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, […]