Dakar, From the Studio to the Sidewalk — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Babacar Traoré (Doli), Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Bouna Médoune Sèye, Élise Fitte-Duval, Fatou Kandé Senghor, Ibrahima Thiam, KhéraBaba, Mabeye Deme, Malick Welli

[Winter 2020] Par Erika Nimis [Excerpt] Dakar, a cosmopolitan capital city and crossroads on the Atlantic coast, open to all creative currents, has grown under the gaze of its photographers. An independent field of professional photography emerged in the 1990s, and the institution of the Mois de la Photo has contributed to legitimizing an increasingly […]

Geneviève Cadieux, Vast Still Tender: Ghost Ranch — Laurie Milner

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Laurie Milner | Artists: Geneviève Cadieux

[Winter 2020] Par Laurie Milner [Excerpt] Is it the greyness of the April afternoon that makes the Rene Blouin Gallery seem so luminous as I enter Geneviève Cadieux’s exhibition Ghost Ranch?1 I had heard the buzz among artists and colleagues that this was a show to be seen – a virtuoso production by an august […]

Stephen Gill, Gill and the Birds: A Photographic Code of Ethics — Alexis Desgagnés

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Essays
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Stephen Gill

[Winter 2020] Par Alexis Desgagnés [Excerpt] On the threshold of my teenage years, my greatest passion was to observe birds. I spent countless hours, binoculars hung around my neck, prowling slowly, silently, through woods and meadows, looking out for a rare gem! When I was thirteen, a camera, a gift from my stepmother, replaced the […]

Martin Bureau. Borders and Walls — Sophie Bertrand

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Martin Bureau

[Fall 2019] Par Sophie Bertrand [Excerpt] “The number of walls has tripled since the Cold War, and it has kept growing since 2001; it now consists of almost 30,000 km of armed borders.”1 This observation, made in 2013 by the researchers of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques et diplomatiques at the Université du Québec […]

CONTACT 2019. Violence — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Carrie Mae Weems

[Fall 2019] By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] Violence runs through our lives, experienced directly or through media representations. We are subject to its power to varying degrees depending on our geographical location, race, class, gender, and access to high-speed internet. We are well acquainted with the variety of ways that humans inflict harm – whether physical, […]

About the Face: The Photographs of Dave Heath — Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault

[Fall 2019] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] In a body of work accumulated over more than sixty years, Dave Heath (1931–2016), a Canadian photographer born in the United States, challenged the qualities of the photographic medium and its techniques. He constantly probed, through images, Montaigne’s dictum that “every man carries the entire form of the human […]

Luigi Ghirri. Flatness and Its Frame — Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Luigi Ghirri

[Fall 2019] By Stephen Horne [Excerpt] The Map and The Territory is a large and intricate exhibition of colour photographs by the late Italian artist Luigi Ghirri at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.1 No doubt the curator of the exhibition, James Lingwood, adopted this title following up on a note that Ghirri wrote in […]

Nathan Lyons, An Exploration of Photography as Visual Language — Bruno Chalifour

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Nathan Lyons

[Summer 2019] By Bruno Chalifour [Excerpt] Some two years after Nathan Lyons’s death, on August 30, 2016, the George Eastman Museum (GEM) is presenting an overview of the life’s work of one of the central influencers of American photography in the second half of the twentieth century:1 a photographer exhibited in the most prestigious museums […]

Anthropocene Fatigue: Edward Burtynsky’s Strategy of Collapse — Bénédicte Ramade

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2019] By Bénédicte Ramade [Excerpt] From the start it seems taken for granted: Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene at the National Gallery of Canada will be technophilic.1 At every opportunity. Even as stratigraphers are still discussing the contours of this geological epoch attributed to human activity, still bitterly arguing over the relevance of the very word […]

Paris Photo, A Game of Memory — Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Daido Moriyama

[Summer 2019] By Claudia Polledri [Excerpt] Context. The 22nd edition of the Paris Photo international photography fair took place November 8–11, 2018, in Paris. During the four-day fair, crowds of artists, gallery owners, collectors, publishers, curators, journalists, and photography lovers bustled through the Grand Palais, which had become a labyrinth of images organized by Paris […]

Milo Rau, Truth and Justice: The Congo Tribunal — Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Milo Rau

[Summer 2019] By Pierre Dessureault “Truth may not be the goal, but it may be the way.”1 [Excerpt] The Congo Tribunal, documentary film by Milo Rau, a German–Swiss co-production (2017), was presented as part of the exhibition L’imaginaire radical: le contrat social at VOX September 13 to December 15, 2018. The International Institute of Political […]

Camerart. Art from the Point of View of Photography — Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Charles Gagnon

[Winter 2019] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] The exhibition Camerart, produced by Galerie Optica and presented in Montreal from December 16, 1974, to January 14, 1975, was a pivotal event in the photography/art debate in Quebec. Although a place in the art market had been carved out for photography in the late 1960s, museums were proceeding […]

Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie. Traces of the Chaos — Érika Nimis

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Debi Cornwall

[Winter 2019] By Érika Nimis [Excerpt] Every summer since 2010, Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie has literally pushed art photography into parks and forests and onto beaches, inviting visitors to a true treasure hunt along the legendary Route 132. During each edition, this photographic and human adventure is punctuated by a number […]

Marisa Portolese, Kinship as a Practice: In the Studio with Notman — Laurie Milner

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Essays
Authors: Laurie Milner | Artists: Marisa Portolese

[Winter 2019] By Laurie Milner [Excerpt] Kinship, broadly defined, is a core concept in Montreal artist Marisa Portolese’s photographic practice. We see kinship, in the context of family relations, enacted in Antonia’s Garden (2007–11), a series of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes that traces the psychic effects of trauma and the will to heal in […]

Michel Campeau. Photography, the Photographer, the Collector – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Michel Campeau

[Fall 2018] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] Photography. The exhibition Michel Campeau – Life before Digital,1 a retrospective of Michel Campeau’s approach in the early 1970s, offers a well­rounded view of his ideas on photography, on the figure of the photographer, and on that of the collector who finally took over from the producer of images. […]

Envisioning Photography as Collaborative – Ellen Tolmie

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Essays
Authors: Ellen Tolmie

[Fall 2018] By Ellen Tolmie [Excerpt] A recent show at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) challenges conventional notions of the lone photographer, the roles of subjects, and even the exhibition space. The idea of the photograph made by an individual, the photographer, now also lionized as artist and auteur, has long been embedded in the […]

In Pursuit of the Afterlife – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell

[Fall 2018] By James D. Campbell [Excerpt] In a remarkable group exhibition recently on view at Optica,1 Raymonde April, one of Canada’s finest living photographers, marshalled the talents of an intrepid group of itinerant fellow travellers – and to radiant effect. April formed Outre-vie/Afterlife in 2013. The group comprises thirteen accomplished photographers2 all of whom […]

On Foxes, Books, and Publishing – Louis Perreault

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Louis Perreault

July 31, 2017 [originally published in CV109 in Spring 2018] — First, there was a fox. A few strollers noticed him, but he evaded a closer look by disappearing into the weeds of a post-industrial lot in Montreal East. I quickly took a liking to the animal and made him a sort of personal totem…

ENTR’ACTE
. A Collective Portrait of the Royal Victoria Hospital – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Raymonde April

[Spring-Summer 2018] By James D. Campbell [Excerpt] This round-robin exhibition featured powerful and evocative images of the original site of the recently abandoned Royal Victoria Hospital. Eleven Montreal artists were invited by the RBC Art and Heritage Centre of the McGill University Health Centre to tour the original site. It had been vacant since the […]

After Jonathan Monk
, Exhibition Views as Augmented Reality
 – Marie J. Jean

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Marie-Josée Jean | Artists: Jonathan Monk

[Spring-Summer 2018] By Marie J. Jean [Excerpt] Exhibition views have taken on an increasingly important role since museum specialists began featuring them in exhibitions. Originally placed under glass, following a documentary protocol introduced via museology, this form of documentation has gradually come to be displayed on walls, occasionally ascribed the status of artwork, eventually attaining […]

The Arab Image Foundation through Akram Zaatari’s Eyes: Or, Variations on the Theme of Photography
 – Claudia Polledri

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Akram Zaatari

[Spring-Summer 2018] By Claudia Polledri [Excerpt] According to Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, photography is expressed in many ways. This is the message of his most recent exhibition, Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, a kaleidoscopic journey, through stories and images, into the archives of the Arab Image Foundation, an institution with […]

Alain Laframboise, Le regard du spectre – Florence Chantoury-Lacombe

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Florence Chantoury-Lacombe | Artists: Alain Laframboise

[Winter 2018] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. By Florence Chantoury-Lacombe (French Only)   [See the printed or digital version of the magazine for the complete article. On sale here : Ciel variable 108 – GOING PUBLIC ]   […]

Contact 2017, Focus on Canada – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Johan Hallberg-Campbell, Katherine Knight, Luis Jacob, Mark Lewis, Michael Snow, Suzy Lake

[Winter 2018] By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] Promotion for “Canada 150” – marking the inception of the colonial enterprise of the “Dominion of Canada” and its unequal union with Quebec – was tepid, perhaps foretelling the inevitable response: a hundred and fifty years old – really? The land, of course, had been inhabited a little longer […]

Photography in Canada, 1960–2000, From Photographic Art to the World of Images – Pierre Dessureault

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, David McMillan, Gabor Szilasi, Jeff Wall, Jim Breukelman, Jin-Me Yoon, John Massey, Ken Lum, Lynne Cohen, Robert Burley

[Winter 2018] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] It seems less and less possible to analyze photography and photographic history without talking about production protocols, dissemination strategies, and contexts for conservation and display in public collections. Andrea Kunard situates her undertaking in regard to this position from the start:1 “Inasmuch as a presentation of selected works highlights […]