BNLMTL2014

On a lovely fall evening hundreds of art goers packed themselves into the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal for the opening of the Biennale de Montréal.  In the rotunda, under the colourful works of Étienne Tremblay-Tardif (above), patrons enjoyed the opening remarks by the curators and some wine and snacks before heading upstairs to the galleries which housed a large majority of the Biennale's works.

While it was A LOT to take in, and the crowds did not help my ability to concentrate or sit and watch video, there were many works that stood out for me throughout the evening.  A repeat visit is on the menu...

Taxidermied creatures, such as the fox and the bird seen above, were laid to rest in several corners around the gallery.  The work of Abbas Akhavan chose not to represent these dead animals in their traditional and vivid trophy stance, but as they are: stripped of their life and "doubly-dead."

The Steubenville, Ohio, High School rape case that made my blood boil.  The 2012 case that converged many skin crawling tropes of modernity: victim blaming, slut shaming, social media trolling, rape culture, bias in the media, and on and on... Andrea Bowers' work (above) featured the exchanged text messages between the (Anonymous dubbed) "Rape Crew", providing a sobering moment in the exhibit. 

Other highlights:

Details from Nicolas Grenier's Promised Land Template (2014)

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the painstaking economics of Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens

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Eternity, the photo-op inducing work of Nicolas Baier

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Finally, Suzanne Treister's insane mind-boggling work Hexen 2.0 (2009-2011) composed of multiple works throughout the gallery, but what did it for me was Treister's re-working of the 78 cards of a Tarot deck.  I will quote the gallery text here:

"Since at least the second half of the twentieth century, the West has witnessed power and agency slip away from tangible, accountable structures of governance towards intangible, quasi-mystical forces whose goals and interests reply on programmatic techno-utilitarianism."

I had the pleasure of babbling like a child to try to convey to Treister why her work resonated so much with me.  She listened politely as I gesticulated while saying: "meticulous! Medium! Message!" 

It was all too much! 

Art overload!

But there's so much more:

-an artist talk with Shirin Neshat

-an artist talk with Ibghy and Lemmens

-and mysterious workshops!

   

Christian Marclay - The Clock

I've only been waiting for this piece to come to Montreal for four years. Now the time has come to feast our eyes on the TWENTY-FOUR hour extravaganza of Christian Marclay's The Clock.  After years of tireless research with several assistants, Marclay meticulously edited clips of clocks and watches from movies and television to create a single channel video that demarcates the marching of time.  So when you, the viewer, are sitting in a comfy seat and that shot above pops onto the screen, you can rest assured that it is indeed one o'clock. Just like a Swiss watch...albeit a cinematic version.

The National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston jointly owned piece has been gracing the screen of the Musee d'art contemporain de Montréal as of last week (!), and will be tick tocking until April (phew...) So don't wait too long, this is hotly anticipated not only by yours truly, but by plenty of other cine-art-nerds.

Pssst... tonight is Nuit Blanche....and it's screening all night for free...shhhhh...don't tell anyone!

Laurent Grasso & Neon

One of the exhibits currently on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is Laurent Grasso's Uraniborg.  A multimedia show that transforms the gallery space into a dark labyrinth.  While orienting oneself through the corridors, the viewer is presented with Grasso's paintings, installations, and videos juxtaposed with true historical artifacts to create what he calls "false historical memory." In the darkness neon installations offer a source of light.

visibility is a trap

video and neon stars, installation view

 Close up of the neon stars

Pierre Dorion MACM

Why I leave certain things to the last minute is beyond me.
I just squeezed in a visit to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal to catch the current exhibits which end in a mere three days!  One of the shows on view featured a look at about twenty years of  the works by Pierre Dorion, a Montreal based painter.  At first glance the paintings are realistic-based on photographs.  Upon closer look (particularly at Dorion's minimalist works), they become abstractions, perfectly ruled and masked lines that don't represent the nicks, bumps and grooves of the "real world".  

 I had was a strange feeling of familiarity when I viewed Dorion's Untitled, 1999 (above left, from here) and I said to myself- "Hey! That's my bed!" (above right, from this morning.)

Well, of course it wasn't my bed- it was but a mere coincidence.  Dorion's unmade bed was featured in an important 1999 painting installation called Chambres avec vue, where site-specific canvases took their places in an empty apartment.  Intrigued? Want to know more?  Take a look at the macm's press release or the 1999 feature in Parachute magazine.