Posted on

Review: Colleen Heslin “Ballads from the North Sea” at Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal

ColleenHeslin_2014_BlueMonochrome48x54inc_Inkand_dye_on_cotton_564
Colleen Heslin, Blue Monochrome, 2014. Ink and dye on cotton. 48 x 54 inch. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laroche / Joncas, Montréal

COLLEEN HESLIN
BALLADS FROM THE NORTH SEA
Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal
8 March to 26 April, 2014

Review by Joseph Henry

On the crowded fourth-floor of the Whitney Biennial, a floor curated this year by Stuart Comer, American artist Ken Okiishi brought painting into contact with the galleries’ propensity toward new and electronic media. For his contribution to the Biennial, a major exhibition designed to showcase recent American art, Okiishi painted over consumer-grade television monitors, obscuring their moving images with messy acrylic. If perhaps blunt in its multimedial comparison, Okiishi’s work symbolized a relatively new place for painting after its perennially announced death by Paul Delaroche in 1839, and countless others since. In a digital visual culture dominated by screen technologies and their perceptual flatness, painting has been revived as a key medium in the investigation of the surfaces and places from which images are produced and consumed. Continue reading “Review: Colleen Heslin “Ballads from the North Sea” at Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal”

Posted on

Essay: Sex in Public – Streetview and Vincent Chevalier’s PWIF’d at the Canadian Centre for Architecture

Text by Joseph Henry

PWIFD1_a_564
Exhibition view, ABC : MTL at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2013. Courtesy Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

Montreal-based Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has devoted roughly a year of programming (from November 2012 to March 2013) to an extensive curatorial investigation of the city’s cultural life and multi-faceted urban structure. With its three-part exhibition ABC : MTL, the CCA announced an open call for submissions, to nourish a diverse presentation of objects ranging from Robin Pindea Gould and Fiona Annis’ rigorous documentation of Montreal bridges to the architectural renderings of the Centre du Soccer, in the neighborhood of Saint-Michel. ABC : MTL additionally supplemented a smaller exhibition entitled Streetview, a collection of photographs spanning from the early twentieth century to present times, to offer portraits of the city via its canals, roadways and plazas.
Continue reading “Essay: Sex in Public – Streetview and Vincent Chevalier’s PWIF’d at the Canadian Centre for Architecture”