Marie-Christine Dubé and John Boyle-Singfield, curators of the exhibition Harder, Better, Faster at Galerie Trois Points, set out to create a myth which “reinforces the empowerment of womenâ€s identities,” an ambitious aim that it achieved very well. As I made my way through the exhibition I wondered if this show did what it set out to do, or whether it simply, but fascinatingly, reflected the status quo. The first impression on entering the gallery was one of paradox; the sleek polish contrasting with the gritty and the rough. We are inducted into a realm of “projected images” which explore the representation of the self and the other through a primarily feminist lens, delving into the complex issues of gender and cultural identity.

The first encounter is with a video installation of young Montreal new media artist, Mégane Voghell, a piece called How to Remove a Lady from its Flesh. The video is projected on a board surrounded by a yellow rectangle which appears to be spray painted on the wall. Jutting out from the video presentation is a simple table decorated with various photos of other simple tables of its kind, some with happy and sad faces made up of crustaceans. The video is a non-linear collage of influences and impressions, itself seeming to question the oppressive implications of female self-representation in our society; images which range from a girl plastering on concealer, her image viewed only through a tablet computer to another woman draining a huge blister, a picture-within-a-picture surrounded by blurred faces and forms. Virtual reality collides with the camouflaged dimensions that we create for ourselves and are inundated with continuously. A womanâ€s world is a flood of images, expectations and ideals we are supposed to live up to. A nude pregnant woman sits in a bathtub outside while a toddler runs around, and she separates from a drawn image of herself, which seems to be a Photoshop filter. Digitally-created red hair forms a towering figure with a pornstarâ€s body. Similar to a computer game visitors can select from faces without hair and hair without faces, which can be selected and chosen at will to represent the self. Meanwhile words like “short memories and unsharp masks” flash on the screen. A yellow square follows a raw young womanâ€s practised smiles which belie the anxiety in her eyes: “Shy and daring at the same time.” This fragmented, repellant yet fascinating piece successfully subverts narrative expectations and usual space, bringing you into an alternate reality. It is quite a mature presentation especially for one of Voghellâ€s age, and it will be very interesting to see what she produces in the future.

Next are Stéphanie De Couto Costaâ€s three lovely stone lithographs, each showing a woman in a state of transformation, suspended in a void of white. De Couto Costa is a second generation immigrant artist who uses feelings of cultural dissonance to retell and thwart fairy tales in works on paper inspired by feminist writing and poetry. She says her series The Bitch and the Blond is “inspired by vanity portraits and the works of women storytellers.” Notions of transformation and duality wrestle with sensually-charged portraits, women caught in a morphological state, half-this and half-that. Road Kill shows a woman crawling seductively on all fours, howling from her wolf-head, her body bearing a shroud like a skin. Mimesis shows a raven-woman, head on backwards, back facing us. Which side is front? From which side of ourselves do we express and perceive? A long veil or train of feather-cloth trails down her front. Clothing, to De Couto Costa, seems to act not only as a decorative, protective layer but a psychologically protective one as well and a signifier of identity in transformation. Motherâ€s Ghosts is not an anthropomorphic transformation, rather it seems as if a tribal costume is in a state of becoming, or is perhaps overtaking the woman. Roots creep in, the figure is headless as she disintegrate into petals or into the earth, a state of disappearance. Feathers, braids and textures cluster in chaotic but elegant profusion and make me think of the disconnect many of us feel from our heritage, and particularly of the pain that must be felt by indigenous peoples. De Couto Costa works in multiples in her process-oriented printmaking practise, and seems to meditate upon ideas of replication—of story, identity and of people themselves, continuously birthed and passing on knowledge and problems.

Olga Chagaoutdinova, native to Russia, but educated in Montreal at Concordia, is a talented conceptual photographer who captures lives in countries caught in the awkward in-between state between communism and capitalism, Russia and Cuba specifically. This series of photographs of female prison inmates are intimate portraits taken after long discussions with each inmate. At first glance, it isnâ€t apparent that they are prisoners, as they are allowed to wear normal clothes, and their prison badges arenâ€t glaringly obvious; they simply look worn out by life, possibly former drug users. Knowing that the photographs were taken after what must have been an emotional interview adds poignancy and humanity to the grid-like portraits, which in their intimacy, also reveal the walls and defenses in their visage.

Montreal artist Dominique Sirois†installation, Mimesis Trinyty, a conceptual space set in a fictional world of finance, is a video on a screen of a digital woman with a certain likeness to Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction, reciting a computer generated text which combines the writings of André Orléan and Flaubertâ€s Madame Bovary. Round, dark pillows scatter the floor and there is a leaking of boundaries of sound and matter around the gallery as oddly-shaped sculptures are scattered sparingly from room to room and the bland computer voice echoes soft words in French. Nub-shaped polystyrene sculptures with the appearance of concrete are piled on top of each other, forming lines of replication with a few tiny indeterminate objects resting on them. A small workout weight rests on an amorphous sculpture. The wall behind the video is papered with black and white simplified womenâ€s faces, another nod to replication and feminine identity. Sirois frequently works with ideas of finance, and this installation is no exception. This financial world opens with a desk, the seat of power of a company perhaps, and the text speaks of muscular training. Merged with Madame Bovary, one cannot help but think of the role of women as property throughout the ages, their lives of increasing free agency and their current role in the financial world. We gain more power and “muscle”, but what have we got ourselves into? A complex world where we must flex our power even more dramatically to keep up. Harder, better and faster. The interpretation is left open and curious, which is part of what makes the piece a success.  The virtual reality/alternate reality presented here is a reflection of our own world, another quantum possibility. There is a sense of being trapped, as Bovary was, by her finances and need to spend to fill a void.

Olivia McGilchrist is a photographer and video artist of Franco-Jamaican origin, whose work has largely dealt with post-colonial white identity in a predominantly black culture, and her sense of marginalization. She often takes this challenging subject for her lovely portraits, and her street nickname “Whitey” has formed what has become a recurrent character in her work, the artist appearing in a white mask. McGilchrist considers whiteness to be a mental construct as much as a physical one. This immersive video installation, From Many Sides, is a departure from that theme, a side step, and it seems the artist has dealt with her issues of being an outsider for now, here merging myth very successfully in a beautiful piece. We encounter the River Mumma, or river mother/mermaid figure, a black woman swimming in the ocean, wearing a white mask—but she isnâ€t Whitey. The white-masked black figure also occurs in the Jamaican folk dance, Jankunu, so McGilchrist is exploring not only her personal identity but a cultural and mythical one as well. In this installation, lucid colours and multiple tracks blend from one to the other, with a soft, dreamy soundtrack of birds, whispers and lapping waves. We feel connection rather than dislocation. We see girls walking down an overgrown road, a family gathering at a grotto, a girl in white shorts gathering water with crockery in a river. We feel the thick haze of colour and lush emotional states. Crashing waves, pure beauty, a magical invocation on a primordial, sleepy island. It is an overwhelmingly lovely mosaic of overlaying ripples, forms and reflections. The pervasive sense of place gives you a feeling of the power of nature upon the culture. McGilchrist deals with collective and intimate memory and as well as identity in a postcolonial landscape very effectively here.

The finely curated works in Harder, Better, Faster serve to question and illuminate the often dark and oppressive spheres of influence, self-censorship and self-representation—mirrored in those processes by the other or the powers that be— as well as the passing on of ideas, of mimesis, of cultural connection and disconnection.

Approaching SBC Galerie dâ€art Contemporain, words of love in French echoed softly through the halls. Upon entering the gallery, I was struck first by a video of a person kissing a wall with intent tenderness in closeup.  A large projection the dim city streets of Paris, clearly older footage, filled the back wall. Then I noticed to my right, images of a war-torn country in the Middle East. Initially, this juxtaposition was discordant, confusing. Yet this first impression also set the stage for the proposition of the exhibition. Sitting down to listen and watch brought me deeper into the experience and revealed a sensitively curated exhibition layer by layer.

Does the Oyster Sleep? raises questions of the relationship between love and activism, intimacy and community, self and other, and the complex ways in which we engage in the world. The evocatively titled exhibition takes its cue from a passage in Clarice Lispectorâ€s Àgua Viga, with a lemon-juice dripped oyster representing “anxiety and transcendence”. Lispector says “I donâ€t like when they drip lemon upon my depths and make me contort all over. Are the facts of life like the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?” The implication thus seems to be that the “facts of life” such as the state of the world, politics and the difficulties of interpersonal relationships are the juice dripped on us which causes us to wake, contort, and tear ourselves free, and then experience union with the other, part of the cycle of life.

The first video in this exhibition was From Beirut with Love (2005) by Waël Noureddine of Lebanon.  We are confronted by images of Beirut suffering the consequences of civil war, soldiers with guns on the street and vigilantly watching the populace from buildings riddled with holes from mortar shells. We hear a constant buzzing and see the blank and exhausted faces of the populace, shown silent and in intimate groupings, facing the camera. We encounter militia with concealed handguns and their families. Young men squeeze fresh lemon juice into spoons filled with heroin, then shoot up. The lemon echoes the subject of the exhibition. Is heroin that which wakes these men, or what puts them back to sleep, to journey to a world less painful and dangerous?

We encounter another silent film in Un Chant dâ€amour (2004) by Silvia Gruner of Mexico. The title and action take their theme from Jean Genetâ€s groundbreaking bold film—the only one he ever produced—which deals with frustrated homoerotic desire as well as surveillance and interference by authority, and also the erotic domination by said power. Grunerâ€s piece focuses on the seminal scene of Genetâ€s film, where one prisoner passes smoke through a wall to the object of his desire with help of a straw. The Genet scene is intensely erotic and full of powerful longing and passion. Grunerâ€s piece is more tender and subtle, yet also deals with issues of gender, as the roles flip among three partners, two men and a woman, in this film, gender is hard to identify and seem to be irrelevant. Tender, ardent kisses are pressed to the wall, and mouths approach the straw, accepting hot, white smoke. It is a worthy homage to Genetâ€s powerful piece.

Sophie Bissonnetteâ€s documentary work, A Wives†Tale (1980) is what one encounters next on this journey, a film which recognizes the role of the wives of miners in an historic strike in Sudbury, Ontario in 1978-1979. They organized and raised money while their husbands were on strike, thus acting as the backbone of the effort, enabling them to support their families and gain their demands. Labour of love.

The short film by Marguerite Duras, Les Mains negatives (1979) was a treat. I admired her writing when I encountered it for the first time in university and was pleased to find it again here. The blueish street scenes brought to mind being alone in a taxi, gently, then fiercely longing, feeling a stranger in a city teeming with people about to wake. The words resounded and repeated with great tenderness that transcended the personal and extended to all who would listen.  The title of the poem, and the film, Les Mains negative, originates from the prints of hands painted on cave walls many thousands of years ago. Hearing Duras†speak her poem in French was something special and the rhythm and subtlety of her words in French cannot be duplicated in translation.

“Je suis celui qui appelle
Je suis celui qui appelait qui criait il y a trente
mille ans

Je tâ€aime

Je crie que je veux tâ€aimer, je tâ€aime

Jâ€aimerai quiconque entendra que je crie”

The feeling is transformed from lonely longing for personal love, the stranger in a strange land, to an intimate yet “indefinite” love for all of humanity, which embraces the lover as well, who becomes pure love.

The next piece, proceeding counter-clockwise around the gallery, was the award-winning The Future My Love (2012), the first feature film by the fast-rising artist and filmmaker Maja Borg of Sweden. The film was a mixture of aesthetically interesting scenes of Borg musing on the difficulties of a romantic relationship alternating with documentary style interviews and scenes with now 100 year-old Jacques Fresco, explaining his Venus Project, an incredibly ambitious and poignantly concerned enterprise in which he built model ideal structures on 22 acres for a burgeoning populace which he saw coming to a scarcity crisis. The public blends smoothly with the private with Borgâ€s voice-overs as her train of thought is influenced by Frescoâ€s ideas and her travels. Issues of freedom and responsibility come up in both streams. The idea of doing away with money by doing away with scarcity with the help of machines kept arising both with Fresco and a group he was associated with for a time, Technocracy.

Borg began her journey to understand the politics of her estranged lover, who appears as a statuesque and idealistic woman in black, a shadow in her hijab, which she erotically removes, taking her hair down when she comes into a private space. Borg says: “You demand nothing and all is yours.” Then: “Look at the wars. If we could do so much damage, we could do so much good. And I thought to myself, if you could bestow me such pain imagine what pleasures you could cause me.”

Interestingly, Fresco does not object to machines or computers, on the contrary, he believes we need more of them, as well as more education in order to reach our full potential. Fresco: “Many people donâ€t entertain dreams because they only earn minimum wage. They canâ€t afford dreams.”

Of the Borg scenes, the most memorable to me was Borg in a wedding dress contrasting sharply with her black-clad lover, both women veiled, in a loverâ€s embrace. We have a love affair with capitalism, a bad relationship we just canâ€t quit, an addiction, a folie à deux, is the implication as we cut back and forth to Borgâ€s musings. “These institutions also exist inside me” we hear the artist say, and this film, a sort of waking dream, ends as Borg moves forward with her life, divorcing her lover in her mind, while Fresco closes his Venus Project headquarters due to lack of funds.

Passing into a nook of the gallery towards the last film, I encountered the muted colours and smooth lines of an anonymous coastal town, viewed through the eyes of Sara Eliassen in A Blank Slate (2014), which has been played extensively at film festivals around the world. The artist also seems to be a stranger in a new town, nearly deserted, or returning to her hometown perhaps. She watches the life that goes on there but barely interacts. She voyeuristically puts herself into the conversations of others; when a man approaches a girl in a café, she answers for the girl in her head, and then two well-dressed and furred older women critique her performance on video as she looks on with them in a postmodern twist. She arranges and rearranges her things in a sparsely furnished hotel room, looking at a carnival across the street. Later she enters the quiet place of diversion, and as she is raised to the top of the ride, it pauses and she watches a man in her hotel room, then sees herself, roughly taken by the stranger. Fantasies of intimacy and the longing for contact and connection resonate through this work, in an engagingly experimental, haunting style.

The aim of this exhibition was to present the role of Eros in politics today, politics being broad in scope from world affairs to personal, me vs. you, self vs. other, at two poles. Eros is what brings together what is perceived to be opposite, finding the points where they meet, and discovering the symbiotic relationship inherent.