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Review: Dora Garcí­a, Of Crimes and Dreams or the infinite power of human mind


Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams, exhibition view at Darling Foundry 2014. Courtesy Darling Foundry, Montréal. Photo © Maxime Boisvert

Dora García
Of Crimes and Dreams
Darling Foundry, Montréal
21 May – 14 September 2014

Review by Cécilia Bracmort

Of Crimes and Dreams strips the threshold between reality and fantasy where the two worlds interpenetrate and nourish each other. Upon entering Dora Garcí­a’s exhibition curated by Chantal Pontbriand, one figuratively experiences a journey into the human psyche and all its complex richness, sequences of altered states and perceptions from waking life to unconsciousness, assisted by Garcí­a’s use of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s last and most experimental novel.

Three videos works projected on the walls of the gallery underline recurrent visual and structural patterns such as circle overlays and echoing effects. Indeed, all videos mirror Joyce’s narrative structure, a never-ending novel, starting and finishing through reconstituted sentences. These seemingly aim to trigger different psychological desires from sexual or voyeuristic desires to the repression of violence or even murderous pulsions.
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Opportunities: Residency For Artists On Hiatus – Call for applications 2014/2015

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Courtesy Residency For Artists On Hiatus ©Akimoto/Evans 2013.

Call for applications 2014/2015
Residency For Artists On Hiatus

Deadline: 15 September 2014

residencyforartistsonhiatus.org

RFAOH co-directors, Shinobu Akimoto and Matthew Evans are pleased to invite international “artists on-hiatus” to apply to our 2nd call for participation in our ongoing project, Residency for Artists on Hiatus (RFAOH).

Residency For Artists On Hiatus is a virtual yet functioning residency available to artists who, for one reason or another, are NOT currently making or presenting art. The residency exists in the form of a website, and the participants are selected based on their proposals of “on-hiatus” activities (or non-activities). To be eligible to apply, artists must have previously created an independent body of work and have exhibited in a public context. Selected artists will be represented on the RFAOH website by a dedicated page on which they are asked to post periodic reports throughout their residency. A modest stipend will be awarded to successful applicants to assist in their on-hiatus endeavours. At the conclusion of their residency, residents are expected to submit a written report on how they benefited from or were otherwise influenced by this opportunity. Continue reading “Opportunities: Residency For Artists On Hiatus – Call for applications 2014/2015”

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Review: Playlist – A Collection of Collectors at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal

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Playlist, Exhibition view. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier

Playlist
galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal
14 June – 26 July 2014

Review by Cécilia Bracmort

On June 14th, galerie antoine ertaskiran opened its self-curated summer exhibition, Playlist, featuring five Montreal-based individual and collective artists. The show brings together a varied selection of techniques, styles and even experiences – from mid-career professionals to promising art students – to realize a striking layout of artists-collectors, using processes of collage and assemblage to accurately reflect the title of this show. Creative hybridizations such as Philippe Caron Lefebvre’s Caméléon Echinoidea mix morphologies of plants, animals and humans to produce fascinating creatures, aggressive as they are beautiful. His jelly-like chimeras parade elaborate mechanisms of defense while stylistically merging earthenware crafts, industrial techniques and new age iridescent paint, to duly note Caron Lefebvre’s proficiency as a naturalist. Continue reading “Review: Playlist – A Collection of Collectors at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal”

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

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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”

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Gesture in Collecting : In conversation with Donald Browne, art dealer at Papier 14

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Donald Browne Gallery booth at Papier 14. Courtesy Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal

Papier 2014 set up its art fair tent this year on a vacant lot in downtown Montreal, one block away from the city’s centre point at corner of Ste-Catherine and Clark streets. Organised by AGAC (Association des Galleries d’Art Contemporain – The Association of Contemporary Art Galleries), the fair comprises a total of 44 commercial galleries from across Canada, exclusively selling works on paper. Donald Browne has been an exhibitor at Papier with his own gallery since its first edition in 2007, and acted as AGAC’s treasurer and member of the executive council for the past four years. He exchanges a few words with M-KOS about Papier 2014.

MKOS: Have you been participating in Papier since it started?

Donald Browne [DB]: Well, I’ve been a part of organizing the fair since the last four years, but yes I’ve been doing Papier with my gallery since seven years ago, when we were just 18 galleries at Westmount Square. We just had a table and a billboard behind us. It was very simple. But then when we started to get a little more confident, with a little grant from the Quebec government, and now it’s much more feasible to put on an event like this. In 2007 it was a very initial attempt at an art fair in Montreal, and with a snowball effect we finally arrived in a tent like this with 44 galleries. It’s really grown over the last seven years, I really encouraged that we have this kind of event here, it’s important for people, for the social interaction, as well as for people understanding that these things are for sale, and it’s an exciting event to prepare for.
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In all seriousness – Interview with the artist Rachel Shaw

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Rachel Shaw, All Seriousness, 2014. Acrylic on panel. Courtesy the artist and Galerie LOCK, Montreal.

Montreal based artist Rachel Shaw’s solo exhibition is currently on view at Galerie LOCK, showcasing her new series “All Seriousness”: a sequence of sterile, yet comically uplifting interiors. These waiting areas, offices, and living rooms have no visible entrance or exit; only black squares that lead to nowhere. Devoid of human presence, the furniture and objects no longer serve any utilitarian function and instead engage in aesthetic conversations with the viewers. The shadows, angles and intersections are only slightly off, lending to a peculiar unease on the part of the spectator. Caught in a state of in-betweenness, we can’t help but ask: where did everybody go? Shaw discusses her work with Jessica Kirsh.

Jessica Kirsh [JK]: There appears to be a reoccurring trope in your body of work: that of the window or frame. Most often illustrated as a black rectangle, it holds a stark yet mysterious presence within the interior. What signification (conceptually or formally) does this device contain? How is it repurposed or reconfigured from one painting to the next?

Rachel Shaw [RS]: In the diorama – a small-scale model of a real-life scene – a window (or at least the absence of a wall) is often as a point of view or observation. Even the word diorama means ‘through that which is seen’, which I think is pretty appropriate. I don’t use the word diorama to mean scale modeling or miniaturism, but I do use the window as a way to display a certain type of space while also containing it and the objects within it indefinitely. Formally, I think it works as a point of pause and reorientation, like a wall does in a maze, but it does hint at a space outside the one you’re in.
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The remainder of the book and other variable formats – Interview with Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, curator of “Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici” at Les Territoires, Montréal

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Exhibition view, from left to right: Boris Meister “Above the Cloud – Archeology of Social Networks” (2012), Sebastian Schmieg and Silvio Lorusso “56 Broken Kindle Screens” (2012), Ruth Beale “Now From Now” (2011), Klaus Scherübel “Mallarmé, The Book” (2004). Copyright Les Territoires, Montreal.

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is an independent curator, writer and director of The Office for Curating based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He curated the group show Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici (50 Years From Now), currently on view at Les Territoires in Montréal (12 March – 19 April 2014). The twelve artists collective exhibition posits the book as art object, container and concept against the backdrop of ongoing discussions addressing the potential demise of the physically bound volume. Lekkerkerk explains in his interview his urge to look into the dynamics of co-existing analog and digital formats within our current media driven society, to raise the key question: “To what extent have the changes in our relationship with information – and the formats we employ for its transmission – altered our rapport to knowledge and its production?”

M-KOS [MKOS]: How did you develop Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici into a curatorial project?

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk [NJL]: From a personal perspective, the exhibition Dans Cinquante Ans d’Ici is the culmination of a previous exhibition cycle entitled Reading Complex, which I developed at various locations in London throughout 2012 together with curator Catherine Y. Serrano. At the time we were interested in – generally speaking – further exploring the relations between viewer-reader and image-text in the context of visual art and artistic practice. For instance, we wanted to look into the fact that we, as viewers, make a narrative reading – an ABC reading – of principally every encounter, whereas the visual evidence we “collect” in order to inform this reading is often incongruous and misplaced. We wanted to link this principle, inherent to our (over)stimulating image-culture, to by what means narrative arcs are employed in artistic practice, and how the connecting of the dots is left to the visitor, so to speak.
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Valérie Blass: Théâtre d’objets at Parisian Laundry, Montréal

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Valérie Blass, La partie pour la chose, 2013. Digital print, watercolour on matte paper, 12 x 18″ Courtesy the artist and Parisian Laundry, Montréal

Valérie Blass
Théâtre d’objets
16 January – 15 February 2014
at Parisian Laundry, Montréal

Opening: Wednesday 15 January 2014, 18h00

Théâtre d’objets includes one of the artist’s latest series where interests that have been at the crux of her practice are realized photographically and presented in parallel to her sculptures. These images represent staged scenes of puppeteers manipulating objects from the artist’s studio, here Blass provides us with a literal window into the theatre of objects that has underscored her practice for the past decade. The actors in these scenes represent the nuance of her work, they remain in the shadows, subtle and discrete, they are the props for the objects of the artists’ desire. This inter-changeability between subject and object represents the essence of Blass’ captivating visual language. The exhibition occupies both Parisian Laundry’s main floor and the gallery’s bunker space.
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Carol Wainio: The Book at Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal

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Carol Wainio, Tapestry, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 91,4 x 122 cm, collection of M. Henry Sykes and Mme Molly Naber-Sykes, Calgary. Courtesy of TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary.

Carol Wainio
The Book
10 January – 22 February 2014
at Galerie de l’UQAM
Montréal

Opening reception: Thursday 9 January 2014, 17h30

Curated by Diana Nemiroff

Organized and circulated by Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, the exhibition, which was presented in five locations across Canada, will be ending its tour in Montreal. Carol Wainio is specifically interested in the narrative power of images. In this exhibition, she uses illustrated books and fairy tales imagery references to create a dialogue with the current socio-political context. The project, curated by Diana Nemiroff, brings together a body of 15 works made between 2002 and 2010. The artist will be present at the opening. Continue reading “Carol Wainio: The Book at Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal”

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Zachary Formwalt at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal

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Zachary Formwalt, In Place of Capital, 2009. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.

Zachary Formwalt
2 November – 21 December 2013
at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine,
Montréal

Capital Imagery and the Traces of the Living
Johan Hartle

The Latin-derived term capital (as echoed in “capital crime” or “capital punishment”) refers to a crime for which one has to pay with one’s life, or more literally (going back to the original caput) one’s head. Also in the Marxist sense of the term and in Marx’s own metaphor, as coagulated “living labour,” or, more explicitly, “dead labour,” capital is linked to death in various ways.

Along these lines, Zachary Formwalt’s reflections on the history of photography are dealing with various forms of capital imagery as well. His materialist approach to the history of photography—embedding the successive development of the medium in the histories of finance, capital accumulation, and urban development—not only emphasizes photography’s structural analogies with the history and development of capital (the effect that the development of capitalism, economic crises, the stock market, bankers, etc. have played in it); it also points to the potential of photography as a space for that which it tends to repress: moving, acting, and productive bodies.
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