Portfolios

Forensics: Representations and Regimes of Truth – Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: Taryn Simon

January 24, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — On 6 June 1985, the international press was invited to the small Embu das Artes cemetery in Brazil to witness an extraordinary discovery. A team of police officers and medico-legal experts had just exhumed the presumed remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. A series of photographs taken on this occasion by reporter Robert Nickelsberg show the press’s infatuation with this event…

Guest editor: Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Portfolios
Authors: Vincent Lavoie

Since the 1990s, there has been a rise to pre-eminence of forensic imaginaries. This phenomenon can be observed in contemporary literature, as in novels by Kathy Reichs (Déjà Dead, 1997), herself a forensic anthropologist by profession, and in television series (Crime Scene Investigation, 2000; Forensic Files, 2000; Bones, 2005) that promulgate a belief in the […]

Eamon Mac Mahon, Landlocked – Isa Tousignant, The View from Up Here : Perspective on the Wild

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Eamon Mac Mahon

October 23, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — My first encounter with Canadian photographer and artist Eamon Mac Mahon was when I worked as an editor for a travel magazine, at which he was the stuff of local legend. He had shot a story about the Bahamas for which he’d risked life and limb: on a tiny, rickety plane with, lore dictates, more holes than a fisherman’s net, he hung out of the main cavity – tied in place with only a rope – to capture aerial shots of the turquoise swirling waters. The story won awards.

Andreas Rutkauskas, Virtually There – Geneviève Chevalier, Hiking the Trails of What Is to Come

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Geneviève Chevalier | Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas

October 25, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — I found out about the Virtually There project in 2009 during a brief visit to the Gushul Studio, which offers a residency program run by the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. At the time, Andreas Rutkauskas was staying there and preparing to make another of his outings in the mountains. The Gushul Studio is located in the small town of Blairmore, in the Crowsnest Pass area of the Rocky Mountains in the southwest part of Alberta…

Thomas Kneubühler, Under Currents – Pierre Dessureault, Currents

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler

October 30, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Thomas Kneubühler’s Under Currents takes us through the hydroelectric installations at James Bay and the complex network of exchanges between North and South that their construction has established. What is initially striking in this coherent whole is the rigorous organization of various elements in a series of groupings to form a well-marked path that is constructed bit by bit, in successive layers, with each of the carefully defined and delimited components opening new perspectives and adding a stratum of meaning to the plural discourse that has been set in motion.

True North

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Artists: Andreas Rutkauskas, Eamon Mac Mahon, Thomas Kneubühler

Three experiences of the north, real or perceived, that bring us face to face with the realities of a little-known region undergoing accelerated transformation. The north is at once home to a sparse population, an ecosystem vital to the entire continent, and a vast resource base that is in the sights of developers as ever […]

Jacky Georges Lafargue et Louis Couturier, Resolute Bay : Voyage du jour dans la nuit – Sonia Pelletier, A Wall of Snow, or Northern Studies Visited

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sonia Pelletier | Artists: Jacky Georges Lafargue, Louis Couturier

August 21, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Jacky Georges Lafargue and Louis Couturier’s project Resolute Bay – Voyage du jour dans la nuit finds a way to take viewers on a sort of voyage to the far reaches of our country and an encounter with people who live in a remote Inuit village with only about two hundred inhabitants…

Tendance Floue : MAD IN INDIA – Bruno Chalifour, A Future to Define

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Tendance Floue

August 23, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Tendance Floue is a collective of French photographers open to the world and the power of expression who reject labels and preconceptions. They are fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities that documentary photography, which they see as subjective, may offer them – whence, no doubt, the name of their group: “Tendance” (tendency), which tends toward without ever reaching the goal, and “Floue” (vague or blurred), resolutely evading precise definitions. The result?…

Edward Burtynsky, Oil – Sylvain Campeau, Between the Perceptible and the Ethical

Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

August 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The images are supreme. Of rather respectable dimensions – when they are not downright immense – and brightly coloured, they please us, dazzle us, force us to admire them. They show landscapes, openings into our immediate environment. But this environment does not have the bucolic accents of yore, for it is increasingly occupied by signs of exploitation of natural resources. Its wild – truly wild – territories are rarer and rarer…

Patrick Dionne et Miki Gingras, Mémoire – Sylvain Campeau, Self-document and Rediscovered Sociability

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne

May 29, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — For a number of years, Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras have been working on large-scale photographic projects that encourage artistic engagement in society. In 2002, to better fulfil this mission, they founded Diasol, a charitable organization the objective of which is to use art photography as a means of intervention with marginalized people and young people and adults with difficulties with school or family, in psychological distress, or in the process of social reintegration.

MoAD, The face of African Diaspora – Alexandra Martin, Old and New Photographs of African Diaspora

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: Alexandra Martin

May 31, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — In downtown San Francisco, at the corner of Mission and Third streets, is a huge picture window before which passersby can stop to look at a photo-mosaic several metres high inspired by the famous portrait Girl from Tamale (1973) by Chester Higgins Jr., which is also one of the “tiles” in the mosaic.

JR, The Wrinkles of the City – John K. Grande, Image Bridge Builder

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: JR

June 5, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — JR’s photography faces real life. The human faces that engage us in the real environments of the First and Third worlds are an exercise in self-identification within a larger matrix that is a seemingly invisible population of everyday people. Largely unrecognized, these people are off the map when it comes to social, political, or economic rights.

Collaborations

Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Portfolios
Artists: JR, Miki Gingras, MoAD, Patrick Dionne

See the oversized faces of a city’s inhabitants emerging on its walls and façades. These people came together to find ways to reappropriate the urban space, and to advertise their presence and identity. Here, photography is a tool for affirmative collaboration. JR The Wrinkles of the City Presentation of Wrinkles of the City, produced for […]

Sylvie Readman, À contretemps – René Viau, Utopia Out of Focus

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: René Viau | Artists: Sylvie Readman

March 21, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — What do we see? Somewhere on the urban periphery, a parallelepiped of concrete topped with an azure tarp sits on a rectangle of asphalt. Elsewhere, the whitewashed wall of a shed rises behind a section of suspended electrical wires. We come upon other indeterminate pieces of land, other uninhabited buildings. The photographs’ titles correspond to the toponymy of industrial sectors that appear more or less abandoned…

Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Of time, lost – Paule Mackrous, One Imagination, a Thousand Stories

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Paule Mackrous | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

March 23, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “The issue is clear: truth or life; history or art,” writes Nietzsche in the opening pages of his Seconde considération intempestive¹. The living, fragile and fleeting, are lost from the objective spectacle of history. This will remain so as long as we make history a succession of factual data rather than a return to an “internal time consciousness.”² Words engender linearity, whereas the experience of time is formed of simultaneities and twists.

Lynne Cohen, Photographies – Stephen Horne, Rooms of Screens/Screens of Rooms

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Lynne Cohen

March 27, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Lynne Cohen has been photographing generic architectural interior spaces for several decades. Photographing rooms is, and has always been, her subject. Some of these rooms are health spas, classrooms, and hotel lobbies, while others are more sinister – laboratories, control rooms, and military sites. In a Cohen photograph, however, even an innocent health and relaxation facility can appear in an unusually “posed” mode.

Places

Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Portfolios
Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Lynne Cohen, Sylvie Readman

[Fall 2011] Being attentive to the environments that one passes through. all these passageways, these enigmatic and inhospitable spaces, all those buildings that one sees on urban access roads, sometimes abandoned, that compose a purely functional environment. This, compared to the old city, to sites shaped by time, proximity, a different pace of life … […]

Martin Schoeller, Close up, Female Bodybuilders – Johanna Mizgala, Accumulating and Dispersing Perspective : The Portraits of Martin Schoeller

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Martin Schoeller

January 10, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — It is nice to stare – particularly at beautiful people who in part make their living as the object of your gaze, each making a concerted effort to appear as though they might actually exist solely for the purpose of your continuing adoration.

Tony Fouhse, USER Portraits of Crack Addicts – Emily Falvey, Use value

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Emily Falvey | Artists: Tony Fouhse

January 12, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — The pressure placed upon contemporary artists to produce socially critical, politically engaged works of art is both enormous and confusing. On the one hand, galleries and other visual-arts organizations expect artists to mobilize the population via certain “artistic strategies,” such as subverting cherished yet secretly oppressive idols or breaking out of traditional exhibition formats to …

JJ Levine, Queer Portraits – Dayna McLeod, Queering the Heteronormative Matrix

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: JJ Levine

January 17, 2017 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — Vivid colours and rich, symbolic domestic detailing underscore the confident, self-possessed gazes of JJ Levine’s subjects in their series Queer Portraits. An exploration of identity, gender politics, community, public vs. private, radical queer life, and deviant gender presentations, Queer Portraits confronts us with a group of subjects that ultimately reflect a portrait of the artist themselves. An intimate look at Levine’s community, this series plays with …

Faces

Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Portfolios
Artists: JJ Levine, Martin Schoeller, Tony Fouhse

[Spring/Summer 2011] Queers, media darlings, Aboriginals, female bodybuilders, and crack addicts form a highly heterogeneous portrait gallery that challenges our ideas about identity. These unsettling images reveal unexpected strengths or vulnerabilities, leading us to re-evaluate our perceptions. JJ Levine, Queer Portraits Levine offers a series of intimate, touching portraits of friends and close relations in […]

Michel Campeau, La chambre noire – Richard Baillargeon, On Obsolescence and Being Photographic

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Richard Baillargeon | Artists: Michel Campeau

October 11, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Michel Campeau, who has been a contemporary-art photographer for four decades, has received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize (2010), the Jean-Paul-Riopelle Career Grant (2009), and the Higashikawa International Photography Prize in Japan (1994). His work, which explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of images, questions the conventions of documentary photography. A retrospective exhibition of his work in 1996 at the Canadian Contemporary Photography Museum covered his production from 1971 to 1996. Campeau is represented by Galerie Simon Blais (Montreal), and lives and works in Montreal.

Chuck Samuels, Before Photography – Chuck Samuels, The Figure of the Photographer

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Chuck Samuels | Artists: Chuck Samuels

October 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Chuck Samuels’s photographs have been exhibited, published, and collected extensively in Quebec, Canada, and abroad. His installation and video works have been presented in various venues, including several Canadian film and video festivals, and his photographs are in numerous collections in Canada, France, Belgium and the United States.

Yan Giguère, Attractions – Sylvain Campeau, Gravity and Tropism

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Yan Giguère

October 18, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Yan Giguère has been a well-known figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene since the mid-1990s. His most recent photographic works were in solo exhibitions at Galerie Optica in 2009, Centre VU in 2008 and 2002, and Galerie B-312 in 2002. His pieces, which are in a number of collections, highlight the poetry of the everyday in series with strong narrative potential arranged on the walls of the exhibition space.

Alain Pratte, Histoires – Mona Hakim, A Thousand Journeys

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Interviews, Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Alain Pratte

October 20, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — Since 1973, Alain Pratte has produced numerous photographic projects, a number of which have been in exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including France and Venezuela. His work bears witness to passing time, the permanence or fleeting aspect of objects, unpredictable fates, and illusory ambitions.

Series

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Portfolios
Artists: Alain Pratte, Chuck Samuels, Michel Campeau, Yan Giguère

[Winter 2011] Fragmented narratives, recording of traces, and role playing within the image are some of the ways in which the artists presented in this issue approach the notion of series. Systematic or scattered, the series provides a means to gather multiple images to evoke a personal universe, possible dramas, a disappearing world, or the […]

Stan Douglas, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 – Karen Henry

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Essays, Portfolios
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Stan Douglas

May 16, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The impressive piece of public art addresses the very nature of public space. It is named after the two streets that cross at the north corner of the Woodward’s building, on which the artwork is installed. The image inhabits space like a sculpture, grandly overlooking the public and private courtyards of the new complex in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

War at a Distance. Blake Fitzpatrick, Karyn Sandlos, Roger Simon, curators – Amish Morrell

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Amish Morrell | Artists: Allyson Mitchell, Graeme Smith, Louie Palu, Richard Johnson, Stephen Andrews, Suzanne Opton

May 19, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The theme of the exhibition War at a Distance, presented by the TPW Gallery in Toronto, was media representations of war in the context of debates over the Canadian presence in Afghanistan.

Emanuel Licha, R for Real & Bagdads – Stephen Horne, Dwelling : A Set-up

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Emanuel Licha

May 24, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — These two works by Emanuel Licha are based on his interest in urban settings re-created for police or military training camps. The intention is to reveal the fully operational role of fiction in the reality of conflicts and in the composition of our portrayals of the foreign.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups – Jacinto Lageira, The Poetics of Facts

Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Portfolios
Authors: Jacinto Lageira | Artists: Sophie Ristelhueber

May 26, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — In Eleven Blowups, Sophie Ristelhueber uses elements of her own photographs to re-create images of bomb craters produced by the media. In showing the traces of destruction, these images, true and false at once, portray not the specificity of a single story and place but the experience of collapse.

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