Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Catherine Lebel Ouellet | Artists: Emmanuel Galland, Jon Rafman
September 18, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Pierre Blache
September 21, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Matthieu Brouillard
September 26, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Curated by Erin Silver, this bilingually (and cleverly) titled exhibition juxtaposed works by Matthieu Brouillard and Donigan Cumming, two artists who, although they are separated by a generation and consequently possess different measures of experience, are both well known to the Montreal art scene. The act of juxtaposition is, in itself, a strong curatorial statement…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Hélène Brunet Neumann | Artists: Patrice Duhamel
September 28, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Caroline Bem | Artists: Jeremy Borsos
October 2, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese
October 4, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — UMA, Montreal’s estimable Maison de l’image et de la photographie, has taken a valuable and highly laudatory initiative in seeking out vacant commercial spaces throughout Montreal and installing photographic works in their windows. What was once a forlorn blank slate of the inner city becomes a vibrant forum for the photographic image. The works remain on view until the spaces are rented or sold…
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Christian Marclay
October 2, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Lynne Marsh
June 21, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Eloi Desjardins | Artists: Adad Hannah
June 27, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Normand Rajotte
June 28, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Every summer until we were teenagers, my sister and I spent three entire months running like wild things through the dense forest of the Laurentians. With our two neighbour friends and a borrowed husky dog, we explored every nook, cranny, brook, and blueberry bush of a stretch of about two kilometres around our cottage all day, every day. They were some of my favourite times, times of excitement, serenity, and free-spiritedness that I’ve attempted to re-create since – with only a modicum of success.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Louis Cummins | Artists: Bernardino Femminielli, Philippe Hamelin
July 4, 2017 [originally published in French in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande
July 6, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — The landscape tradition in North American photography extends back into the colonial era. In “Songs of the Future,” photography is an instrument that documents the unfolding of an industrial heritage. Some of the flavour of this show is akin to Gordon Lightfoot’s song Canadian Railway Trilogy, but, sadly, no images of Chinese or Irish workers or of Sir William van Horne figure in it.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Edward Steichen
July 31, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Scott Chandler
August 2, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — Scott Chandler’s recent work opens a window on a place and a time unknown to us. With an “under-the-radar” documentary ethic and his cumbersome camera equipment, he travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to photograph eloquent ruins hidden for generations from the outside world.
Ciel variable 91 – OUR WORLD | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Dominique Fontaine
August 7, 2017 [originally published in CV91 in Spring 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Boris Mikhailov
April 18, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — During the Soviet era, it was unlawful to photograph anything that contradicted the reigning political ideology. As images were seen to be an extremely forceful argument to support the cause, anything that might show signs of rust on the well-oiled machine would not be tolerated. The negation of an outlet for visual evidence to the contrary of the accepted narrative attests to the very power of the documentary photograph, for it bears silence witness when it is too dangerous to speak the truth.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sandra Fillion | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
April 19, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jen Hutton | Artists: Guy Tillim
April 24, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — Guy Tillim’s sizable exhibition (initially organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photo at Columbia College in Chicago) at the Design Exchange was a provocative inclusion in 2011’s Scotiabank contact Festival. The title of the exhibition evokes the spirit of Patrice Lumumba, a staunch supporter of African nationalism and the first elected prime minister of the Congo after it gained independence from Belgium in June 1960…
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Barbara Garant
April 26, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: André Cornellier
May 1, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — Two photographic panoramas evocative of nineteenth-century popular entertainment were on view at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. The first was a panoramic vista made by the Wm. Notman & Son studio in 1896. The larger of the two, titled The Great Mural, was created by photographer André Cornellier in 1996, exactly a century later. Both show a 360-degree bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view of Montreal, as seen from the southwest…
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nicolas Mavrikakis | Artists: Emmanuelle Léonard
May 3, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sholem Krishtalka | Artists: Suzy Lake
May 8, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — In general, the art world is not kind to older women artists. Nan Goldin recently gave an interview in which she was brutally frank on the subject. She remarked that three-quarters of the art world wants her dead; her work has changed, but the market would rather have the Nan of yore: documents of seedy underbellies and demi-mondes. Now that she has the life perspective of a woman in her sixties, her hard-won ease does not square with the woman the art world wants her to be. Suzy Lake has made this harsh truth the core of her work. But then again, this is not a recent development…
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Lauzon
May 10, 2017 [originally published in French in CV90 in Winter 2012] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 90 – COLLABORATIONS | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne
May 15, 2017 [originally published in CV90 in Winter 2012] — The fourty-second edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles adopted the challenge of exploring the image economy, as well as photography’s relationship with the World Wide Web and with social networks, within the ambit of forty-seven diverse exhibitions. “From Here On,” the centrepiece exhibition at the Rencontres, presented photography in the context of the Web, the “digital revolution,” and how they circulate images.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Wang Qingsong
February 2, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Wang Qingsong’s photo scenarios focus on the ambiguities of China’s changing cultural identity and internal clash of ideologies. Pick Up the Pen, Fight to the End (1997) mimics a late Cultural Revolution poster, Take Up the Struggle of Polemics and Struggle to the End (1975), also on view. We see a girl wearing a Young Pioneers red scarf; Mao’s Little Red Book is on the table.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sheena Ellison | Artists: Wanda Koop
February 7, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “Wanda Koop: On the Edge of Experience” is a major attraction of the Prairie Scene festival, the fifth presentation of this biannual event organized by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to showcase Canadian regional art scenes. Koop’s show, a mid-career retrospective of sorts, consists of four chronologically arranged sections and offers a sampling from eight of the artist’s many series.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Chih-Chien Wang
February 9, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — In Short Sentences, an aptly titled show of recent photographic and video work, Chih-Chien Wang offers a moving photographic journey that is also a poetic reverie on words and things, life and death. The show is fittingly bracketed by an image of the artist’s son asleep, and another of his son being breastfed by his partner, Yushan. In the former, Shaore Lies on Futon, a photograph of his son lying prone on a futon in deep sleep, Wang evokes the fragility of young life.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Fiona Tan
February 14, 2017 [originally published in French in CV89 in Fall 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Elizabeth Kalbfleisch | Artists: Greg Staats
February 16, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — Grief and loss are guiding principles in Greg Staats’s exhibition “Condolence,” but so, too, are more complex notions of alliance and reconciliation. The exhibition, co-presented by Oboro and Articule galleries and split between these two sites, offers Montrealers rare access to the work of an artist whose works are not often seen in this city.
Ciel variable 89 - PLACES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Adam Fuss, Susan Derges
February 21, 2017 [originally published in CV89 in Fall 2011] — “Shadow Catchers” takes off from the tradition of camera-less photography initiated by William Henry Fox-Talbot, whose photogenic drawings, first displayed to the public in 1839, preceded photography with a camera – a “little bit of magic realized,” as he put it. And we sense his influence on photographers who followed, such as Christian Schad, Lucia Moholy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray, whose photogenic drawings…