EXHIBITION STEEPED IN MYTHOLOGY
An obsession with the details that are the stuff of myth creation is the thread that connects the three artists showing their work at 1700 La Poste.
Gallery director Isabelle de Mévius likens the artwork of Anna Torma, Claire Labonté and Marigold Santos in the exhibition Singular Mythologies to a spider’s web that attaches its threads to the objects produced by the artists’ imaginations.
The exhibition sheds light on mythology as a tool for understanding one’s life in the context of the world the artists have experienced. Torma and Santos are immigrants to Canada; Labonté is a native Quebecer who travels into the past for inspiration.
All three artists work with beginning-of-the-world narratives, de Mévius said in an interview.
Labonté studies archeology, but imagines the story behind the science, de Mévius said. Labonté’s largest painting, 20 metres long, is based on a single image of a smiling face engraved on a rock in the Laurentians as many as 7,000 years ago.
Labonté painted the workings of an entire society on the L’énigme archéologique du visage souriant de Coteau du Lac that snakes around the centre of the main gallery. The smiling face is repeated many times in the sky over the scenes, which include child sacrifice.
“She explores the fears that children have,” said de Mévius.
Labonté works on a kitchen table wide enough to hold a section of her one-metre by 20-metre canvas scroll, de Mévius said.
Labonté works in a trance, de Mévius said. “She asks herself: ‘Why am I doing this?’ ” Then she writes her analysis on the back of the canvas, along with quotes from philosophers. Visitors can read her writings on L’énigme archéologique because it is mounted inside a wood frame that is open on both sides.
Labonté’s painting method is as intuitive as the worlds she creates. She starts her paintings as abstractions, then develops the images she finds.
But the artist doesn’t know when to stop painting, de Mévius said. “We had to stop her,” she said. “We told her the paint has to dry so we can show it.”
Although the work of Labonté and Torma seems at first to be naive, it is not, de Mévius stressed. Both of them have academic credentials; they design and use colour and materials in sophisticated ways, she said.
Torma, who lives in New Brunswick, draws on the embroidery culture of her native Hungary for her designs on partly dyed fabrics. She used linen for works that include collages of found objects, while pieces with delicate embroidery are made of three layers of silk.
Torma is a storyteller and uses her own family as source material to depict subjects as the evolution of the family or the aging process. She also makes pedagogical charts, one of which categorizes the functions of the human body. There is a sense of humour in these works.
Adam and Eve are common motifs and Torma tells the story of civilization from the Garden of Eden. She contrasts the tamed nature of gardens with wild nature, but her flora and fauna are identifiable, not generic.
“There is an ambivalence about good and evil in Torma’s work,” de Mévius said. There are primitive fears: “You are in a big garden, but you must beware of demons.”
Santos is a Manila-born artist who immigrated to Canada as a child and now teaches at Concordia. Her art is centred on the myth of aswang, a woman in Filipino mythology who appears normal by day but who can remove
her limbs at night and fly through the sky, doing what she wants.
De Mévius said that Santos describes her emigration from the Philippines as an amputation and that the aswang myth comforted her in her transition to a new identity — an aswang returns home in the morning with new appendages that can be anything, even the tree stump that is depicted in one of her drawings.
In Filipino mythology, the aswang is a woman with shamanic powers, a healer and midwife — the woman who comes to draw out the baby from the mother. But Christianity, in its attempt to supplant traditional mythology, turned the aswang into an evil character who sucks babies from the womb, de Mévius said.
Santos’s drawings are the most accomplished of the three artists, with a wealth of fluid lines. Two of her large pieces contain phosphorescent colours that glow in ultraviolet light (also known as black light).
In choosing whom to exhibit at 1700 La Poste, de Mévius said she is attracted to artists with a high degree of craftsmanship “because such artists are in touch with the materiality of art.”
Visitors to 1700 La Poste are now greeted by a knowledgeable young person who offers to provide a tour of the exhibition.
PORTRAITS OF DANCER LOUISE LECAVALIER
André Cornellier shows his several poster-size portraits of the contemporary dancer Louise Lecavalier in an exhibition at Art45. The black and white photographs are high key, but Cornellier’s use of a large-format film camera captures the finest gradations of light greys and near whites.
Cornellier said in an interview that he wanted to photograph Lecavalier over a period of time in the context of art history, in which the gods were the subjects in Greek and Roman times. Then it was the Christian saints, kings in the Renaissance, then business leaders and more recently athletes and celebrities.
Now it’s ordinary people, thanks to reality TV.
Each photograph in the series seemed to associate Lecavalier with someone in the artistic firmament. In one image, Lecavalier is as androgynous as David Bowie, whom she danced with. “They look like sister and brother,” Cornellier said.
“She looks delicate, but on stage, she is the strongest man in the theatre,” he said.
En quête du temps: Lecavalier 1993-2001 continues to Dec. 10 at Art45, 372 Ste-Catherine St. W., Suite 221. More information: art45.ca.
ART MÛR CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY
Art Mûr has put on 270 exhibitions since it opened two decades ago, and some of the nearly 1,000 artists it has shown are in Life Size.
Life Size is just that — artworks on a human scale. A realistic sculpture of a human figure by Jean-Robert Drouillard is the size of the young person it portrays and takes on an uncanny reality because of that. Cal Lane turns a car door into lacework, and no matter how intricately cut and delicate the result, it is a car door even as it becomes something else.
Gallery owners Rhéal Olivier Lanthier and François St-Jacques write in the show’s catalogue that they transformed their galleries into a tableau in which viewers are invited to wander and become elements of the composition.
“This is our invitation to discover the emotive potential of living with art,” they write.
Life Size, along with Claude Tousignant: Artist’s Selection, continues to Dec. 17 at Art Mûr, 5826 St-Hubert St. Details: artmur.com.
SCULPTURE EVENT PRESENTS MORE THAN 130 ARTISTS
SCVLPTVRE is a two-day event that presents the work of more than 130 individual artists at the Palais des congrès. The Quebec Sculpture Council and ASPMSculpteurs sur pierre will also have kiosks. The event, which includes work in bronze, clay, ceramic, glass, plaster, stone and wood, was founded by Emmanuel Descoutiéras, owner of the Fonderie d’art d’Inverness.
The exhibition’s goal is to demystify sculpture and will include demonstrations by sculptors, Descoutiéras said.
As well, at 11 a.m. on both days, art historian Norman Cornett will explore the sculpture of André Fournelle with the artist in his dialogic discussion.
Admission is $10 for adults. Details: scvlptvre.com.
HOMAGE TO PRINTMAKER ALBERT DUMOUCHEL
In The Footsteps of Albert Dumouchel, Master Printer, at the Maison de la culture VilleraySaint-Michel-Park Extension, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dumouchel (19161971).
Artworks by Dumouchel and prints by his followers, known as Collectif 50/50, will be on display in the Maison’s exhibition space at 421 St-Roch St.
Five works made as a tribute to Dumouchel by Gilles Boisvert, René Derouin, Richard Lacroix, Francine Simonin and Serge Tousignant will also be on display. The five artists, who were close friends of Dumouchel, will be present at the vernissage on Nov. 26, 3 to 6 p.m. A video made for the occasion by Nicolás Gulino will be shown, and a bilingual catalogue will be available.
Two tours, on Dec. 1 and 3, will explore Dumouchel’s influence on today’s printmaking techniques. To participate, call 514-872-6131. Details: accesculture.com and ville.montreal.qc.ca/vsp.
WIM DELVOYE OPENS AT DHC/ART
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye presents works of sculpture, drawing, photography, installation and video that critique consumerism and capitalism at DHC/ART (dhc-art.org), 451 and 465 St-Jean St., Nov. 30 to March 19.
Delvoye takes objects, symbols and icons out of context and gives them new meaning in terms of branding, social class, economics, technology and globalization. In his Car Tyre series, the lowly rubber tire is handcarved with ornamental designs to become a precious objet d’art. But his work is not polemical — Delvoye lets contradictory notions of high and low culture coexist.