Mia Sandhu

Mia Sandhu is a Punjabi-Canadian artist, born in Canada, currently residing in Toronto. She is an artist who often works with issues of immigration, identity, femininity, and sensuality. Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You was Patel Brown’s second exhibition at their Montreal gallery, and Sandhu’s first solo exhibition in Montreal.  These works explore, among other things, the relationship between pleasure and shame. Her figures appear to be at ease with their bodies, confident in their sexuality, at home in their environment and being seen. Perhaps they are so relaxed because some of their most personal  physical features, their faces and genitals, are obscured by clouds of black smoke-like veils. The exhibition consists of many works on paper, made with gouache, watercolour, pencil, and charcoal. Paintings on paper are surrounded by vintage furniture (loaned from the personal collection of Patel Brown Montreal gallery director Roxanne Arsenault) and installation elements that create a homey, stylish, and pleasantly kitschy environment for her works. Her inspiration here comes from her collection of vintage erotica, her work as a set painter in the film industry, and her family photos from the seventies, all of which contribute to the aesthetic.

I first discovered Mia Sandhu’s work at the Patel Brown booth at the Papier Art Fair a few years ago in Montreal. I remember her work as exemplary in the use of materials, and striking in her portrayal of the erotic. It was a breath of fresh air at an art fair where senses are overloaded, making a lot of work seem underwhelming. Sandhu’s works on paper stood out and I was delighted to find them again at the fair in the following years. Patel Brown is a welcome new addition to the galleries in the Belgo Building, as an established gallery that is strongly curated, very contemporary, with a brave sensibility that doesn’t shy away from the erotic and the weird, traits which aren’t that common in Canadian art spaces. As a Punjabi-Canadian of mixed cultural identity, and Sandhu’s works have long examined cultural hybridity. Her work often conveys mixed feelings and experiences, dealing with polarities such as shame and self-love, belonging and alienation. 

The women in these paintings continue the connection to Sandhu’s last solo show at Patel Brown in Toronto, Golden Girls, except here, the figures are often pregnant, and the overall feel here is more erotic and bizarre. Luxuriating in their own feminine power and grace, bedecked in vintage stockings and heels, sporting full 70s-style bushes, the women seem to be part of a secret sisterhood, perhaps Sapphic, perhaps platonic. They tease us, they enjoy their own existence, and they look at us with the same curiosity with which we regard them. These women see us, the viewer, seeing them. Sandhu’s women are playing up this exchange, legs spread over the arms of a chair, frank gazes meeting ours. These women’s soft, lavish pubic hair mimics the colour and texture of their smoky crowns. Though the smoky veil that enshrouds their visages, these women peer at us with a steady and sometimes flirtatious, sometimes inscrutable regard. There is an erotic exchange of energy in watching and being watched, and these women are disrobed in a way that heightens the eroticism of their bodies and situations. They seem to be fantasy images, yet they are simultaneously beings in and of themselves. Spirits of an idealized 1970s, when free love was the thing and many people had sexual awakenings via breaking down of self or societally imposed sexual mores and conventions.

Many of the women in this series are pregnant, but they seem to be so frankly, ripe with creativity and self-possession. There is no sign of a husband or children around, and the demands of childrearing do not beckon. The sense of the pregnancies in this series seems to be in the way that women are creative goddesses of mystery, rather than possessions intended to extend the tribe and lineage. All of the women who are visibly pregnant in these works seem to be in the last month of their pregnancy, ready to bring new life—new creation—into the world, thereby transforming themselves and the lives of their babies forever. In this way, we are reminded of the artist’s role in bringing new work into the physical realm.

Mia Sandhu has a delicate, skillful touch, a mastery with line that makes one peer closer to admire the skill in the rendering of floral textiles and the details of gorgeous houseplants that surround her figures, enhancing the atmosphere of time and place. There is a pleasant contrast between the opaqueness of gouache with the translucency of watercolour, especially layered here over creamy, warm-coloured paper.  I am reminded of the rich history of erotic paintings on paper in Asia, examples of which can be found in humourous Japanese erotica, and often philosophical Chinese paintings, which represent slices of daily life, and the harmony of yin and yang represented in both sexes taking equal pleasure in each other.  More importantly is the connection to Sandhu’s own heritage, there is a long tradition of gorgeous erotic paintings on paper in India. Sandhu’s interest in putting her figures in domestic environments, surrounded by bold colour and patterns harkens to the rich history of erotic art in Asia and India, but as a contemporary painter she brings a soft but confident touch, contemporary line and rendering skill, a personal inquiry, and a sense of playful taboo. A woman, especially one raised with an awareness of Eastern culture and mores, would have a keen sense of what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of sexual expression and modesty. The historical predominance of Christian Anglo-Saxon values on colonial Canada makes this country also not so open to sexual expression, feminine pleasure, or self-possession, feminine sexuality is only acceptable if it is a thing to be consumed and profited from by someone else. Such influences are still quite palpable here today, though of course to a much lesser extent than in the past. I do not doubt that the mixed cultural heritage Sandhu possesses has contributed strongly to her interest in portrayals of concealing and revealing. Probably it the contrast between the two states, the sense of becoming, of transition, that makes these works so compelling.

In A Vessel to Hold 4, a heavily pregnant woman regards herself in the mirror, she seems to be calmly admiring what she sees. The Vessel to Hold paintings speak of the way a mother holds their baby within, and the comforting sensation of being held, and perhaps, to hold one’s own soft, round curves, or that of another. They speak of what it is to nurture and be nurtured, and of the embracing, supportive nature of womanhood and sisterhood. A Vessel to Hold 9, a pregnant woman is attired in a diaphanous blue blouse, her swollen breasts and nipples visible over her large belly, which she holds proudly while regarding us. She seems to ask us to admire what she has made. She sits heavily with physical presence on an antique chair of soft wood and wine-coloured velvet. A Vessel to Hold 10 shows two pregnant nymphs, wearing vintage stockings and lace, luxuriating playfully on a bed lush with blue and white curtains, from which wild Queen Anne’s Lace flowers emerge. Sandhu’s pregnant vixens do not allow for the Madonna and whore duality, they convey the sexy magic of a voluptuous pregnant woman, who can still be desired and desire even though she is a mother-to-be.

In the Chrysalis paintings, the figures are again covered with thick black smoke, but they are wearing transparent fabric, perhaps gauze. The title of this mini-series implies they are emerging from silken cocoons, resplendent and transformed. In many Eastern countries, influenced by Muslim traditions, women are veiled, but these chrysalises do not conceal, they reveal the glorious transformation of the feminine body, perhaps from childhood to puberty, then maturity, pregnancy, and beyond. In Chrysalis 6, the curvaceous woman kneels on a bed, regarding us with almost frightful self-possession, eyes just points of piercing light through the darkness. She appears before large golden rings, dried flowers, and plants—familiar as installation elements in this exhibition. 

In the Waxing and Waning paintings, women disguised by floral shrouds are paired together to play, support, and embrace each other. Waxing and Waning 16 presents a figure concealed by a floral fabric leaning in to caress a reclining woman whose breast is nearly exposed as she receives a red finger-tipped embrace. The black cloud seems to seep like liquid over the bodies and the bed, almost as if it is an extension of the fluid energy of the couple. Sexual symbolism is apparent in Pussy Willows and Cat Tails, we see the “tail” of the figure, clad in a thong. The bullrushes, or cat tails, look phallic, paired with the delicate toes of the pussy willow branches. 

A play on words, and with a nod to popular culture, the bodies in Mia Sandhu’s Bawdy paintings could be considered raucously, joyously nude and lewd. They’re playing in decidedly kitschy 70s environments, enjoying their physical forms and showing off. Full, heavy breasts, costume jewelry, furry armpits, and more greet us. The woman in Bawdy 37 has a leg thrown over the arm of a wicker chair, revealing white panties. She is holding an apple, like Eve, yet shameless. This work is intriguingly presented on a wooden shelf, flanked by retro decorative elements, against a white and mustard-coloured floral patterned wallpaper, almost as a shrine. This style is reflected in Bawdy 36, where a white opaque-stockinged nymph coquettishly draws a stemmed flower between her legs as she kneels on the floor before a chair and houseplants. The painting is flanked by campy candle holders against a different type of vintage-style wallpaper. These works by Sandhu create a scene that reminds us to gracefully, playfully enjoy while asking ourselves: what is the nature of self, embodiment, and pleasure?

The signature black smoke around the women in Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You, is like a dark nimbus, light but thick, allowing us to see curious, sensual eyes through the clouds. The black veils are almost afro-like, echoing the dense bush between their legs which obscures and mystifies their vulvas. The nipples and areoles are lovingly rendered, with great attention to variations of colour and texture which make them remarkably lifelike.  Sandhu’s women are queens, Goddesses, courtesans, porn actresses, mothers— archetypes of luxury, physical and emotional nurturing, and sensuality.  Their veils obscure their identity, cloak them in anonymity, beyond reproach or identification, rendering them archetypal. They play, exploring the connection to the other, to the world, within self-designated realms of boundary and safety. exposed and concealed.

Instagram: @patelbrown @mia.sandhu

Photo credit: Kyle Tryhorn @gingerhorn

From May 28- June 13, Ar Prim hosted a group exhibition of finalists for the Albert-Dumouchel Prize for undergraduate artists. This was the 32nd edition of the collective exhibition Première impression. For me, the standout work was by School of Art at Université Laval’s Jessica Martin-Lafond, who presented Wolf in Lover’s Clothing. This work is an artist’s book inside a wooden box, the pages of which can be turned with tweezers using gold-coloured satin gloves. I enjoyed the discovery process of this piece, the disorientation that ensues from figuring out how this works, the tactility, and the use of colour and texture.

Martin-Lafond is a printmaker and artist book creator, and her work pays homage to those traditions, but is also reminiscent of female surrealists, such as Merret Oppenheim, who also worked with unusual objects and sexuality. There’s always a childlike exhilaration when one is allowed to handle the art, and this piece is no exception. There is a sense of the theatric with putting on the satin gloves, as well as a sexual metaphor to putting a part of your body into a covering to handle the art itself, to explore it within the box.

The dusty pink and gold tones, felt, and doilies and other touches made me think of antiques and femininity. This piece, with its vulvas, predatory wolves, drawings of hands, rumpled bedsheets, and delicate flowers with fragments of love-lorn poetry is playful, cheeky, and gives a sense of discovery, vulnerability, and intimacy.

You can follow her on Instagram to see her latest works, as Jessica Martin-Lafond is an artist you may wish to keep your eye on.

What I found most striking about Fait ou défait, c’est idem, Galerie Deux Poisson’s fourth show, was how collaborative it was, how well the works of these four artists worked in a sort of humble synergy that was at once nameless and named. The show was curated by artist and writer Benjamin Klein, and the curation was strong in this group show; I find group exhibitions are exceedingly hard to pull off, as they too often seem forced, like a gaggle of people compelled to hang out awkwardly. Either they don’t seem to relate at all or they are gathered simply by common theme or medium, having nothing else to bind them together. In this exhibition, however, that was not the case. It had a real grassroots feeling, a sense of true collaboration and excitement. I am going to refrain from describing each work individually; the spirit of this exhibition is the sense of unity and togetherness that makes all the pieces work as a whole. 

Fait ou défait, c’est idem, translated as “done or undone is the same”, alludes to the process of art-making. How does one know when a piece is completed? Is it ever truly done? An artist can stop working at any point and call it finished, no one can ever truly know when a piece is completed, including, oftentimes, the artist. It becomes a choice, an intuition, or it could come with being fed up or having a deadline. The word faire in French means both “to do” and “to make”, so, evocatively, the show’s title could also declare, “made or unmade, it’s the same.” One’s making and one’s doing carry the seed in the same word, as well as its opposite, as from the moment we are born—or made— we start dying. 

The first thing one would encounter when entering the gallery is, ironically, a painting by Malcolm McCormick entitled, The End. It’s roughly but tenderly composed, with black “photo corners” and white script declaring “The End” in the middle. It is plaintive, mock sentimental and also cute. Smears of mustard-paint allow one to see the underpainting as if through a screen. 

If one doesn’t strictly make the rounds, the visitor would likely then notice the impressive installations at the room’s centre. On the floor is a piano-shaped wood and cloth structure titled The Sparrow on the Hill Sees the Fool Going Around by Malcolm McCormick, a painter who also works with drawing and installations. Inside are works on paper by Mathieu Lacroix and Rachel Crummey, and ceramic hands by Michelle Furlong, along with found objects. There is a play on collaboration here, music is more frequently made in a group, multiple instruments and players create greater complexity than one individual is capable of. 

Behind this piece, on a white block rests a piece by Lacroix, another legless piece—do we have a leg to stand on without our friends and collaborators?—is a three-legged chair propped up by stacks of papers and drawings, with a ceramic hand by Michelle Furlong pointing to a spot in the stacks. After this, certainly one could not help but be drawn to the immense in situ mixed media wall piece and installation by Rachel Crummey and Michelle Furlong towards the back of the gallery, titled Experience no. 2, after a piece by John Cage. Layered with bold and gestural marks in charcoal, graphite powder, acrylic paint and spray paint, the eye follows the energy of two artists and one can’t help but visualize their process, working together, erasing the work of the other, wondering if they worked in harmony or at times, adversarily. I think of how Robert Rauschenberg came to de Kooning to ask him if he could erase one of his drawings, which was allowed. Klein told me that he witnessed the process, allowing the artists to work uninterrupted, and saw how many times it could be completed, yet a new movement and shift began. It seemed a process fraught with dynamism and energy. The piece is so energetic that it cannot be contained to the wall.

A large piece of cheap-looking wall-to-wall carpet was contorted on the floor and subjected to the treatment of paint, recalling Furlong’s crumpled painted canvases. Most of the works in this show walk a thin line between ugliness and beauty, humility and humour. A leg made of black faux fur projects from the wall, reminding me of Dada creations. The piece sports rope of a gaudy purple shade, connecting the wall to the folds of carpet like an umbilical cord, its colour standing in stark contrast to the rest of the piece’s monochrome.

A painted disc of carpet stands alone like punctation on the floor, and large strips of black velcro and fringe with what appear to be large black pasties could suggest a crude face. The sort of feminine grunge aesthetic of Crummey and the slick, cool aesthetic of Furlong make an uneasy but pleasing contrast which gives the work a sort of personhood, even beastiness. I imagined it being made with John Cage playing in the background, the artist’s gestures and erasures moving to the sound like the surges of a symphony. 

Scattered throughout the exhibition are Michele Furlong’s shiny, black-glazed ceramic hands pointing, squatting and hiding. They made me think of Thing in the Addam’s family, and their ubiquitousness felt as if they were the same hand, everywhere. They seemed at times to be the hand of the curator, invisibly and gentling guiding your attention. 

Rachel Crummey is an award-winning Toronto-based abstract artist (and writer) working with painting, drawing and installation. Her work is layered, rich, and informed. She is an emerging artist who received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2014. Her work is most successful in series, and this exhibition has a few of her works on paper, oil pastels on paper and acrylic on board or canvas. Her play of lines and layering is often very graceful. As in Experience no. 2, her installations in charcoal and graphite look like traces left by a ghost or the residue of a spirit or slug, but it could also be a kind of unusual wallpaper, worn with time and peeled away in strips. Her small works in this show are subtle in comparison to the collaborative installation, and quite accurately she describes her work as a “softly moving web.” One of her most engaging pieces here is a network or lung of actively tangled blue lines, made from oil pastel on paper.  Much of her work is very tender and touching, and improvisation plays a strong role in her practise. 

Malcolm McCormick is a primarily a painter (and drawer) but is also a multi-disciplinary artist. He’s from Vancouver and came to Montreal as an MFA candidate at Concordia. He’s spoken of being interested in colour, the formal aspects of making, collage-style work and things that are non-monumental and subtle. His work is sometimes wryly humorous and it has a sensitive yet painterly touch.

Besides The End, another funny piece sits on the floor saying: Take Me Home. Another work is an invisible house where all you can see are illuminated windows and a hastily painted, blue-steel background with brown ground and green grass, uneven letters imploring the viewer. Does the artist wish to go home, or the painting? Every painting for sale in fact says this wordlessly, and it was charming to have it so imploringly stated as it wasn’t even hung. His other oil painting, Banging Your Head Against a Warm Rock was textured with pebbles and almonds. Overall, McCormick’s work is deceptively simple, endearingly unostentatious, but skillfully handled and exploratory.  McCormick said in an interview for his Kelowna Art Gallery duo exhibition in 2017: “ I like to make things that show an accumulation of decisions, and to leave traces of each decision so that the viewer can come into it and get a sense of how this thing developed over time”. The poetically titled, “Looking into His Ear” is a painting layered with transparent polkadot fabric, which leads one to visualize the layers and channels of the body and the delicacy of listening and looking. 

Michelle Furlong is a Montreal-based multi-media artist, a recent graduate of Concordia’s Painting and Drawing program. Her work frequently consists  of cutouts, textiles, texture, silhouettes, sharp contrasts, soft forms, stylized shapes and often, a cold, almost graphic, design. working primarily in paint, drawing and sculpture. Her work is largely concerned with the body, and hands are a major player. Her drawing sits on the floor in the corner, and is layered with outlines of hands, much as a child would use their own body as a starting point for making shapes and forms, and paint with their fingers. The effect of the ghost-like hands layered in blacks and whites and layers of charcoal, using negative space, and tucked away on the floor is at once haunting, playful, and evocative. There is a sense of ephemerality and whimsy, an awareness of temporality, of the limitations to the corporeal form in Furlong’s work. The hands play throughout the gallery, dark and shiny, slick, but not sinister.

Mathieu Lacroix is a Montreal native and multidisciplinary artist who received his BFA at UQAM.  His grid of drawings here are reminiscent of architectural drawings, but also de Chirico. Some are on vellum, some on brown packing paper. There are elements of collage, and they are all cleverly composed, contemporarily-aware works that aren’t precious at all, which is why, I suspect, he titles all of these works NON ART. They fit perfectly with the drawing theme of the exhibition and the sense that creativity will continue and art will be made regardless of the means at one’s disposal. These are unpretentious drawings, and, despite being a rather conceptual show, Fait ou défait, c’est idem is also quite unpretentious and certainly process-oriented.  Lacroix’s drawings contain a sense of resilience in their delicacy. His work uses reclaimed and recycled materials such as cardboard, ordinary, cheap substances. Art can and will continue without expensive materials and resources that often make it the domain of the privileged. Lacroix’s playful sculpture, NON ART: Chair, calls to mind the absurdity of Dada, a three-legged chair. Is it a comment on academia? The third leg is made of theory, of drawings, of studies. All of his works in this show are labeled emphatically NON ART, and then given a secondary title, in this case, NON ART: Chair. As an artist he to seek to connect to the ordinary and mundane through his subject and media, then thwart our expectations. These drawings engage with formal abstraction and imaginary space. We see a square building with grass growing out of its centre, long black hair pouring down like a waterfall; we see what may be a railroad station with water emerging through it being transformed in shape by its passage through the building, the rails of which pour with light, a power station, an A frame building overruled by a flow chart, a collision of realities and geometries, an unusual combination of formal fascination and dreamy imagination. They could be diagrams made on acid or instructions for or by aliens for human society. 

The works here as a group, and even individually, don’t say “I, I”  they say “us, we”. There is a particularly Montrealaise spirit here, a sort of “struggling artist”, communal sensibility of resourcefulness, resilience and joie de vivre. There is strong sense of line, of hesitant but necessary declaration and bold erasure. The marks made by the individual on the world, the lines that tie us together. The connections. The overlap, the influence. The give and take. This exciting and ground-breaking exhibition is a sign of innovative work both in artistic production, support for emerging artists and dynamic curation taking place at Galerie Deux Poissons and bodes well for future developments. Galerie Deux Poissons is a blessing for the artistic community of Montreal for its role in maintaining the importance of the Belgo Building as a Montreal landmark which has recently lost some important galleries.

Surfaces

Roger Bellemare, Daniel Lahaise, Jennifer Lupien, José Luis Torres, Monica van Asperen

Curator: Marcus Sendlinger
Co-Curators: Li Alin, Bettina Forget

Since 2010 Marcus Sendlinger organizes the wandering exhibition “Alptraum” in different countries all over the world. Starting out in Washington D.C., Montreal is now the 13th location of this world wide artist collaboration with the aim to explore the relationship between the individual, the national and the global collective subconscious surrounding nightmares.

“Like George Orwellâ€s Room 101, in his predictive tale, 1984, we all have our own version of what constitutes a nightmare, and for this reason, the project has been opened to a large number of artists whose many and varied personal nightmare versions, or visions, act to reflect this hugely variable human state of fears and phobias, pain and panic.” (Marcus Sendlinger) The nightmare motif has a longstanding tradition in visual arts with its intertwining of the fantastical, the horrifying and the elusive. The theme has long fascinated artists – from the hellish landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch, Henry Fuseliâ€s The Nightmare (1781), Goyaâ€s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (c. 1798), right through to the 20th Century, when nightmares became one of the central concerns of the surrealist movement.

But are nightmares individual to all? Like dreams, which have become synonymous with individual ambition? Or are nightmares perhaps expressions of the undesirable unconscious – that common denominator of a community? Do they indicate national archetypes? Or do they simply remain in the grips of the global fears of present age? These are the questions at the centre of the Alptraum exhibition, suggesting answers through the various repetitions of the same theme.

(text: Li Alin)
More info: www.visualvoicegallery.com

January 23 – February 28, 2015
Opening Friday January 23rd from 5pm to 7:30pm

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is proud to present new drawings by Ed Pien in parallel with the National Gallery of Canada’s presentation of his masterwork Ad Infinitum in the exhibition “Shine a Light”.

Relinquishing the comforts and habits of the known, his imagery and his processes reveal the risks and rewards of traversing the territory of the unknown. Rather than adopt an illustrative approach, Pien works spontaneously. No preconceived image is held; each line begets the next, necessitating a leap of faith on the part of the artist. The images generated through this organic process capture the immediacy of his linear gestures and the fluidity of his brushwork in a highly expressive visual field. Pienâ€s imagery conjures a fantastic and disturbing universe. His all-over ink and gouache compositions are brimming with mutant monsters, hybrid creatures and celestial beings — angelic and demonic — summoned from his subconscious. Blue giants, greenhaired witches, menacing night-walkers, shamanistic puppet-players, winged figures with bulging eyeballs, two-headed teddy bears and other similarly tragic Halloween-types inhabit these interior worlds. In each of the artistâ€s vignettes, an event instigated by one of the antagonists unfolds before the viewer, the activities often carrying on beyond the edges of the paper. Allusions to various forms of social transgression and power imbalances persist, accentuating the vulnerability of the body and the psyche. Playful, provocative, sensual and sinister, Pienâ€s drawings elicit and mirror the anxieties, fears and desires that issue from the depths of our being.

Text: Carolyn Bell Farrell

More info: www.pfoac.com

MARC DULUDE
Causalité
Sculpture, drawing

zipertatou
À la lueur de Bébé Lune
Photography, hologram

In collaboration with Art Souterrain

INBAL HOFFMAN
Incubator
Vidéo /Video

Curator:
Carmit Blumensohn

Round table
Friday, February 27, 2015, 4pm

More info: www.joyceyahoudagallery.com

Ironically, the first work that I connected with in this exhibition about masculinity features a female artist. Raymonde April‘s photographic self-portrait shows the artist in profile against a back background. At the level of her eyes her wavy hair changes from cool grey to a warm auburn red. My first reaction was to suspect photo editing, but in fact April documented a very personal transition from one life stage to the next: menopause. April, now middle aged, decided to stop coloring her hair and allows her natural salt and pepper look to show. The descending watermark of changing hue also marks “the change;” effectively the artist turns her hair into a living work of art.
The onset of menopause also sees an increase of testosterone, making this a multi-layered transition from colour to black and white, from young to old, from woman to man.

Another favorite in this show are Olivier Gariépy‘s photos of nudes set in lush landscapes, particularly the work L’Echo de Narcisse. An androgynous figure stands in waist-deep water, awkwardly leaning forward, the long, curly blonde hair plunging beneath the surface. The body (female, upon closer inspection) and its reflection form a self-referential circle. Absorbed in a monologue with the self, Echo becomes Narcissus.

The show is completed by Jenna Meyers‘ vivid painting of the transgender Frankie, Jérome Ruby‘s enigmatic sketches of violent mythology, Louis Fortier‘s wax sculptures of damaged Greek gods, and Shari Hatt‘s large-format colour photograph of deer hunters, their faces censured by back bars, turning their trophy selfie into a crime scene.

It is worth braving the heat for this Belgo exhibit alone, though there are currently seven other galleries who are welcoming visitors. For a list of what’s open and closed, check here.

Galerie Donald Browne, space 528
Raymonde April, Louis Fortier, Olivier Gariépy, Shari Hatt, Jenna Meyers, Jérôme Ruby
curator: Charlotte Rousseau
Testosterone: Mythologies of Identities
July 12 – September 6, 2014
www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com

For this week’s selection of four noteworthy artworks, I’ve chosen artists which explore the properties of pure light. Clockwise from top left:

Ève K. Tremblay at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Luc Courchesne at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Julie Tremble at Galerie Joyce Yahouda, Jérôme Ruby at Galerie Donald Browne

Robert Poulin‘s latest show En tête features a wildly eclectic mix of artists. Established luminaries such as Alexandre Castonguay and Balint Zsako hang tête à tête next to undiscovered talents like BoBo Boutin and Claude Perreault.

Photography, drawing, painting, assemblage, collage – En tête is a riot of media and artistic styles. And yet, this exhibition has a surprisingly coherent feel to it. This is partly due to the strong central theme, as well as to Robert Poulin’s careful clustering of the artworks. The wide spectrum of aesthetic approaches in this collection of 60 portraits by 35 artists is this exhibition’s strength. It is an illustration of the ingenuity and inventiveness of artists. “Drawing a head” is one of the most elementary subjects in picture-making, and yet the outcomes are as unique as the person creating the portraits. Effectively, regardless of the person being portrayed, each artwork becomes a self-portrait of the artist.

Among my personal favorites in this offbeat portrait gallery is the work of Claude Perreault. His collage work perfectly mimics the quality of a 17th century portrait, the kind you would find in a stately home. The piece on display at Espace Robert Poulin depicts Dame Judy Dench in her role as Queen Elisabeth I. However, if you look closely you’ll notice that this is a meticulously constructed collage using images from gay porn magazines. The double-meaning of the term “queen” did not escape me. At once hilarious and borderline treasonous, Perreault’s work is wonderfully irreverent.

Equally painterly but more disturbing is the series of three small portraits by James Juron. His distorted portraits are reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s work, but softer and more demonic.
The brute force of Daniel Erban’s paintings are a resonant counterpoint to the delicate tension of Caroline Boileau’s mixed media pieces. And the cool, ethereal aura of Alexandre Castonguay’s C-print acts as a dominating focal point to Juron’s tortured souls.

This is one of my favoutire shows at Espace Robert Poulin, and to finish I’ll repeat Robert Poulin’s poetic text accompanying his show:

Histoire de têtes
Jâ€avais cette idée qui me passait par la tête, sans me la casser,
ni souhaiter me la faire grosse ou forte.
Jâ€ai souhaité un tête à tête, pas de nÅ“ud, ni dâ€enterrement, ni même de turc.
Trente-cinq artistes avaient la tête de lâ€emploi,
je la leur ai mise dâ€affiche et à prix, sans quâ€ils ne la perdent.
Maintenant jâ€en ai par-dessus la tête, sur laquelle je suis tombé.
Où lâ€avais-je donc.

Espace Robert Poulin, space 411
Caroline Boileau, Alexandre Castonguay, Daniel Erban, Louis Fortier, Marc Garneau, Patrick Lundeen, Sean Montgomery, Balint Zsako, BoBo Boutin, Harry Corrigan, Luc Giard, Adeline Lamarre, Annick Langelier, Shawn Makniak, Nancy Ogilvie, Claude Perreault, and others
En tête
March 15 – April 5, 2014
www.espacerobertpoulin.com