emotional dimensionality of her images. The third instalment of her photographic series of portraits of women and girls titled Belle de jour marks something…

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s  – Jill Glessing. Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and a Few Others . . .

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Garry Winogrand

March 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The title that brings together the wild and woolly works in Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s1 is worthy of consideration. The word “outside” depends on its semiotic partner in crime – “inside.” . . .

Yoanis Menge, HAKAPIK – Mona Hakim, Countering the Negative Image

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Yoanis Menge

March 12, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — HAKAPIK did not go unnoticed during its presentation at Occurrence. The subject was an attention-grabber: a report on the seal hunt by Yoanis Menge, a photographer from Îles de la Madeleine who totally immersed himself in the lives of groups of hunters off the coast of the Canadian North…

From Another Angle

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

[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain […]

Isabelle Hayeur, Desert Shores (L’Amérique perdue) – Stephen Horne, Photographing In the Anthropocene

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur

January 6, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Dead trees, a few dried-up pigeons, some rotting fish, and broken-up cottages: what is the world that these make up? From the perspective of Montreal documentary photographer Isabelle Hayeur, this is a landscape – that is, a space inhabited with suburbs and industrial plants…

Geneviève Chevalier, Mon boisé, phase II – John K. Grande, My Woodland, or the Developers’?

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier

January 8, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — So pervasive have the interventions become that they challenge the stereotype of nature as an ongoing and seemingly inexhaustible eternal backdrop to all that we do. Our era is all about the intertwining of the human built landscape and the natural world…

Jessica Auer, January – James D. Campbell, Bluer than Blue

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Jessica Auer

January 13, 2020 [originally published in CV103 in Spring 2016] — Who better than a seasoned photographer to explore the phenomenology of light? Jessica Auer’s recent series January, created during a 2015 residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, is a thematic work of great visual poetry…

Nature

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Portfolios
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 […]

Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers – Isa Tousignant, From the Northern to the Southern Suburbs

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena

October 21, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — In the storybook that is Alejandro Cartagena’s oeuvre, Carpoolers is the chapter that comes between Suburbia Mexicana and What We Fight For. The artist, who works and lives in Monterrey, Mexico, has been researching and imaging urban sprawl and its impact for the last decade in photographs that mix a luscious kind of composed beauty with deep human interest…

Julian Germain, The Future is Ours, Classroom Portraits – Johanna Mizgala, Between Portraiture and the Documentary

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Julian Germain

October 23, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — It started off in the northeast U.K., where I am based. I had received funding at the time to photograph in six particular schools. I realized pretty soon that it would be interesting to expand to other schools in different parts of the country, in that it was a way to make a portrait of the population…

Raymonde April, Near You No Cold – Charles Guilbert, To Photograph to Understand

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Raymonde April

October 28, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — For a Westerner travelling, it’s quite easy to take striking pictures of India. But what is being portrayed in these images is simply culture shock. One stays at a distance. Since I was in Mumbai to work, what was urgent for me was not so much to take pictures as to understand…

Far Away, So Close

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

[Winter 2016] Globalization is making us more aware of the realities of the entire planet through news, visits, and business travel. In addition, urbanization and consumer markets are tending to bring cultures and lifestyles ever closer to each other. Even so, and fortunately, diversity and differences remain. What is more, the most radical forms […]

Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Études préparatoires (dessins d’explosions) – Charles Guilbert, Logic of Excess

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf

August 7, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Since 2012, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf has been working on a series of artworks titled Études préparatoires (dessins d’explosions), which he has presented in various venues and contexts. As he has often done in the past, Phaneuf revives found objects by inscribing them in a system of his own making.

Moyra Davey, Copperheads – Isa Tousignant, Heads of State of the Art of Money

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Moyra Davey

August 12, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Moyra Davey’s Copperheads series has had a few existences. It was born in 1990, soon after the Canadian-born artist moved to New York, where she still resides. In those early days it was a project that lived a practically private life…

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin. Scarti – Paul Paper, Reason for photography in Dustbin

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Paul Paper | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin

August 15, 2019 [originally published in CV101 in Fall 2015] — Scarti is a recent photographic series, and a book of the same title, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The project revives the photographers’ 2003 series Ghetto. It is, however, by no means a straight reprint. The title – Italian for “scraps” – gives away an important aspect of this reuse…

Strates | Strata

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, Moyra Davey, Oliver Chanarin

In geology, the concept of stratification refers to a process during which sediments accumulate in layers, which eventually form more or less heterogeneous sedimentary ensembles but nevertheless remain distinct units of meaning. We often find such ensembles on the edges of paths or roads; they offer the possibility of a simultaneous reading of many strata […]

Althea Thauberger, Marat, Sade, Bohnice / Geneviève Chevalier, The Revolution of Marat, Sade, Bohnice

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Althea Thauberger

May 21, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — From the opening credits, the title of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade as Performed by the Prague-based Experimental Theatre Company Akanda for the Patients and Staff of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital announces the work’s device….

Chuck Samuels, The Photographer – Chuck Samuels, The Ventriloquist’s Dummy: Another interview

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

May 22, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — Chuck Samuels: In Before the Camera, you presented yourself in drag to look at the female nude in the history of photography; in Psychoanalysis, you appeared as both the Norman Bates and the Marion Crane characters; in Before Photography, you assumed the roles of photographers in film stills from a specific era…

Adad Hannah & Denys Arcand, Les Bourgeois de Vancouver – Sébastien Hudon, The People of Bronze

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Denys Arcand

May 28, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — As far back as 2002, multidisciplinary artist Adad Hannah was citing a work by French sculptor Auguste Rodin in his own work. It has been thirteen years since he produced Stills, composed of video captures of Rodin’s first bronze, The Age of Bronze (1877). At the time, no one would have guessed that this was the first manifestation of Hannah’s unique and constant fascination with the Parisian master…

Replay

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Chuck Samuels, Denys Arcand

Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire: here, a sculpture by Rodin, self-portraits of famous photographers, and a play whose writing is attributed, as part of the fiction, to an author of another era. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and […]

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