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…
Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Portfolios
Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff
These abstract works involving simple forms evoke methods of analogue photography to challenge the degree of veracity of the image. Imprint, inversion, and casting are some of the components transposed into other artistic media to re-evaluate our capacity to apprehend the real. THOMAS RUFF Photograms Thomas Ruff’s images, made with 3D digital imaging software, are […]
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Claire Moeder | Artists: Gabriel Coutu-Dumont
October 29, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — In Glasgow, the artist Gabriel Coutu-Dumont set up a minimal photography studio on Sauchiehall Street, a street frequented by the city’s night owls. For several nights, he drew these passersby away from the tumult of the street and asked them to pose in front of an analog camera for a twenty-minute session. The result was The Way of the Willows, a gallery of eighty anachronistic portraits in which the classical composition contrasts with the signs of the models’ contemporary lives…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Christian Tagliavini
November 2, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Portraits are deceptively alluring: we are immediately attracted to admiring the faces of others. As we are drawn under their spell, the images reveal themselves to be carefully crafted manifestations that must be decoded to be fully understood…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Pierre Gonnord
November 5, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Pierre Gonnord’s photographic portraits are fascinating for the experience that they offer us. The models gaze straight at the photographer’s lens, and we are taken aback: we feel like they are staring at us…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Portfolios
Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord
Three approaches to the portrait sustained by pictorial references and knowledge manifested in chiaroscuro, framings and poses, texture and draping of fabrics, head positions, and, above all, the gazes. And techniques that ennoble their subjects. PIERRE GONNORD Portraits Strong presences with imposing gazes, and yet revealed with a sort of humility. Pierre Gonnord approached anonymous […]
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Kim Waldron
August 20, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Over the years, it has been possible to observe a strong trend in Kim Waldron’s photographic work – a central theme or modus operandi that has been evident in her projects since the very beginning. The artist usually appears in her images, but although she is the central subject, she is not really performing a “spectacle of the self.” …
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Marisa Portolese
August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Walk around in early winter and you may just spot a dash of colour peeking through from under the first coats of snow that blanket the front gardens. That’s a carnation. Long after the peonies, lilies, and daffodils have gone, this sturdy flower still shines its bright hues, in defiance of the season of death…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier
August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Up to now, a certain conception of painting came to mind when I thought of Jacynthe Carrier’s photographic and videographic work, not only because of the emphasis that she places on composition and narration in the creation of her works, but especially because of the type of gaze that these works draw…
Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese
These three montreal artists have in common the performative dimension of the images in their works. Bodies are staged in situations of intimacy, intrusion, or sacrifice to highlight how loved ones, strangers, and animals help to form our identity. JACYNTHE CARRIER Les Eux Here, we are as close as possible to bodies, in an interwoven […]
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Janine Marchessault | Artists: Dave Colangelo, Jean-Michel Crettaz, Jennie Suddick, Mark-David Hosale, Michael Snow, Patricio Davila, Philip Hoffman
May 22, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Images are connected to our physical environments more dramatically than ever before – literally opening up new spaces of interactivity and connection that transform the experience of being in the city, its semiotic forms, and its modes of public gathering, navigation, and movement…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christine Ross | Artists: George Bures Miller, Janet Cardiff
May 23, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Since the 1990s, spatial art – a category that has broadened to include installation, architectural environments, relational interventions, (…) – has led to a major redefinition of the relationship between art and the public space…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Daniel Fiset | Artists: Karen Elaine Spencer
May 28, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In the autumn of 2012, a large brown envelope addressed to me arrived at my apartment. Inside it was a signed inkjet print of a colourful typographic exercise, announcing via an enigmatic sentence – hey mike please wipe up any spills that may occur – the genesis of the latest project by Montreal artist Karen Elaine Spencer…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Christelle Proulx | Artists: Jon Rafman
May 30, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — The “nine eyes” in Jon Rafman’s project refer to the photographic device mounted on the roofs of Google cars. These cars have been travelling the world’s roads since 2007, equipped with cameras with nine lenses, taking pictures of streets – images automatically in street view – for use with the Google Maps tool…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Élène Tremblay | Artists: Dominic Gagnon
June 4, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — In his Web trilogy – the films RIP in Pieces America, Pieces and Love All to Hell, and Big Kiss Goodnight (2009–13) – Dominic Gagnon finds video excerpts on the Internet, which he describes as a cinémathèque or film archive, and recombines them to produce what he calls “films about people who film themselves.”
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet
June 6, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — Roland Barthes once attempted to define the nature of photography as “a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.” In the photograph, he wrote, was produced “an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.” Some thirty years later, Francis Jauréguiberry remarked that there is always a great deal of elsewhere in our here; he was talking about the portable telephone…
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Portfolios
Authors: Suzanne Paquet
With essays by Suzanne Paquet, Élène Tremblay, Christelle Proulx, Daniel Fiset, Christine Ross, Janine Marchessault and works by Dominic Gagnon, Jon Rafman, Karen Elaine Spencer, Janet Cardiff et George Bures Miller and the exhibition Land/Slide: Possible Futures Even though, in the view of many authors, it seems that we are now living only in the […]
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Rannou | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne
March 21, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Far from fitting the image of picture chasers and big-time reporters, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras seem, rather, to present themselves as pedagogues of photography, as their projects are intended both to document the contemporary world and to teach the rudiments of photography…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Emmanuel Hermange | Artists: Dominique Auerbacher
March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Dominique Auerbacher’s early career was bound up in the emergence of photographic commissions devoted to landscape in Europe, starting with the Mission photographique de la Datar, which brought her to the public eye in the mid-1980s. She sparked a lively debate by choosing, against all expectations, to photograph a number of major European cities…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Nicolas Baier
March 26, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — To judge by his works, Nicolas Baier has never been anything but a photographer, as these works are replete with all the potentialities, components, and mechanisms of the medium. This is so even when the works he creates are not photographic…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Portfolios
Artists: Dominique Auerbacher, Miki Gingras, Nicolas Baier, Patrick Dionne
[Spring/summer 2013] A thematic section on public art featuring the works of nicolas baier, dominique auerbacher, and patrick dionne and Miki gingras, highlighting the issues of community affirmation in the public space and the revelation, or contestation, of its customs and regulations. Somewhere between group portrait, “objective” self-portrait, and urban anti-aesthetic . . . NICOLAS […]
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Phil Chadwick
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Meteorology is a science of prediction. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are analyzed in order to anticipate precipitation, predict temperatures, and so on.1 The weather report, on tv or radio, has become an indispensable barometer, and there are now countless weather “aps” available…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Gaëlle Morel | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard
December 20, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — After devoting a number of projects to the world of work, Montreal photographer and videographer Emmanuelle Léonard investigates the notions of visual traces and information in her most recent works…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: William E. Jones
January 10, 2018 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio, police department, convinced that homosexual practices created a predisposition to perpetrate serious predatory crimes, decided to put the public restroom in a large park in its town under surveillance. The site was suspected of being the scene of clandestine sexual activities…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Marianne Cloutier | Artists: Paul Vanouse
January 15, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — The American artist Paul Vanouse, known for his collaboration with the collective Critical Art Ensemble, has had a practice involving diversion since the early 1990s. He appropriates techniques, tools, materials1 , and knowledge from the techno-sciences in order to better examine what is at stake in those disciplines…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexis Lussier | Artists: Corinne May Botz
January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Ever since Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) first took his metric photographs, in which he tried to produce accurate maps of crime scenes, legal photography has always been, in spite of itself, a “photography of interiors.” This involved considerable technical constraints (cramped quarters with no place to pull back, poor of insufficient lighting, and so on), as Rodolphe Reiss (1875–1929) often demonstrated…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Susan Schuppli | Artists: Errol Morris
January 22, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris, offers a concise example of a methodological shift – what we (in the European Research Council project that I am affiliated with) have elsewhere called a forensic turn – within the investigation of human rights violations and war crimes…