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Brooklyn/Montréal goes stateside


 

From October to November 2012, Montreal hosted the first installment of “Montreal/Brooklyn”, initiating an exchange in visual art events between the two titled cities, thus capturing important media and audience attention towards the art scene of the Quebecois metropolis. In an interview with M-KOS, Montreal coordinators Claudine Khelil and Yann Pocreau mention their delight at all the positive feedback received in Montreal, but remain alert for the final chapter of the project that is yet to come, over to the state side of the border. As it is now Brooklyn’s turn to host the next part of this event, indicated by the reversed title (Brooklyn/Montreal), the categorical test for Montreal artists will be about how they are received by New Yorkers, their critics as much as their art enthusiasts. Will there be any buzz?
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Montréal – Brooklyn Rendez-vous

Montreal / Brooklyn is a new contemporary art initiative organized by Montreal-based artist-run centre Clark, which aims to establish a cultural exchange between the two cities, to include the participation of 16 institutions and 40 artists. Residing on either side of the US/Canada border and separated by a physical distance of approximately 600 kilometers, coordinators Claudine Khelil and Yann Pocreau have spent two years setting up a network between the different institutions in the respective cities, before turning this rendez-vous into a reality. Pocreau comments: “The main idea of this project was to create a real encounter between two cities, two galleries and artists – it’s very much a communication-based project” *
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Review: “No News” is good news for Wanda Koop

Currently on view: Montreal
Wanda Koop: No News
at Galerie Division
19 November 2011 – 12 February 2012


Wanda Koop “Friendly Fire (No News Series)” 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 79.5″ x 119″. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division

No news is good news as we say, to suggest we only hear of a particular place or situation when something bad is happening. This is symptomatic of the deeply-rooted western narrative traditions which center on dramatic tension, taking origin in Greek tragedy but very much actualized in contemporary mass media. In other words, happy feelings tend to signal the end of a story. In this line of thought, Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop’s new painting series entitled “No News”, feeds on contradicting these assumptions with her catchy pictures.

Koop’s current show at Montréal’s Galerie Division traces a continuation from previous series such as Green Zones (2003–09), manipulating images from daily TV news reports which she constantly scribbles down on post-it notes to later transfer onto canvas. The artist’s use of painting justly draws enough distance with broadcast technologies to establish a discourse of critical awareness that would seem uneasy via video art. But the electric colors, graphic overlays and fragmentation of the painted surface into multiple storylines nonetheless confirm a vocabulary pertaining to television.
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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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