"When artists come to me and say they want to show their art, I tell them to start their own gallery"
Jeffrey Deitch
Would you believe that I claim to be a serious gallery goer, but yet never visited
Art Mûr since their departure from their Old Montreal spot two years ago?
This might have to do with the fact that I'm forced to be selective with local shows as I'm often out of town. I simply figured that Art-Mûr was little too far a distance for me to cope with. Hey, this is afterall just "one" gallery: why would I go there when I can go elsewhere and visit more than
5 galleries in a day?
Well, this is where I was wrong.
Lately I had heard rumours that the space at Art-Mûr had got pretty large. It took the new works of
Holly King, a photograph I'm following since many years (my first show of hers was at Articule in 1988!), to finally urge me to visit the place.
First reaction:
"Oh my gaaaawwwdddd!!!!!".
Yes, this gallery is the LARGEST gallery spot in Montreal.
With its 2 full-apartment-size floors, they had 6 ongoing exhibits when I visited.
Would there be only two artists on show, they would probably be major retrospectives.
Grant you, they don't come close to
Quartier Ephemere as far as
width is concerned, but Art Mûr have arranged their spaces so they could show multiple shows, while Quartier Ephemere seems to prefer deserving their space to gigantic installations that couldn't enter anywhere else but at their address.
Nevertheless, Art-Mûr has strong potential to become an
important art spot in Montreal (if it's not already). The fact that
they both combine a commercial gallery and open spaces on the second
floor for more
experimental projects is absolutely incomparable with any
other places in this city, and will certainly provide with very interesting artistic encounters. This will all depend on the way this is going to be
curated. If they open the door to established curatorial projects it will be the more interesting. I think the future of art lies in this combination of commercial with experimental. The owners did the right thing (hopefully their spaces aren't too costly and I suggest they invite major sellers for the ground exhibit (even foreign artists, why not) to ensure viability).
Ok...let me attempt to cross those 6 exhibits with you:
Space 1: Ewa Monika Zebrowski: "Remembering Brodsky"
Well, it's mostly the photographic portrait of a book (
"Watermark", 1992) from an author (
Joseph Brodsky, of nobel prize fame) who himself tried to portray Venice through his poetry. Unless I'm wrong, this is not the major work from this author, but I've read people
recommending reading it prior or after planning a travel to Venice .
Personally, I found these works (a dozen large photographs and a group of 25 photos with an accompanying artist book) a little too traditional. The precise referent is asking much from the knowledge of the viewer (take on me: I haven't read this book) and I'm afraid that these
retro black photographs might be a little too illustrative (
those stairs near the water of a canal reaffirm a quote where Brodsky compares the fluidity of life activity in Venice with the fact that the city is dwelling on water: hmm...well...Maybe he can write this better than I did).
Why Brodsky was chosen by this artist ? Why Venice ? That part of the artist's passion for her subject never translated to me.
Nevertheless, you can
look here and judge by yourself (here's my
favorite picture).
Space 2: Holly King "Vistas"
Vista
Function: noun
1 : a distant view through or along an avenue or opening
2 : an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)
(Webster Definition)
Slope, 2004
Beauty, 2002
I came specifically to see these
new "paintings" by Holly King. At first sight they looked like more of the same from her past work, if you will, but recently she picked on the format of
19th Century oval portrait to present these new fabricated landscape, as though to convey that nature is only truly created through perceptual gaze and a
process of identification. As she mentions, the oval form is eager to bring back in memory the archaic age of early photography, an age that brought into desuetude the sorts of solemnful and heroic representations of nature that King has been so obsessively dragging back in style (in her own kinky way).
Like the surprise of tumbling on an
ugly brushstroke in a Van Gogh, the fun with Holly King is to compare her works both from distance and proximity. As you approach them, they reveal
details of their bricolage that deliver all the
kitsch implied in their
making. Yet when you move back, these scotchy apparitus disappear and the whole look almost like it revendicates the
sublime (I'm thinking of
"Exquisite" (2004), a majestuous fake waterfall, but it could be said of her other photographs sporting such evocative titles as "Lush" (2004), "Stream" (2004), and "Wonder" (2002)).
Exquisite, 2004
It's this correlation that King establishes
between the kitsch and traditional landscape that I always find so interesting. You're never sure if you're being too cheap and sentimental for liking them or not. The oval shapes enhance that impression genuinely.
Space 3: Guillaume Lachapelle: "Passages Avides"
Guillaume Lachapelle builds tiny wood theatres that propose neo-surrealist scenes, often linking man with
the animal world or dealing with
exhilirated sexuality.
These both
minimal and figurative scenes share with the works of such artists as
Jake and Dino Chapman or
PaulMc Carthy a tendency to revisit the lost fantasy scapes of childhood, though for what they lack in the
sensational extremism of these artists, they gain in proposing subtle subersions not deprived of
elegancy and technical genius.
Neat stuff...
The question is to know wrether this artist intends to comfortably dwell on a tangent with
naive art, or if he intends to pull the nerves out of his sculptures a little more.
Space 4: Maureen Rodrigues-Labrèche: "Belonging(s)"
Now this is what I call "photographic installation". Nearly
none of the pictures assembled here (in the largest and best of all
the gallery spaces at Art Mûr) would make sense on their own.
What would you make of two picture of the roots of a tree ?
Well, when juxtaposed with a series of photographs showing social workers, a
chinese girl on a farm, an old kitchen, a father, a
cemetary in snow, and various diary texts hung up here and there, you can begin to accept that they belong to an exhibit which thematically revolves around the consequences of adoption.
This exhibit was meant to
tear-jerk you. I felt really uncomfortable (not embarassed, more intimadated) because I felt so much anger and pain coming from this artist, especially in the ending section, which showed a video loop of an
icy river superimposed with the constant typewritting of the phrase "You left your belonging(s) behind".
What is surpriseful is that apparently, the exhibit was built up from an assemblage of unrelated families photographs, and from various banal images of landscape (dyptichs of coast and trees, a man walking near a lake, etc...).
This work is pure fiction, though at the origin the photographs document the lives of people who "really" experienced
adoption . The installation set up is very fragmented. Even the words on the walls are probably not coming from the "same minds".
But because of the use of the first pronun, which influenced my interpretation that this work was narrating the artist's life, I felt engulfed by a tragedy
that turned out to be fake. Where does the fabrication of fiction begins and ends when it is created solely through the association of random documentary elements ? Does this trick makes it better art? Well, it's at the opposite of pomo works of the likes of
Nan Goldin. It doesn't pretend to make you connect with the intimate lives of anyone. It deals with the problematic of adoption from an universal standpoint.
This said, it was all a bit emotionally manipulative. How would you react to such self-pitiful affirmations as "I was meant to be abandoned by these people"? People who live close to their family members are not necessarely in
better terms with them. I wonder if
biology is of any relevance or simply illusory in the way humans are able to psychologically bound together. My final opinion is that the majority of people who make kids shouldn't make them. There: I've expressed myself now. How about that for unprofessional art journalism?
Space 5: Gisèle Ouellette: "Repère" + Joane Poitras: "Pour L'Instant, L'Arbre"
Past a forgettable paper curtain serving as canvas for the drawing of a circular vegetal shape ("Repère" by
Gisèle L. Ouellette didn't help me find my way towards it, despite it's title), we get to another artist dealing with the creation of singular shapes proposed as many hommages to the natural world (addendum: I found out later, after doing a little research, that the form Gisèle Ouellette intended to draw was a nest).
Joane Poitras's installation "Pour L'Instant, L'Arbre" is probably the best show of all this late 2004 programmation at Art-Mûr. It's
land art made for the indoor. She piles up thousands of leaves of a same tree species into shapes that look like insect hives, cakes, or bluntly, simple angular shapes of no definite prescriptions (though some titles like "Conduit" and "Tertre" evoke masonry). There's nothing more to read into this but a re-organization of nature, except that as a discourse on sculpture it's really this interesting: most land artists create ephemeral works with rocks and wood in the outdoor, but this artist chose to extend that experience by working with even more fragile and ephemeral materials of nature. Her
sculptures wouldn't last seconds under the wind. It wouldn't take much to crush them inside either, and they would burn under the lapse of a minute if someone had the bad idea to light a match at a near distance.
Then what ?
Life, for what it is, constitutes a revolution against time. Everything about it tends toward battling against the doom of entropy and destruction. By making the most fragile life residues stand like the most permanent of
monoliths, the artist exposes her enthousiasm in participating in this ongoing
homeostasic war against chaos. Next to the sculptures are a constellation of 19 miniature drawings of branches, and a column of empty boxes, ready to be filled with the leaves that the artist will ritualistically reconstitute in a future exhibit. It's a beautiful hommage to the essence of life when you are able to take that much care for its most banal detritus.
Space 6: Clara Bonnes: "Saisissement" + Jean-Maxime Dufresne: "Rest Area"
This
duo of works by two young Montreal media artists was organized by
Jean Dubois as part of his "Interstices" curatorial project, and I had the opportunity to meet the artists and have a good
chat with them while I was there.
The work of
Clara Bonnes, young french artist, assembles 3 (I heard elsewhere there was originally 4) organic sculptures pending down from the ceiling, each encasting a small monitor. These monitors constitutes small video-loop portrayals (one per sculpture) of people living in their immediate environment: eitheir their home or their apartment.
Here is the interesting part: you are able to touch and manipulate these sculptures, what triggers an interactive aspect that makes you able to pause
random snapshots of the videos. This is supposed to signify the potentiality of any contact being made with a (the) proposed identity(ies).
As I was arguing with the artist, the fact that I was able to touch these pictures enhanced my impression that I was connecting with them, an impression that rested on an utopy, but nevertheless, that helped me trespass the usually superficial level of gaze and representation, and let me enter another world much more having to do with experiencing sensuality (note the word play in the title between the terms "uphold" and "being upholded", as in "being taken by surprise").
These organic forms, looking like
cocoons, eyes, or even
spermatozoids (not such an ackward idea in 2004 when artists like
Matthew Barney have all layered down these subject matters), provoke the most interesting aspect of Clara's work: her merging of
video art with the plastic, pre-conceptual tradition of sculpture. As she is a beginner artist, I can only encourage her to lean toward the sculptural. We have seen enough of video wall projections. She might be on the right track, though she gonna have to hide a little more of those
electric wires on the ceiling.
As for
Rest Area, the work of Jean-Maxime Dufresne, I was dumbfounded to learn that the artist is part of
Syn- Atelier, after I had compared his art with outputs from this group (of which frankly I could until this date only name
Jean Francois Provost amongst the members). Luckily for me (and Dufresne), I'm kind of a little fan of -Syn Atelier, so I only have good things to say about most of (his) their projects.
As I mentioned to him, I think this was the second time that I've experienced an installation asking me to sleep into a cubicule and watch a video at the proximity of my forehead (the other was a fantastic installation by
Mariko Mori ("Wave UFO" (2003)). There is no other option, this is where his work succeeds the best: when inside, you're able to see two video loops at once, one being a video collage, installed inside the tent, of the artist sleeping and doing various activities related to living within a tent, and another video across the room as the horizon wall, in which the artist is shown installing his tent in the most bizarre and unconvivial of spaces, reminding of the famous work
"Hypothèse D'Amarrages" by Syn- Atelier when they installed pic-nic tables all across Montreal city in the most univiting places.
My only drawback with Dufresne's work was the confusion at first glance with some of the footage that showed people doing sports, as when I entered the gallery I was wondering if there was two different pieces (there was a
large field of polyutherane moss in front of the video that looked like a sport-field). This ended to be coincidental, as most of the video show
a selection of delibarately uncomfortable spaces (like near a superhighway) where the artist attempted to live for a few hours in a state of survival.
Is there still a place for
the nomad man in contemporary society? This is what this exhibition entails. How much of the built world can be alienating towards the survival instinct. How have we come to this? Where and how are we able to live though this ?
The installation is the mise-en-scène of the documentary of a performance. Where the art really happens is not in style, montage, or technology, but in the actions that originated them, and in the honest attempt to want to make us revive that experience.
Cheers,
Cedric Caspesyan
centimen@hotmail.com
PS: as if all this wasn't enough, Art-Mûr have launched the new cd of Sylvie Laliberté that I will be buying soon. There is also a nice window where they show extra works. It's a fantastic place. Try it for once's sake.
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