Montreal Exhibitions

Kent Monkman: Mary (2011): HD video. Courtesy Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto.

Kent Monkman
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
To April 16

Monkman’s installation of military tents transforms the gallery into a camp where the new “Canada” that emerges in the decisive battle between Wolfe and Montcalm – the British and the French – is pervaded by the presence of the artist’s notorious alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. As in past works, “My Treaty is With the Crown”, revisits North American historical events and cultural representations proposing alternative narratives and possibilities that mine the discourse of civilization and the ethos of foundational myths, while derailing the white colonial discourse through an aesthetic that places sensuality at the center of his critical project.

Suzy Lake: Reduced Performing (Breathing #5), 2008-09: Courtesy the artist.

Suzy Lake
Galerie Donald Browne
To April 16

In the series titled Reduced Performing (2008-09), Lake’s interests again focus on the body and performing. In this work, Lake asks herself: “How far I can reduce the photographic activity’s narrative while still retaining a body-reading that reveals itself in time?“ In a series of slightly larger-than-life-size prints, the artist records herself breathing, blinking or crying against a flat background for the duration of the exposure. The detailed stillness delays viewers’ attention to the performed movement. Yet movement recorded by a scanner produces a digital drag or an RGB breakup. The artist’s fascination with a virtual rendering’s particularities is broken when the temporal movement is perceived. Against all of this stillness, the image again addresses body and duration through inherent qualities of digital technology.

Anri Sala: Answer Me (2008): HD video, stereo sound. Collection: Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal.

Anri Sala
Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art
To April 25

Curated to feel “like a single work of art”, this survey of a dozen recent works by the Albanian-born, Berlin-based Anri Sala is his first solo exhibition in Canada, and his largest ever in North America. The exhibition brings together videos, photographs, sculpture and an installation created for the museum. Sala reconfigured the space to establish new relationships between the pieces, such as in the staggered screening of the films. Just as one film ends, another begins, requiring visitors to reorient themselves according to the rhythm of the projections.

Marc-Aurèle Fortin: Railway Tracks at Hochelaga (1931-32): Pastel on paper. Collection: Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, Montreal. SODRAC 2010.

Marc-Aurèle Fortin
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec
To May 8

The Musée wraps up its trio of major exhibitions focusing on the leading figures of modern Quebec painting with a survey of Marc-Aurèle Fortin. (Suzor-Coté and Clarence Gagnon were featured previously.) “The Experience of Colour” is the first museum retrospective devoted to Fortin in 45 years, and features approximately 100 paintings, prints and drawings produced between 1909 and 1949. While Fortin is most known for his compositions of colourful rural scenes and landscapes, the exhibition also presents his lesser-known cityscapes. Such paintings capture the irreversible changes that modernity was bringing to Montreal in the 1920s and 30s.