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…
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 […]
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…
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.” . . .
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…
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 […]
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…
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…
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…
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 […]
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…
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…
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…
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 […]
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.
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…
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…
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 […]
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….
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…
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…
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 […]
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Caroline Loncol Daignault | Artists: Normand Rajotte
March 13, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Le chantier: the first image. Through marks and lines – green, taupe, orange – a wet woodlands glistens. In the foreground, three black tree trunks. The one in the centre is cut open at the base, showing freshly gnawed yellow flesh. It partially hides a pile of branches arranged in an outwardly spreading form – the key, the sun of the image…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Allison Tweedie
March 18, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The series Cutting Sunsets is composed of small-format collages portraying scenes of daily life around affluent dwellings on the American west coast. A few people, here and there, quietly tend to their land, do maintenance, contemplate, walk around, and converse…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Sébastien Hudon | Artists: Steve Veilleux
March 20, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — One can easily imagine the scene, so banal that it is universal. On a moonless night, its highbeams blazing, a new car, with a new couple inside, rolls down a remote road, far from the bustle of the city. The passengers, the nuclear family of the post-atomic era, already see themselves there, deluded by the illusion of an extraordinary suburb – one of a thousand similar suburbs…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Iain Sinclair | Artists: Stephen Gill
March 25, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — Our expeditions usually begin at first light. This time, Stephen explained, we would be better to hold off until the worst of the rush hour had burnt itself out. I sat on the church porch and waited, admiring a procession of those bright-red sculptural interventions held long enough at the traffic lights to catch the appreciative eye, the new Stagecoach buses with the NOT IN SERVICE destination windows…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Allison Tweedie, Normand Rajotte, Stephen Gill, Steve Veilleux
So, here we are, humans and animals (the same thing, really), perforce engaged in the concrete and naked fact of existing. We are – the verb says it with the force of law – sunk into being like a foundation is sunk into the ground. For as long as the few hours, days, or decades […]
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Henri Venne
January 14, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Henri Venne is a painter. It is painted matter that interests him. It is in this medium that he was educated, and it is also how he defines himself. Henri Venne is also a photographer, as the works that emerge from his creative process are photographs. He is also interested in how images are imbued with visual effects, places for various reflections…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Charles Guilbert | Artists: Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer
January 16, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — It is quite uncommon for the association of two exhibitions to create a dialogue that becomes an artwork in itself. Yet, this is what Dazibao did by bringing together works by Jacinthe Lessard-L. and by the duo formed of Lorna Bauer and Jon Knowles. Their respective works, although different in tonality and look, intertwine to lead viewers into a surprising reflection on darkness…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Thomas Ruff
January 21, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Given the impossible computer-made “photograms” in Thomas Ruff’s recent series – thus in line with Moholy-Nagy’s idea that one can make photographs without a camera (he made his own photograms) – we must immediately consider either a broadening of the notion of photography or its being subsumed, pure and simple…