Outdoor art will mark 375th birthday
Look out for outdoor displays of art marking Montreal’s 375th anniversary
Montreal’s 375th-anniversary celebrations will be marked by major outdoor displays of public art, including one along a sixkilometre stretch of Highway 20, another along one kilometre of Sherbrooke St. W. and a third in the Quartier des spectacles.
Two galleries have jumped the gun with indoor exhibitions that feature artists commissioned to produce public artwork.
The exhibition titled Spaces for Agency, on display at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau till March 4, includes works by Alain Paiement, the artist whose Bleu du bleu will stretch from the Dorval Circle to the 1st Ave. overpass on Highway 20. The project, sponsored by the National Bank, will have 75 free-standing vertical LED tubes and painted diagonal lines on the highway’s sounddampening walls.
Paiement also has the largest piece in the Charbonneau exhibition. Voisinage contextual is a 152-cm-by-223-cm digital collage of about 280 overhead views of Montrealers engaging in daily activities of work and leisure, both in private and public spaces.
Paiement used a drone for some of the outside photos, said gallery owner Hugues Charbonneau. Each subject in this complex work consented to be photographed.
David Lafrance presents small sculptures that appear to be maquettes of proposed public squares. But instead of little plastic shrubs, the vegetation in the squares is represented as images of flowers embedded in the tiles or on the sides of central slabs that are neither fountains nor monuments. Lafrance’s crude public spaces seem designed to repel any public use, a nice comment on democratic society under siege.
Maria Hupfield’s video Survival and Other Acts of Defiance has been seen around the world since its introduction as part of Beat Nation, a travelling exhibition that made a pit stop at the Musée d’art contemporain in 2013. It is a one-minute video that seamless editing has turned into a onehour performance of Hupfield jumping on the spot, affirming her presence through unflagging physical exertion.
She’s dressed casually but the tin jingles on her boots indicate her status as an aboriginal and the healing nature of her dance.
The second exhibition with an explicit anniversary theme is titled cARTographier, on at Galerie Simon Blais till March 4.
The 16 artists in the exhibition have all left their stamp on the city’s public spaces, said gallery assistant François Babineau. Some of the artists, like JeanPaul Riopelle and Marcelle Ferron, have created large public works, while others are known for their photographs of Montreal neighbourhoods.
Riopelle, whose sculpture and fountain La joute graces Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle (a square built over the Ville-Marie Expressway in the Quartier International), is represented by a small sculpture. Ferron, whose stained-glass window in the Champ-de-Mars métro station is a canopy of coloured light, has a small piece of fused antique glass from 1960-65.
One of Charles Daudelin’s great public works is an 18-metre-high altarpiece for a chapel in NotreDame Basilica. His contribution to this exhibition is a much more modest polychrome bronze relief — just 34 centimetres — from 1954.
A photograph from Bertrand Carrière’s series devoted to facades of abandoned buildings is in the show. It’s a high-contrast image of a building since demolished at the corner of St-Laurent Blvd. and Ste-Catherine St. The layers of old flaking posts that cover the building matches it to the patches of dirty ice on the sidewalk that are covered in part by fresh white snow.
Another striking image is of a geometric composition of structural elements taken during construction of the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) hospital by Yann Pocreau. It is part of a larger project by an artist whose work explores history of place and memory.
Also on at Galerie Simon Blais is an exhibition of 10 abstract works in ink from 1969-70 by Jean-Paul Jérôme. But what captivated my attention were photographs of women by Éliane Excoffier.
The artist uses long exposure times on film cameras to create ghostly presences, then enhances the weirdly old-fashioned images through various old darkroom techniques.
The end results are almostauthentic-looking 19th-century photographs with images that capture Romantic esthetics of beauty in a collection that veers between artistry and soft-core porn. They are of a time when subjects had to sit still for their portraits, and photographers could exploit the expressive possibilities offered by the significant amount of time needed to expose a glass or metal plate.
The photographs, taken between 2004 and 2011, also made me think that Excoffier is “celebrating” the 19th-century photographers who mastered the technical challenges of their medium.
The images are different, of course, but some of the fascination of Excoffier’s images has to do with trying to determine why modern technology can’t make contemporary women with bodies and attitudes that are shaped by 21st-century society look exactly like women of more than a century ago.
AT A GLANCE:
Spaces for Agency/Recomposer la ville continues to March 4 at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, 372 Ste-Catherine St. W., Suite 308. For moreinformation, visit huguescharbonneau.com.
cARTographier continues to March 4 at Galerie Simon Blais, 5420 St-Laurent Blvd. For more information, go to galeriesimonblais.com.
Where Paiement marks the present with his bird’s-eye views of Montrealers, Sarah Hatton looks upward to commemorate a world war that is marking its 100th anniversary.
Hatton commemorates five major battles in the First World War that involved Canadian soldiers with charts marking the position of the stars on the final night of battle. The stars are brass fasteners that held some of the paper files of 650,000 soldiers before the files were digitized.
The battle at Vimy Ridge killed 3,598 Canadian soldiers between April 9 and 12, 1917. Does it matter whether the dying and surviving soldiers could see the stars on the night of April 12 or if their view was obscured by clouds or smoke?
Sky conditions weren’t recorded in the archives Hatton studied. But “the most terrible acts imaginable can take place below on Earth, and none of it will ever change the position of the stars,” she wrote in an email. “I can’t think of another constant quite like it, and I find this thought comforting.”
AT A GLANCE:
Sarah Hatton: Detachment continues to March 4 at Visual Voice Gallery, 372 Ste-Catherine St. W., Suite 421. For details, visitvisualvoicegallery.com.
Here are some of the major art events that will take place in the city this year, several of which explore the theme of Expo 67: March 17: Fashioning Expo 67 opens at the McCord Museum. It will show uniforms worn by hostesses of national pavilions and branded fashion goods made by Quebec designers. For details, visit musee-mccord.qc.ca. May 17: Where Montreal Began opens in the Pointe-à-Callière history museum’s new pavilion at the site of the city’s founding in 1642. Archeological treasures unearthed during digs between 2002 and 2015 will be on display. They include traces of an aboriginal fire pit, a well dug in 1658 and remains of Fort Ville-Marie.
Another exhibition, Memory Collector, will give visitors access to 110 metres of a collector sewer beneath the museum that was an engineering feat when it was built in the 1830s. For more information, visit pacmusee. qc.ca. May 29: The Museum of Fine Arts will turn Sherbrooke St. between its new Pavilion for Peace and the McCord Museum’s Urban Forest into a public art walk. La Balade pour la paix, designed by Claude Cormier, will work with the same themes of humanism, tolerance and openness that inspired Man and His World, Montreal’s world fair in 1967. June 9: Expo 67: The Place to Be is an exhibition of photographs by Jean-Louis Frundin in the vitrines along McGill College Ave. For more information, visit musee-mccord.qc.ca. Summer 2017: Revolution: You Say You Want a Revolution will be indoors at the MMFA. It’s an immersive exhibition celebrating 1967 in its music, film fashion, design and political activism. For more information, visit mbam. qc.ca. Aug. 31: KM3 opens in the Quartier des spectacles as a participatory outdoor art event with 20 artworks and installations by Quebec-based practitioners of visual arts, urban art, digital art, design and architecture. For more information, visit quartierdesspectacles.com. Sept. 9: Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything opens at the Musée d’art contemporain. The exhibition will showcase new and commissioned works by visual artists, performance artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers reacting to Cohen’s poetry of redemption and hope. “There is a crack in everything,” Cohen sings in Anthem. “That’s how the light gets in.” For more information, visit macm.org