Newsletter
EDITO
Flawless Fragility
Sylvette Babin
FRAGILE
The Aesthetics of Inadequacy, Still
This essay explores symbols of fragility and human weakness in the work of contemporary still-life photographers. Focusing on concepts of the sublime, as well as the Renaissance tradition of vanitas still life, it considers the failure of recent attempts to differentiate contemporary practice from the modern and postmodern, while highlighting artists’ sustained interest in the aesthetics of inadequacy.
[Laura Letinsky, Louis Joncas & Colwyn Griffith]
[Laura Letinsky, Louis Joncas & Colwyn Griffith]
Emily Falvey
Plasticity and Fragility
Walter Benjamin drew inspiration from glass to propose an enlightening study of modernity at the start of the twentieth century. More recently, Peter Sloterdijk sought to conceive fragility in connection with a reality principle: fragility characterizes that which is most real, that is, the singularity of that which cannot be repeated. Today, polymer materials are ubiquitous and carry a rarely discussed civilizational and spiritual significance. This text attempts to conceptualize the plasticity of civilizational capitalism and its relationship to fragility.
[Matthew Barney]
[Matthew Barney]
Patrick Poulin
Durability and Fragility: Two Distinct Positions
This paper on fragility begins with an analysis of pieces that seem completely at the opposite of this notion since they question the concept of immortality. From here a reflection on different dissemination models unfurls: namely, how institutional contexts influence our expectations and experience of art. Two trends stand out: artworks that surpass the human and reaches towards eternity, and artworks that call into question our free will in accepting their own fragility. The text thus bases itself on pieces such as Chih-Chien Wang’s Le nid and Joanne Poitras’ Pour l'instant, l'arbre, which are both radically different from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre and Daniel Buren’s process of “warning.”
[Chih-Chien Wang & Joanne Poitras]
[Chih-Chien Wang & Joanne Poitras]
Clara Bonnes
Boxed Fragility
Starting with the theme of fragility and thoughts on the current art system, from within and without (i.e., capitalism), this text looks at a complex and multidisciplinary project that artist Patrick Beaulieu has led since 2003. Transfriable is presented as a package delivery company and has a major web presence. With the help of various contributors, negligently packaged fragile objects travel around the world, from one art venue to the next, where they are exhibited and then reshipped. The handling of these packages becomes the pretext for various public actions and results in accelerating the deterioration of their contents—a wholly intended outcome.
[Patrick Beaulieu]
[Patrick Beaulieu]
Ève Dorais
Violence and Sweetness
The following meditation on Tapis de sucre 3, Aude Moreau’s installation at the Darling Foundry, explores the varyiousng aspectsdimensions of both the inherent precariousness fragility of the artwork’s material and the social conditions that it perpetuates. It links the bitter precariousness uncertainty of life on a sugar plantation to the sweetness of life ving off of an industrially weaffluenthy industrial society, the brutality implied in the refinement of both sugar and culture, as well as the violence that founds them and the exceeding of itits overcoming, since this fragile artwork par excellence imposes oncan command the public’s a sacred respect for its integrity.
[Aude Moreau]
[Aude Moreau]
Christian Roy
Fragility in Sophie Calle: Between Affect and Community
The essay focuses on the expression of fragility in Sophie Calle’s work, as it proves to be a part of her practice. Her subject matter, marked by life’s ordeals, the ambiguity of her intentions and her risky production modes found an aesthetics of precariousness. The author highlights these features in Calle’s first work, Les dormeurs, and in her recent pieces, Où et quand ? Berck and Où et quand ? Lourdes, and finally revisits Prenez soin de vous in light of this issue. The author addresses what is at stake in mediation, as a system that undermines artistic paradigms.
Chantal Tourigny Paris
PORTFOLIOS
Just Dharma
Jason Lim
À portée de souffle
Jean Dubois & Chloé Lefebvre
Hors Jeu & Simili
Olivier Sévère
Conversation Bubble & Ice Domes
Ana Rewakowicz
Deuil
Spring Hurlbut
ARTICLES
Le cadre et l’excroissance
L’entreprise de Patrice Duhamel, récemment décédé, peut être caractérisée, dans la diversité de ses questionnements et de ses manifestations comme une tentative de recadrer l’espace de la représentation. Qu’il s’agisse de croquis où le trait, à force d’entrelacements, de reprises, d’excroissances, semble littéralement germiner, d’installations où la vidéo s’articule au dessin, ou de bandes vidéo où l’espace et les gestes sont émiettés, démultipliés, répartis sur une profondeur de champ fictive, Patrice Duhamel recompose indéfiniment une géographie des gestes et des espaces où ils se déploient comme sur une portée qu’ils enchantent. La vie ainsi toujours déborde le cadre où pourtant toujours elle s’inscrit.
[Les dernières œuvres de Patrice Duhamel]
[Les dernières œuvres de Patrice Duhamel]
Jean-Pierre Vidal
[in French]
Catherine Bolduc : My life without gravity
Dans son œuvre My life without gravity, Catherine Bolduc explore un nouveau médium, la vidéo, qu’elle intègre à un langage installatif. Une fois de plus, l’artiste crée un espace dont l’accès nous est refusé, tout en sollicitant nos sens par les sons et la lumière qui nous y parviennent avec intensité. La projection vidéo, en dialogue avec l’installation visuelle et sonore, consiste en une courte autofiction narrative présentée en boucle. Dans l’ensemble, My life without gravity propose la rencontre d’un certain romantisme, d’une pointe ludique et d’un désir de croire en l’enchantement momentané tout en ne manquant pas de suggérer son altérabilité.
Hélène Brunet Neumann
[in French]
Nervous Witness of Struggle
Never Lopez’s Pretendahar, photographs of a Canadian training facility located in an airplane hangar that mimics an Afghani village, examines Canadian “nervousness” through culture, architecture, and the body. Canadian nervous culture, distinguished from American paranoia, is transparent in Pretendahar’s functions, yet the facility suggests a need to remain concerned about global shifts post-9/11. The architecture of the facility creates a nervous system sustaining the cellular structure of the village, which is used to observe and train troops whose bodies grow out of the hangar’s body. Pretendahar makes the viewer anxious suggesting a growing confluence between cultural commentary and military culture.
[Never Lopez]
[Never Lopez]
Toby Heys & Andrew Hennlich
Québec Gold
Québec Gold, an exhibition held in Reims, France and in association with the 400th anniversary of Quebec City attempts, among other things, to provide an image of contemporary art practice in Quebec at the present time. The exhibition is built around a series of thematic axes, which help determine both the shape it takes and the way it is viewed. This review examines the exhibition, and these assumptions, to investigate some of the ways in which the show is both successful as such and acts as a site for interrogating the confluence of concerns around notions of discursive context, canonization, and inclusion.
Peter Dubé
[in French]
Entre présentation et représentation : à propos de Cellar Door de Loris Gréaud
L’exposition de Loris Gréaud au Palais de Tokyo au printemps 2008 a souvent été mal comprise. La présentation par cet artiste d’un ensemble d’éléments fortement hétérogènes, couplée à un déficit d’informations claires, a rebuté une partie du public, alors que des spectateurs plus avertis ironisaient sur la pléthore de références à des artistes récents. Il semblerait que la confusion tienne en réalité aux objectifs de l’exposition, laquelle était bien plus une représentation métaphorique d’un atelier qu’une suite d’œuvres ou de processus.
Jérôme Glicenstein
[in French]
AFFAIRE DE ZOUAVE
Cycle délicat
Michel F. Côté
[in French]
EXHIBITIONS
Harvest of Memories : Mexican Days of the Dead, Gardiner Museum, [exposition collective]
If ait is so / to be so in / go in to it / asit is so / it is in us / is it as if / it is of me, Double Négatif, Ctrllab, [Double Négatif]
Superdome, Palais de Tokyo, [exposition collective]
Sobey Art Award 2008, Royal Ontario Museum, [exposition collective]
Carrall Sreet, Artspeak, [Althea Thauberger]
Marina Roy / Abbas Akhavan, VIVO Media Art Centre, [Marina Roy et Abbas Akhavan]
Méta-morphose, Cinémathèque québécoise, [Stefan Nitoslawski]
Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus, VOX image contemporaine
PUBLICATIONS
Marcelle Ferron
Champs d’intérêts : infiltrer, habiter, spéculer [I] et [II], [programmation 3e Impérial]
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