Peut Mieux Faire
September 4 - 9 October, 2009
Atelier Punkt, Montreal

There’s a new exhibition opening on September 4 at Atelier Punkt, the year-old space that appears to be one of Montreal’s coolest art and design spaces.

Founded by artist Melinda Pap, Punkt is effectively an artist-run centre that dedicates itself to exhibitions of work by young designers, photographers, illustrators and architects from “Montreal and the world.”

Peut Mieux Faire features work by artists, performers, graphic designers, stylists, make up artists, ceramicists, jewelers, architects, authors-composers-interpreters…each of whom have been given by Emmanuel Galland (the curator ‘professor’), a classic Canada Hilroy exercise book as a ‘canvas’.

Participating artists include Suzanne Dery, Justin Stephens, Jerome Fortin and Daniel Olsen, among many others.

Continue reading →

“With their artists competing on an international stage, Canadians can no longer complain of their country as a cultural backwater nor luxuriate in the nostalgic charm of provincialism. In art as in political, social and economic activities, Canada is fully involved in the world of today,”
– Dr. R. H. Hubbard, former Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada.

Guido Molinari, Untitled, 1964. Image: artnet.com

Walking down Bloor Street in Toronto last night, we stopped at a bookshop’s outdoor display and there, right in front of us, on sale for $1.99, was a copy of Canadian Art Today, originally published in 1970 by Studio International.

Edited by William Townsend, a professor at the University of London, the slim book is filled with contributions from Canada’s art elite at the time: R.H. Hubbard, then chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Doris Shadbolt, then curator of the Vancovuer Art Gallery, curators Dennis Reid, Pierre Theberge and David Thompson.

“Canadian artists were dependent for generations on the artistic traditions of France and England and it is only since the last war that contemporary American influences have made a decisive impact,” writes Townsend.

Continue reading →

This fall in Montreal and Toronto sees a new exhibition at DHC/ART in Montreal, the legendary art critic Hal Foster at OCAD in Toronto, and the Ten Commandments at the ROM in Toronto.

Ten Commandments: A Fragment
Saturday, October 10 to Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

A fragment of the Ten Commandments. Image: cogwriter.com

As part of the ROM’s excellent exhibition Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World, which is on view through January 3, 2010, for one week only in October (due to its sensitivity to light and humidity), the ROM will showcase a fragment of one of our oldest copies of the text of the Ten Commandments.

The displayed Scroll contains the text of the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy 5 and is the best preserved of all the Deuteronomy manuscripts discovered. A biblical scroll, it is written in Hebrew and dated to ca. 30 – 1 BCE.

Continue reading →

It’s summer, and you don’t want to get too serious…so here are some easy shows to check out throughout July. Swing by for free nighttime screenings in Montreal, or get outside for public art interventions in Calgary.

La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse
Montreal

In Montreal, stop by La Centrale’s window to see these screenings, which are about appearance and transformation. From dusk ’til dawn.

Stephanie Chabot, Destroyer, 2005. Image: stephaniechabot.netfirms.com

BLUE MOON
Stéphanie Chabot
2007.
July 29 to August 2, 2009

Blue Moon presents a woman coldly displayed in virtual space accompanied by a soundtrack based on an Elvis tune. Evoking beauty, pleasure, and desire, Blue Moon is a tender take on woman’s complex and sometimes contradictory situation within the myth of romance.

Continue reading →

Above and Below
July 18 - 12 September, 2009
Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University
Sherbrooke, Quebec

Penelope Stewart, Cloche, 2008. 12′ x 10′ double photograph ( on vinyl), in the woods.
Image: penelopestewart.ca

Continue reading →

The annual ARTnews collectors list is out, and there are no big surprises. Over half the major collectors featured are from the United States, followed by Germany, the UK, Switzerland and other Western European countries.

Most focus on contemporary and modern art, though Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Old Masters are also popular.

Jativa Master (also known as the Master of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin), The Crucifixion, late 1400’s
oil on panel lined with fabric. Gift of Joey and Toby Tanenbaum to the AGO, 1995

Four Canadians make the list:

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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.