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Review: Pierrick Sorin “Une vie bien remplie”

Currently on view: Montréal
Pierrick Sorin: Une vie bien remplie
at Great Hall, Darling Foundry
16 June – 28 August 2011

Pierrick Sorin “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) short film 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Darling Foundry

Une Vie Bien Remplie is a collection of works by French videographer Pierrick Sorin, currently at the Darling Foundry. The six pieces on show form a comprehensive twenty-year overview of the artist’s career, spanning most of his thematic realm. Sorin reaches high levels of self-contemplation with each of his films and videos in order to subvert his own artistic relevance and project the buoyancy of his humor, which fluctuates between subtlety and satire.

With “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) for example, Sorin films himself on all fours in garter belt, high heels and stockings, fondling a monitor inches from his face which is broadcasting a live feed of his own behind. The mise en scène is overdubbed and inter-spliced with a closely-shot interview of our self-portraitist, confessing his difficulties at overcoming shyness and creating meaningful relationships with others. If nothing else, this first piece illustrates the extent to which Sorin uses the versatility of video to comment on this medium of tele-presence that separates as much as unites its protagonists with the rest of the world.
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Review: Showing Stuff in a Big Room

Mathieu Lefevre: Showing Stuff in a Big Room
at Galerie Division, Montréal
25 June – 31 July 2011

Mathieu Lefevre “Face Plant” (2011) oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division

Mathieu Lefevre at Galerie Division is effectively “Showing Stuff in a Big Room“. Whereas unpretentious exhibition titles often suggest modesty in the artist, Lefevre is putting some big cards on the table, playing against the plausibly inescapable boundaries of conceptual art. This show claims a much wider appeal than the usual art world’s initiated few, fighting conceptual dreariness with the weapon of humor.

Nearly all clustered on a single wall of Division’s main space, the works range form classic tableaux to three-dimensional painting-sculptures. By way of over-crowding Lefevre seemingly instills some sort of democracy amongst his works. Taken individually, each art object is as painfully entitled as a dated comedy club one-liner: a large black canvas, covered in feathers (“Tarred and Feathered”); a swath of white paint on a bare canvas, on which is penciled less is more (“More or Less”); an indistinct shape protruding into an unpainted, stretched canvas (“Trash Can Disguised as Contemporary Art”). The literal and figurative collide in many of his works to illustrate commonly known ideas in art, and thus reach a second level of understanding, which does question how many of a wider audience will ultimately “get it”.
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Review: Sculpture – Ludisme

Currently on view: Montréal
Sculpture – Ludisme at Galerie SAS
9 June – 13 August 2011

Patrick Bérubé “Lies” (2010) Wood, Plexiglas, water jet cutting, clay and plant. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie SAS

Derived from the Latin verb ludere, to play, Galerie Sas has appropriately titled its current exhibition of three-dimensional works. Sculpture-Ludisme assembles art pieces by Patrick Bérubé, Catherine Bolduc, Éric Cardinal, Laurent Craste, Marc Dulude, Peter Gnass, Fred Laforge and Karine Payette in this playful, surreal and wildly chromatic show that comfortably straddles the line between serious and over-the-top. While all the works genuinely represent the approach of each artist, overall this show is delightfully coherent.

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Review: Parisian Laundry’s New Post-New summer show

Currently on view: Montréal
Summertime In Paris at Parisian Laundry
23 June – 30 July 2011

Luc Paradis “Stick Out There” (2010) oil on canvas, 60 x 84”. Courtesy of the artist and Parisian Laundry

Parisian Laundry is now showing its annual summer exhibition entitled “Summertime In Paris”, double Dutch busted with generous servings of themes: “Kindling” and “Post-New”. Five artists from Canada and America have been selected this way to spark a fire from beyond the realms of novelty.

“New” has long been overused as an adjective and oversaturated the pages of art press releases for decades. Lost in its significance and barely identifiable, art audiences still irresistibly seek newness, almost as a reflex behavior. Parisian Laundry fuses this with an equally vacuous term to create “post-new”, a humorous neologism that perhaps will ignite the whimsical attitudes of Summertime in Paris artists.

Luc Paradis creates uncanny and fantastical scenery in his paintings, such as “Stick It Out There” (2010), its undulating mountains and valleys, coveting a factory-like building alone by the cliff of a fictional wilderness. “Pleasure Park” (2011) also depicts a fun place to go to, with the familiar theme park attractions teasing our desire to take on a ride. But the surroundings of the park are submerged in darkness, tensing up the atmosphere as if an undetected danger was about to pounce and shatter an innocent moment of glee.
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Review: Kent Monkman “The Atelier”

Currently on view: Montréal
Kent Monkman: The Atelier
at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
14 May – 23 June 2011

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain

“The Atelier” is Kent Monkman’s current exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, transforming the entrance of the gallery into an open artist studio, furnished with antique décor including Récamier, wall paper and thick embroidered drape curtains partially covering a theatre window. Placed at the centre of this mise en scène (although exclusively for the pleasure of those at the private view) a winged male nude poses next to an easel, canvas and used paintbrushes, piles of drawings and etchings of reference materials cluttered on the adjacent wall. Mimicking the romantic ideal of a 19th Century European studio, Monkman invokes the artist as creative genius, bastardized with contemporary paraphernalia such as a Louis Vuitton handbag and photographs of Princes William and Harry. Monkman opens the studio door for his audience to take a quick tour of the creative process in his new series of fables.
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Review: Euan MacDonald “9,000 Pieces”

Currently on view: Montréal
Euan MacDonald “9,000 Pieces”
at Silver Flag Projects, 21 May – 18 June 2011

Courtesy of the artist.

Silver Flag Projects presents “9,000 pieces” by Euan MacDonald, a looping five and a half minutes single channel HD video projection, which meticulously documents a piano operated by a testing machine. The test performs a short sequence, so-called “repetition and responsiveness testing”, one of the final stages in the assembly line of a musical instrument factory, situated on the outskirts of Shanghai, China.

MacDonald’s video is largely composed of close-up piano parts, nine thousand to be precise, aptly indicated for us form the piece’s title. This volume of elements forming the completed piano interacts with what seems an equal quantity of testing machine parts, all moving in a synchronised mechanical ballet. The filmic sequence begins somewhat mysteriously, with a hand pressing a big green “ON” button, followed by a digital display counting time. Extreme close-ups of rotating crankshaft, coiled springs, and spinning things challenge the viewer to grasp the sense of scale of this contraption, which doesn’t yet reveal enough to understand it as a musical instrument. Dozens of thick green metal bars continue their frenzied motion, and metal legs oscillate mercilessly, all under incessant cacophonic noise.
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Last Chance To See Montreal Biennale This Weekend

Ian Wallace (pictures), “Les Pages répandues” (2011), Acrylic and photolaminate on canvas, variable dimensions, Courtesy of Yvon Lambert New York, Photo Credit: the artist / David Armstrong Six (sculptures) “L’Esprit de l’escalier” (partial view), 2011, wood, steal, bronze, paint, plaster and glass, Variable dimensions, Courtesy of Parisian Laundry, Photo: Ludovic Beillard / BNL MTL 2011

The seventh edition of the Montreal Biennale concludes this week from a month-long program of exhibitions, screenings, workshops and more, themed this year by quoting Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dé jamais n’abolira le hazard” (A throw of dice never will abolish chance), first published in a collection of poems from 1897. Historically, this “coup” went on to instigate several artistic revolutions, such as the schools of Dada, Surrealism and Futurism. Not only playing a pivotal role in the history of modern art after The Great War, chance also represents a central element in Fluxus as in the quieter revolution of Quebecois Art, like 1950’s Automatism. The Biennale’s affiliation to such movements is reiterated upon visiting the Guido Molinari Foundation, a satellite venue of the Biennale, within which hangs a series of paintings by the same artist, produced in 1951 whilst blind-folded. Artistic director Claude Gosselin, co-curator David Liss and electronic arts curator Paule Mackrous put into perspective the enduring prominence of chance in contemporary art, with a comprehensive exhibition acknowledging both national and international talents.
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Review: The Ha-Ha Crystal at Maria Stenfors, London

The Ha-Ha Crystal
Maria Stenfors, London
Artists: Allen Grubesic, Colin Guillemet, Niamh O’Malley, Jason Rohrer and David Lynch
Curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak
 

Allen Grubesic “The Last Laugh” (2007) India ink in Langton Aq 300gr. Image courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors

Maria Stenfors gallery’s group show “The Ha-Ha Crystal” originally refers to Robert Smithson’s analytical model for defining different types of laughter, according to what he calls The Six Main Crystal Systems, as an attempt to find answers on how to visualize the dimensions beyond our usual three:

“[R. Buckminster] Fuller was told by certain scientists that the fourth dimension was ‘ha-ha’, in other words, that it is laughter…Laughter is in a sense a kind of entropic ‘verbalisation.’ How could artists translate this verbal entropy, that is ‘ha-ha’, into solid models?” *

Here the four artists in The Ha-Ha Crystal exhibition endeavor to suggest possible responses to this rhetorical question. With Allen Grubesic’s “The Last Laugh” (2007) three identical white prints literally spell out “HA HA HA” in thick black typo, which don’t quite stand as words rather than a straightforward phonetic illustration. This quasi-iconic code crystallizes with Grubesic’s use of a generic typeface, to directly tap into our collective memory of laughter. Continue reading “Review: The Ha-Ha Crystal at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Review: Janice Kerbel “Kill the Workers!”

Currently on view: London
Janice Kerbel “Kill The Workers!”
at Chisenhale Gallery, through 15 May 2011

Janice Kerbel’s new installation “Kill The Workers!” commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery sets up four stands of multiple light fixtures facing each other to suggest a central ‘stage’ area. The theatre lights follow a series of cue scripts written by Kerbel to condense a 24-hour day-to-night period into 24 minutes. The otherwise empty gallery this way undergoes a succession of narratives and progressive plots, played out solely by the different settings of theatrical lights.

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Review: Kent Monkman “My Treaty Is With The Crown”

Currently on View: Montréal
Kent Monkman “My Treaty Is With The Crown”
Leonard + Bina Ellen Art Gallery
4 March – 16 April 2011

Kent Monkman “Mary” (2011) High definition video. Courtesy Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto

Nearly two decades ago, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Harlem (It relocated in One Bowling Green, New York City in 1994). An art student at the time, I was curious to find links between my upbringing in Japanese Shinto religion and the Native American’s worship of nature. I vaguely remember the features of this space, but I did notice that only a handful of visitors were in the museum and, after settling in for a while, I could hear echoes of drumming in the hallways. When I followed the sound I found a man presumably in his early 30s, playing on a traditional animal skin drum, singing a song of folklore. He wasn’t dressed in any overstated ceremonial costume but simply festooned with ornaments on his long dark hair. Children and adults gathered around as the man continued his performance, in this space dimly lit to preserve the nearby artifacts stored behind glass cases. A split-second later, my eyes were blinded by a flash of light, coming from the camera of an elderly person standing next to me. The singing man sternly frowned, ceased playing. He spoke in the elderly person’s direction, in a firm yet polite manner: “Please don’t take my picture because I’m not an exhibition display”. After a measured pause and palpable tension in the air, the man resumed his drumming with dignity.

Kent Monkman’s exhibition “My treaty with the crown” recalled in me this buried memory of the proud signing man, I may have completely forgotten otherwise. The exhibition proffers multilayered narratives and profound symbolism from Monkman’s work, together with other paintings, objects and ornaments from the collection of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the McCord Museum of Canadian History.

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