The house plant possesses the cinematic ability to oscillate between the highly significant and the background prop. As a body of signification, the plant exists in relation to one individual: its caretaker. Even if a couple bought their asparagus fern together—taking turns carrying it on the walk home from the nursery, potting it on the first kitchen table that belonged to them and only them—only one half of the pair will remember to water it. It grows because of this individual, it makes it through the winter. As long as the fern is contained in a pot, in an apartment, in the middle of a city, its life is dependent. So the individual loves it, because he understands that it needs him. But the house plant can die, and the house plant is left behind, and the house plant is, of course, non-sentient.

The strange void that potted dracaena, fiddle leaf fig trees and philodendrons fill in our lives is explored by artists Evergon and Jean-Jacques Ringuette, with the exhibition HOUSEBOUND: Portraits from the Winter Garden, at Galerie Trois Points until April 22. The photographic works are an examination of interiority, reminiscence, and the beauty of the botany we keep.

A grid of 31 inkjet prints (3×10, plus one frame added to the top right corner) dominates the show. Brightly lit and placed in front of the same cool grey background, various potted plants sit for their portraits. One after the other, they are uniformly lined up like in an obligatory yearbook page for an aloof graduating class. They are a motley crew. “Margaret,” the bulbous and key lime green succulent, is slouching out of her tilted pot. “Echo”â€s pink petals cascade whimsically from a tall glass vase, like the girl from the wealthy family who doesnâ€t brush her hair. “Émilie” broods in a dark green tangle, at odds with the sunny yellow of the planter she crouches in. The camera captures the ridges of a vein, the glints of reflected light, and the vast negative space that respects each ‘lady-plant†as a subject. Within HOUSEBOUND, the exotic flora are yours for a moment. Without having to tend to their soil, it is possible to imagine complaining to “Margaret” about the morning rain or glancing in the hallway mirrorâ€s reflection of both you and “Echo” to check your teeth. You bring them the nourishment of the outside world; you are their caretaker. In return, they give you beautiful company.

Artist Evergon is also known as Celluloso Evergonni, Eve R. Gonzales and Egon Brut. The Canadian photographer is internationally acclaimed for his technological innovation (non-silver processes, electrostatic works and life-size holograms, for example) and thematic of sexuality, gender, aging and the body. A professor emeritus of studio arts at Concordia University, Evergon lives and works in Montreal. His work has been shown from Los Angeles to Shanghai, but, in recent years, Evergonâ€s health has rendered him housebound. The exhibition is a collaboration with former student, friend and model Jean-Jacques Ringuette, capturing living things that only live indoors. The creative partnership may be symbiotic in the same way that a plant and its human individual are. When art is made, is this not a form of photosynthesis?

The show also features a series of memento mori-style still-life prints. Unlike the rich, natural colors of the house plants, the still lifes conjure fleshy decay. At luncheons where meat is served, it sits on a platter as the centerpiece of the table. After the lunch guests are full and float on to the next room, while the unfinished carcass is neglected. Purposeless, its death is consummated. The flowers of these visually opulent images are browning, their petals brittle and tendrils wilted. The crowded frames feature water-damaged photographs, bronze amphibian figurines and a model skeleton. Glittering red rubies of DayQuil and cherry tomatoes are scattered on the table, posing the question: ‘what does one do to feel well?â€. The scene suggests the simultaneous existence of the living, the already-lived, and the intangible nostalgia for life itself. As a testament to expiration, these still-lifes subscribe to the more cynical ontology of the house plant: it is painfully perishable.

From sunny windowsills and forgotten dentist office corners, plants extend stems of companionship, whispering to its caregiver. Evergonâ€s Winter Garden reminds viewers to water, resoil and tend to these symbols of how marvellous life is while it is still living.

Kahatènhston tsi naâ€tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha, Drawing a Line from January to December

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art announced last month that it will be renamed and operating as the Wood Land School in 2017, unfolding a single exhibition over the course of the year. Wood Land School: Drawing a Line from January to December considers linearity in understanding the history and memory of Indigenous people, identities and ideas.

Beginning in 2011 with the acclaimed Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater, Wood Land School exists without fixed location or form. Indigenous artworks and realities inhabit Indigenous-directed conceptual and physical space. This is a space where complex Indigenous stories to take full precedence, and where non-Indigenous visitors are invited to engage in the understanding of them.

The iteration occurring within the Belgo Building is organized by Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater and cheyanne turions with Walter Scott. They write, “The scope of the contexts we operate within and in relation to include the historical, which is akin to theory, and the contemporary, which is akin to practice. Wood Land School aims to be a space for listening, where we can tend to the urgency of current conditions as they unfold–both systemic and material–with an eye to how (and how else) these circumstances can shape our everyday lives.”

The current ‘gesture’ (defined by Wood Land School as “clusters of activity that bring works into and out of the gallery space”) features Alanis Obomsawinâ€s 1971 video Christmas at Moose Factory. Obomsawin pans over childrenâ€s crayon drawings of their lives in winter with narration by a young girl from the community on the shore of James Bay. The texture of crayon, lines for limbs and facial features askew are familiar to anyone, but the stories of seeing a black bear in the backyard may not be. It is tender to watch and listen; a portrait is created of a place that we see with eyes of childlike wonder. In the same way that the cinematic medium is able to move what is still, the experiences had at Moose Factory are able to be felt. Wood Land School is the forum for this embodied perception.

March will see a performance with Anje Loft and Re:Collection Kahnawake, and drawings by Napachie Pootoogook and Brian Jungen.

Walking trepidly around Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, wincing as shoes crush the foil Chinese coins in silver and gold, is like tiptoeing out of a childâ€s bedroom when bedtime stories have lulled them at last. It is a sweet and inviting space: bright pastels, tactile objects, animals, constellation prints on the walls like day-glo stars. But there is something slumbering that we know will rumble when it wakes.

Itâ€s the napping political significance, of course. Karen Tam presents a beautiful critique of the contemporary art worldâ€s tendency to blend and appropriate cultural forms until their history and politics are lost. The meaning isnâ€t overt when just looking, but her work is imbued with a questioning of the relationship between Asia and the Americas and its disoriented representation. “Yet,” the exhibition guide nuances, “the artist maintains a subtle distinction between the original source of inspiration and her own interpretation from which emerges a clear critique that activates cultural and identity issues relating to racism and the globalization of trade.”

The walls of Tamâ€s second solo show at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau are lined with cyanotype paper works: a color palette of rich blue and white traditional to Chinese ceramics, and galactic patterns that reproduce the first visualizations of Chinese astronomy. These early constellation graphics were used by merchants along the Silk Road, relating the ancient trade of goods and culture to contemporary commercialism as embodied in the piñatas, the centerpiece of the room. The pastel horses are literal and metaphorical bricolage, using Mexican piñata tradition as well as Chinese funerary elements of horse and camel imagery and papier-mâché offerings.

Whose funeral is Tam constructing? The floor sparkles, but itâ€s the commodification of Chinese bodies we are stepping on. The unbeaten piñatas beckon us to tear their corpses, but itâ€s the reality of conditions of labor and trade that we are shredding into unrecognizable pieces. Itâ€s a funeral for our ignorance.

Tam constructs a room meant to symbolize worlds through their stereotypes; the world through the rudimentary, childâ€s eye. Itâ€s inviting yet so much more lies beneath the aesthetics, a truth of our capitalist and globalized society that Tam is illuminating. It takes more than a walk around the exhibition to not just view, but to see.

Pierre Ayotâ€s work requires suspension. The tilted frame of “Fil à plomb” (1978) is as unsettling as a tilted frame on a white gallery wall. But the tilted frame of “Fil à plomb” makes sense – it is simply obeying the laws of gravitational pull – as a fil à plomb that has been swung to the right. Ayotâ€s work requires a suspension of our rote reality in order to enter a new one. 

A retrospective of the late, multidisciplinary Montreal artist is sweeping the city this autumn. A recreation of Ayotâ€s controversial tipped-over replica of La Croix du Mont Royal was erected at the edge of Jeanne-Mance Park, 40 years after the original was demolished and rendered a work everyone talked about but had never seen. The project was realized by Martha Carrier, director of Galerie B-312, and curator Nicolas Mavrikakis with financial support from the City of Montreal. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec is highlighting the cultural history of the province from the 1960s to the 1990s, using over one hundred works and archival documents. Graff Gallery, co-founded by Ayot in 1980 and also located in the Belgo Building, has combined and displayed four decades†worth of the artistâ€s portraiture. Nicolas Mavrikakis has had a hand in all of this.

In curating the Ayot-centric exhibition at Galerie Joyce Yahouda, Mavrikakis did something unconventional. His approach tapped into the combination of an out-of-the-box interpretation and simplicity that Ayot strove toward. I may lack the Montrealaise heritage to personally feel all that Ayot did for the world of visual arts in Montreal, but Push and Pull makes clear his acute significance to Pop Art as it operates in the contemporary world, decades after the original Pop Art movement.

This clarity is presented in the most touching way. As Mavrikakis writes, Ayot is remembered as “a maker of playful artworks and of intricate trompe-lâ€oeil”. Mavrikakis’ curation focuses on creationâ€s antithesis: Ayotâ€s deconstruction of representation. With this emphasis, Mavrikakis draws out the unique surrealism of the prints that allow them to become more than their medium. Our world has permeated the reality of the artworks, and they have edged into ours, thus muddling our understanding of real and representative.The show features Ayot’s prints from seminal ‘deconstruction’ works to screenprints of enlarged and pixelated film slides, as well as the work of artists influenced and inspired to respond to Ayot. The pieces coexist suitably, making the gallery into a coherent space where normalcy has been subtly tweaked. Ayot’s “Attention! Haute tension” (1978) is a frame stretched by a wire which is tied around its centre. The frame is slightly hourglass-shaped. But the wire is not actually pulling anything at all; Ayot has rendered the pulling, responding to the would-be pull and thus responding to the power of an artwork. It is early conceptual art without pretension and conceding simplicity. The gallery is dotted with these direct yet contemplative works, including those artists other than the eponymous. Andrea Szilasi’s “Stripes” (2005) is a deconstructed photo that is different enough to wonder, and not so destroyed to leave us wondering. 

Inside Push and Pull, maybe we are suspended in time, where Ayot could ask us what we think and challenge our answers. Or maybe our conception of ‘real†and ‘art†and ‘inanimate†are suspended, in the gallery and forevermore when we leave it. I would like to think that together, Mavrikakis and Ayot carry viewers up to an Archimedean point. While suspended there, we can view art from a removed and total vantage point. We can see every little taken-apart piece.

DECADE: 10th Anniversary Exhibition
Galerie Dominique Bouffard
June 16, 2016 – August 28, 2016

Galerie Dominique Bouffard is celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer with an exhibition of work by artists who exemplify the gallery’s past, present and future. Below is a conversation with Bouffard on the show, the space and contemporary art across a decade.

Greta Rainbow: What were your original goals when you first opened your gallery in 2006?

Dominique Bouffard: I worked for years for other gallerists. It is a scene I got to know and I liked the artist-gallerist-collector dynamics very much because I like working with people. I founded my gallery in 2006 with the aim of building an identity focused mainly on painting by supporting artists in the development of their career.

GR: The gallery has now shown over 70 solo and group exhibitions. Are there some that stand out to you as the most monumental in the galleryâ€s history?

DB: Pascal Caputoâ€s exhibition Latitude anthropique shown in 2015 has without a doubt been the most spectacular one. It had all the features of a great exhibition, be it the relevance of the topic treated, the quality of the works or the scenography. The event was on for nearly two months. Stéphanie Morissetteâ€s L’inquiète forêt also made quite an impression. Poetically charged as it was, I saw it work its magic on viewers†faces in front of her paper forest. The latter exhibition subsequently travelled around Quebec and abroad. More generally, I am proud of all the projects shown at the gallery. Each exhibition is an adventure and my role is to support the artist in his or her process. I am very particular about the choice of works, the texts and the staging. At the end of the day, I want the artist to be proud of the result and the public as well as the stakeholders to have the tools they need to understand and appreciate the work being shown.

GR: How has the world of contemporary painting, photography and printmaking changed in the last 10 years?

DB: Diversity in contemporary art is at an all-time high. The market has opened up to offer multidisciplinarity and has fragmented. In this context, we can see that painting is still reaching record sales on the markets and remains a safe investment. Since the beginning, our efforts have mostly been focussed on the promotion of this discipline. Over its history, painting has gone through constant renewal according to the social contexts in which the artists were working and I am happy that, still today, it has such an important share on the art market of contemporary art, in spite of economic fluctuations and the diversity of the offer.

GR: You describe the works in the exhibition DECADE as perpetuating discovery, as opposed to a look back through time. How do the selected works celebrate both the past and the future of Galerie Dominique Bouffard?

DB: Some of the artists whose works are shown in the exhibition DECADE have given me their trust from the very beginning and have thus had a part in the galleryâ€s evolution from the word ‘go’. It was important for me that they be part of the celebrations. It was also the opportunity to underline the presence of artists who have joined the team over the years. I have personally chosen all the pieces to combine them into a coherent body of work without saturating the space. In the final analysis, I think the exhibition is a real success and is worth visiting.

GR: The gallery first inhabited 1000 rue Amherst. How does the gallery interact with the historic Belgo Building? Does the space give certain opportunities or drawbacks?

DB: For eight years, we maximized the possibilities of the space we took over in 2006 and managed to attract the public, in spite of the fact that the gallery was geographically isolated and out of the way. Letâ€s say we managed to do a lot with very little, but I am very proud of how far weâ€ve managed to come. Moving to the Belgo was part of a plan for continuity and expansion. It was, on the one hand, a way to get closer to the scene and to widen our customer base, but mostly it was a way to give ourselves the means to host more ambitious projects and to offer my artists a more suitable exhibition context to show their work. It was also a way to prove we were legitimate and professional, since in this line of work, unless youâ€re very rich, time and strategy are clearly our allies.

GR: Looking into the next decade, do you have any new curatorial aims or aspirations?

DB: I am currently working on the development of a department of works on paper that should take shape as early as fall 2016. This will allow me to establish collaborations with certain artists and to have a more varied and accessible offer to show to collectors. After a brief pause imposed by the galleryâ€s move, I am planning to return to art fairs outside Montreal starting in 2017. New collaborations are also to come… but letâ€s keep a few surprises.

The Whole World Has Gone Joyously Mad at Joyce Yahouda Gallery
Until July 16, 2016
Nadine Faraj portrays women protesting a multitude of issues through nudity. Her subjects are drawn from global and local movements; many are Montreal students resisting tuition fee increases in 2012. The watercolor works on paper are blurred, creating a softness that complements naked skin but juxtaposes fighting and rage. Faraj seeks to create harmony between the works with a series of sculptures within the exhibition.

A Comfortable Indifference at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau
Until July 30, 2016
Featured artists Benoit Aquin, Isabelle Hayeur, David Lafrance and Cynthia Girard-Renard depict the environment’s wild chaos, a chaos that is both the natural disorder of tangled vines and the unnatural disaster of man’s war against the planet. Lafrance gives us the utopia of a healthy and protected environment, and Aquin documents tragedies like North America’s worst oil spill. Art and a universal problem meet in A Comfortable Indifference, ultimately depicting a desperation for action.

The Garden at Projet Pangée
Until July 30, 2016
Darby and Claire Milbrath paint like they have just woken up and are documenting a fever dream filled with forgotten childhood friends. The sisters (and Canadian art darlings–Darby is an artist in Toronto, and Claire is Editor-in-Chief of Montreal-based Editorial Magazine) grew up in a haunted mansion. This show encapsulates the whimsy and restlessness of a 10-year-old roaming an old British Columbia estate, featuring mysterious, lounging characters from the sisters’ lives and imaginations. Classical motifs and themes are explored through primitive line work and simple color palettes. Ceramics by Étienne Chartrand and Trevor Baird are also featured, similarly evoking Miss Havisham and Estella.

Summer Show 2016 at Galerie Laroche/Joncas
Until July 30, 2016 (by appointment in August)
The gallery presents the work of seven young artists: Lauren Chipeur, The Doodys, Mark Dudiak, Élise Provencher, Stefan Sollenius and Tom Watson. Of note: Chipeur’s sculptures of repurposed cardboard and art museum ceiling tile, Mark Dudiak’s multi-media approach to past and present architectural spaces, and Provencher’s existentialist papier-mâché.

Itâ€s the last week to see La revanche des Sans-culottes at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau before the bubblegum-pink curtain closes on the spectacle of 21st century art created in response to France in the time of Marie-Antoinette and of May 1968.

In 2015, Montréal artist Cynthia Girard-Renard participated in a Paris residency through the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). La revanche des Sans-culottes is an expansion of the body of work she created during the residency. Girard-Renard offers a contemporary viewpoint on the French Revolution, combining romantic, stereotypical North American perceptions of the nation with the realities of history.

The markers of global capitalism borne out of France (just the names of Rolex, Chanel and Dior are enough) are presented as embedded in history. Puppets and posters provide the artist with the medium for wordplay: ‘Austerité eau de toiletteâ€, ‘No.5 The Debt.†There is also a juxtaposition in the childlike colors and surreal cartoon characters, and the messages of oppression and resistance that we know them to represent.

The exhibition derives its name from the derogatory slang used to distinguish the striped pants-wearing working-class protestors from the ‘culotteâ€-wearing bourgeoisie. Three pairs of papier mâché striped pants are suspended in the gallery space. Their bareness may be an eerie ode to the past, or it may be more future-thinking: a suggestion of their universality, that the role of the resistor is ready to be assumed at any moment and the figure who ‘wears the pants’ is in shift.

As the camera pans over rows of airplanes, zooming in and out on nondescript white wing after white wing, over dusty patches of grass and empty patches of sky, the monotonous quickly shifts to unsettling. That is exactly how Nelly-Ève Rajotte curated her video installation, Claustrophobia of Open Spaces, to be.

“Otherwise peaceful places are seen as becoming somehow twisted, with anxious minds interpreting them as being surprisingly hostile,” reads the CIRCA exhibition’s accompanying text. A low-frequency buzz permeates the gallery. It appears to be part of the first video, connoting the wind tunnel in the small space between the jet bridge and the airplane, or the invisible roar that emanates as the plane ascends. Walking into the next room is troubling because the sound remains, while the image is replaced by scenes of sublime nature.

Water hits the rocks in slow motion and waterfall footage is played in rewind. Rajotte plays with nature enough so that it is recognizable but not enough to still make sense. The crashing water is sloth-like and powerless, and the waterfall is now receding into itself.

Unease and anxiety is heightened by investigation of the gallery space itself. The meta element is an effort to force out a consciousness in the viewer of the distance between themselves and the subject, and the distance between what is represented and how this representation is sought. Here in the Belgo Building, we are far from the scenes on the screen; an edited video of nature is far from nature.

The ambiguity of the sound and image centralize individual reaction and experience, and the space becomes a fluid sculpture that sees a range of reactions, a diversity perhaps not always produced by the traditional still image.

At the vernissage of Sans Peau / No Skin, a girl about four years old runs through the gallery, weaving in and out of legs, clutching a sculpture from the exhibition. The artists and visitors laugh and continue their conversations in English, French and Portuguese. Sans Peau / No Skin is not meant to be stagnant, but rather bend toward and mold itself around the people who interact with it. It is a fluid, barrierless microcosm, like the jellyfish, known as “água-viva”, living water, in Brazilian Portuguese.

This conception of blurring the substance and the space, for the jellyfish who is succumbed in water to become water itself, is the starting point for artists Ines Doujak, Pablo Lafuente and Alessandro Marques. Their collaboration was a response to the existentialist philosophy of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector in Água Viva. They absorbed Lispectorâ€s seemingly untouchable ideas of nature and the passage of time, and answered with the most tactile medium: fabric.

The artists covered walls, boxes, and strange human forms in chita, a popular fabric from northeastern Brazil that is characterised by bright floral imagery. SBC Gallery is once again transformed by their focus program, to another world, to another home.

The three artists are Brazilian, but currently spread out across the globe. There was long-distance discussion and creation before their meeting in Montréal, but nothing came ready-made. The exhibitionâ€s realisation occurred in the two weeks of daily work in the gallery space, and continues to occur through its run-time as fabric corpses are moved and textiles are touched. Sans Peau / No Skin is a translation of one country and culture to another, and a balancing act of artistic practices that share a heritage.

SBC Gallery is hosting events in conjunction with the exhibition: for February 24’s Nuit Blanche, experience workshops in percussion, capoeira and a textile laboratory from 8 pm to 2 am.

Following the popularity and success of the first edition in September, the artist-run centres and the contemporary art galleries of the Belgo are pleased to announce a special event on Thursday from 5pm to 10pm: La soirée Belgo.

This friendly gathering will allow the public to (re)discover, in a lively atmosphere, the dynamic nature of the Belgo. As an important centre for contemporary art for many years, the Belgo continues to be the only place in the city where many galleries and artist-run centres can be visited at a single address in the heart of Montrealâ€s downtown area.

The evening will also feature musical performances from bands Navir and Les vas nu pieds, as well as the duo “DJ Breezy Breeze and Cool Dad”.

Participating Galleries and Arts Centres:

Galerie B-312
espace 403
Il nâ€en est rien.
Mathieu Cardin

Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
espace 216
Mark Clintberg

pfoac221
Espace 221
Un Show de Motâ€Arts : décennie
Commissaire : Eloi Desjardins

Galerie Hugues Charbonneau
espace 308
Les Appelants
David Lafrance

Centre des arts actuels Skol
espace 314
Voisins
Matthew Brooks, Yvette Cenerini, Risa Hatayama, Emily Jan, Dâ€Arcy Wilson

Galerie Lilian Rodriguez
espace 405
Céramique : art & design
Pascale Girardin, Lana Jamieson, Véronique Lépine, Francine Potvin

Projet Pangée
espace 412
Drawing Is the New Painting

Laroche/Joncas
espace 410
Des paquets d’histoires
Gilles Mihalcean

Visual Voice Gallery
espace 421
Equilibrium
Stephen H. Kawai

Arprim, centre d’essai en art imprimé
espace 426
Jamais plus
Piéo Eliceiry

Galerie POPOP
espace 442
Dessins-Écrits
Catherine Lisi-Daoust
Vernissage le 4 février à 17 h

CIRCA art actuel
espace 444
Marie-Claude Bouthiller
Voeux

SBC Galerie dâ€art contemporain
espace 507
Sans Peau / No Skin
IInes Doujak, Pablo Lafuente, Alessandro Marques

Galerie Dominique Bouffard
espace 508
Arcadie, entre désenchantement et éternel retour
Stéphanie Morissette Daniel Barkley, Justin Lalancette, Sébastian Maltais
Commissaire et artiste invité : Michel Denée

Galerie Joyce Yahouda
espace 516
Le mois Hypnagogia, Daniel Horowitz
One Hundred Crowned Masterpieces of Painting, Andrea Szilasi
Après Evangelion, Julie Tremble

Galerie Trois Points
espace 520
Sonata / Outsvoslkaïa
Mario Côté

Galerie Donald Browne
espace 528
Group Show
Louis Fortier