In The Trees: Works from the Battat Collection
Battat Contemporary, Montreal
July 2 – August 15, 2009

Ed Pien, Night Gathering, 2005. All images courtesy Battat Contemporary.

Montreal’s newest collector-led art space, Battat Contemporary, run by the collector Joe Battat, opened in March 2009 and has quickly made a name for itself by mixing Battat’s interest in Old Master drawings with cutting edge contemporary pieces.

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VoCA went to Montreal and by far the best thing we saw was Michal Rovner’s wonderful installation Particles of Reality, her first solo exhibition in Canada, at DHC Art Foundation. The exhibition, which opened in May and runs through September 27, begins with the same video works projected onto Petri dishes that the artist showed at the 2005 Venice biennale’s Israeli pavilion.

Michal Rovner, a close up shot of Datazone, 2003. Image: musesphere.com

We were struck by her work then, but this exhibition is even better. Rovner’s videos of tiny, abstracted human beings, swaying and dressed in black derive meaning from the way they are exhibited. The people are choreographed in patterns so that in Data Zone (2003), a group of long tables embedded with illuminated Petri dishes, they look like Chromosomes.

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Thomas Kneubühler, installation view: ‘Brise Soleil’ éclairant ‘Mount Hortons’ & ‘The Mountain (Switch)’, “Electric #1″, 2009 and “Electric #3″ , 2009. Image: projex-mtl.com

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Paulette Gagnon, chief curator of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, has been given the top job at the gallery.

Paulette Gagnon. Image: newswire.ca

She will replace Mark Mayer, who left last year for the bigger top job at the National Gallery of Canada.

Paulette Gagnon is the 9th director general of the museum, and the third woman to occupy this post.

Gagnon has been as the MACM since 1992 and gets VoCA’s thumbs up for organizing exhibitions that included VoCA favorites Isaac Julien, Louise Bourgeois and Attila Richard Lukacs.

Confluences: Rencontre entre Montreal et le Bas-Saint-Laurent
June 14 - 13 September, 2009
Musee Regionale de Rimouski

Should you find yourself in Quebec this summer, this exhibition seeks to bring together a rencontre between Montreal and the lower St. Lawrence. The show looks promising!

Guillaume Lachapelle, Manege 16, 2004-06. Image: guillaumelachapelle.com

Featuring work by 13 artists (who you may not know of) including Magalie Comeau, Sylvie Moisan and Guillaume Lachapelle, whose miniature theatrical installations VoCA loves.

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One of VoCA’s favorite artists, Yoko Ono, speaks with the FT on the eve of being awarded the prestigious
Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement - along with John Baldessari - at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens this week.

Read the full article HERE.

John and Yoko. Image: mmfa.qc.ca

Her exhibition sounds well worth seeing, if you’re in Venice.

If you’re not, check out Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko, on view through June 21 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Click HERE for the Montreal Museum website.

Click HERE to watch Yoko Ono’s famous Cut Piece from 1965.

How relevant are art schools today? Do artists really require education beyond basic technical training? Do art institutions hinder, rather than help the creative expression of artists today?

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967.
Image: truthinart.wordpress.com

And what does Bruce Nauman think?

Read my opinion piece on the brand new news website, The Mark.

Click HERE.

Kalup Linzy: Recessed Depressed… Child Just Tell Me…
May 8 - June 13, 2009
Parisian Laundry

Kalup Linzy. Image: artnews.org

One of the hottest names in video art, Linzy’s best known work is a series of video art pieces satirizing the tone and narrative approach of television soap opera. Linzy performs most of the characters himself, and was once described as ‘Part Richard Pryor, part RuPaul.‘

Click HERE for more info on Linzy, and some great videos.

Click HERE for Parisian Laundry’s website.

COMING UP!
Michal Rovner: Particles of Reality
DHC Art Foundation
May 21 – September 27, 2009

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Well, it’s down to five.

Who will win the $70,000 Sobey Art Prize this year?

After last years win by Vancouver superstar Tim Lee (stolen, we think, from Winnipeg’s excellent Daniel Barrow) and won the year before by Montrealer Michel de Broin (who we interviewed HERE and whose pedal powered Buick we covered HERE), this year it’s down to this group:

WEST COAST AND YUKON: Luanne Martineau, whose fuzzy felted pieces we really like for their craft element and references to Minimal art and painters like Philip Guston.

Luanne Martineau, Dangler, 2008. Image: akimbo.ca

PRAIRIES AND THE NORTH: Marcel Dzama, he of the much-copied naive drawings that were so much in vogue several years ago. From Winnipeg, where he lived, Dzama seemingly influenced all of Brooklyn. Now he lives in New York and shows with David Zwirner Gallery, where he’s been making sort of awkward dioramas.

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We’ve written a lot about the excellent public performance group Improv Everywhere HERE, and about one of our favorite films, the Spanish mock-umentary Noviembre HERE, in which street theatre performers tread a dangerous line between reality and fiction (In once case, a performer feigns collapse and the unknowing public calls an ambulance in desperation).

This past weekend, we received THIS video, in which performers break into a fantastically kitsch song-and-dance rendition of Do-Re-Mi from the Sound of Music, charming an unsuspecting public in Antwerp station.

The Sound of Music in Antwerp station. Image: theinspirationroom.com

Now that artists are taking to the streets more than ever in ways not specifically revealed as art projects, we wonder what the effects of this trend will be.

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