Some of VoCA’s favorite Canadian artists are from Quebec:

NICOLAS BAIER

Read more HERE

MASSIMO GUERRERA
(His installation of sculpture and drawing opens at Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto this Saturday November 18)

Read more HERE

ALEXANDRE CASTONGUAY

Read more HERE

SYLVIE LALIBERTE

Read more HERE

ADAD HANNAH

Read more HERE

A week or so ago VoCA was in Montreal for the announcement of the Sobey Art Prize. Did we mention how much we liked BGL’s installation?

More on BGL HERE

The exterior room - a kind of recreated storage room - didn’t do much for us, but the inner room!

With the rolling disco ball attached to a pulley so that whenever the door was opened, a sparkly light intstallation was instigated. Wonderful! We can’t find an image of the disco ball room, but here’s one of their moose:

We also saw the RODNEY GRAHAM show at the Musee D’Art Contemporain. Rodney Graham is one of VoCA’s favorite artists, and the show was OK. Best was Awakening, two photographs (one a negative image) of a scene recreated from a Black Sabbath album cover. The scene showed the band standing in front of a bum on a park bench, pointing and laughing. Graham plays the bum. Naturally.

And we saw his excellent How I Became a Ramblin’ Man:

We didn’t care too much for the lightboxes – lightboxes don’t seem to suit Graham. They’re too much Jeff Wall’s thing.

The film of the inaudible pilot on the sea plane was great, even if the outfit on display (the costumes always accompany Graham’s films, as kind of sculptures) was exhibited too early. It should have been displayed after the film. Kind of like a postscript. And the film made us envious of Vancouverites with that incredible harbour backdrop.

Tied with Awakening for best work in the show, the moving image piece Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, was apparently inspired by Pink Floyd’s drummer. Graham sits in a chair just in front of the camera with his back to the viewer, lobbing potatoes…well, at a gong. Very Fluxus, very serious and very funny. The distance between viewer and image is reflected in the window where a tiny image of the scene appears a few feet in front of the projector itself.

The companion exhibition at MMCA was painting by the Leipzig painter NEO RAUCH.

For info click HERE

VoCA must say that Rauch’s paintings are not our cup of tea, but you can’t deny they’re exceptionally painted. Too much going on for our taste, though. And the colour clashes and the scale of the imagery and the images themselves seemed dated. These works demand a lot of the viewer.

The video programme downstairs was excellent. The best was Sylvie Laliberte’s Bonbons bijoux. Laliberte always portrays a child-woman, and here she speaks (with a mouth full of white candies that look like pebbles) about the significance of candy, and then jewels, in a girl’s life. Similarly to Pipilotti Rist and Gunilla Josephson, she draws parallels between the ‘mistakes’ in her work and the experience of femininity.

Across town near Berri-Uquam visited Projex Mtl, a small gallery with a strong show by Ottawa-based artist ADRIAN GOLLNER. He’s the same artist that has done the lighting installation atop the City Place condominiums in Toronto.

A number of wall sculptures spell out phrases in Morse code. Some, like Location, Location, Location seem geared to condo-dwellers (or salespeople.) He has a series of prints made by rolling various Ikea products in ink and pressing them onto paper. They’re fun pieces and very pleasing. (and well priced.)

Well, that’s all for now. VoCA’s recovering from the Toronto International Art Fair last weekend.

BEST IN SHOW AT TIAF: the Arman bronze violin from the Parisian gallery Galerie Mark Hachem

and Pierre Francois Ouellette’s entire booth

PFOAC HERE