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Item Ships From: Montreal
Extrapolation 1
By Guillaume Lachapelle
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Guillaume Lachapelle’s work combines the real and the imaginary to create miniature environments and scenarios that showcase connections between humans and their everyday worlds. In Extrapolations, Lachapelle extracts seemingly mundane mechanical objects from a typical cityscape – such as radiators, fire hydrants, and balconies – and manipulates their appearance by creating 3D printed models that visually oscillate between the magical and the monstrous. In some of his sculptures, Lachapelle uses photogrammetry – a method that scans a series of two-dimensional photographs or images to create three-dimensional models. While photogrammetry typically enables real-life objects to be accurately reproduced, the artist challenges this paradigm by tampering with the machine’s process, both by accepting the machine’s glitches and by triggering them. When scanning images, the results may not always be what is anticipated, however, for Lachapelle it is about welcoming the unknown. In several examples, he encourages the program to read screenshots of images and extrapolates what should be there, filling in blank data with added images and various shapes. The resulting sculptures are symmetrical and geometric, appearing uncannily familiar like human vertebrae, yet unfamiliar in fantastical abstracted forms. The sculptures merge between two different worlds, bridging human and machine through unexpected adaptations to everyday things. Extrapolations balances between this duality, ultimately reflecting on the increasing dependency humans have on technology in our everyday world. For Lachapelle, this is especially pertinent in a world where technology is continuously developing. The sculptures highlight the dynamic and everchanging relationship between humans and technology, making us question this reliance on technology. In this exhibition, Lachapelle also introduces the inclusion of human characters back into his art practice. He places people in unnatural and impossible exchanges with machines and technology. For instance, while in past exhibitions, he has usually tried to conceal the electronic components that make moving pieces...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Resin, Paint

Dom
By Guillaume Lachapelle
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Guillaume Lachapelle’s work combines the real and the imaginary to create miniature environments and scenarios that showcase connections between humans and their everyday worlds. In ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Resin, Paint

A Second Breath
By Guillaume Lachapelle
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Guillaume Lachapelle’s work combines the real and the imaginary to create miniature environments and scenarios that showcase connections between humans and their everyday worlds. In ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Resin, Paint

Xenolith VII
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A collision. A landslide. A tectonic shift and a tumbling of boulders reveal geological strata that have been hidden for centuries. Nicholas Crombach’s Landslip is a slow unfurling o...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Mixed Media

Vue d’El Ghazela, Technopole
By Hédy Gobaa
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For this exhibition, I wanted to find the coherence of a life shared between different geographies from Tunisia to Canada. Intertwining the imagery of here and there, I ask myself wh...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Djerba, été 2007
By Hédy Gobaa
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For this exhibition, I wanted to find the coherence of a life shared between different geographies from Tunisia to Canada. Intertwining the imagery of here and there, I ask myself wh...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

You Float on Nothing
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Vapour IV
By Christine Nobel
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Christine Nobel’s dabs & systems explores the connections, similarities and differences between the handmade and the digital. Taken from the foundation of the artist’s practice of ex...
Category

2010s Abstract Montreal - Art

Materials

Mixed Media, Encaustic, Acrylic, Wood Panel

System I
By Christine Nobel
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Christine Nobel’s dabs & systems explores the connections, similarities and differences between the handmade and the digital. Taken from the foundation of the artist’s practice of ex...
Category

2010s Abstract Montreal - Art

Materials

Mixed Media, Oil, Acrylic, Wood Panel

In The Sticks
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Adam Gunn’s painting practice began with a desire to subvert the traditional still life genre, creating an absurd experience that would evoke a sense of uncertainty in the viewer. In...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Untitled
By Eddy Firmin
Located in Montreal, Quebec
The first decades of the 21st century shaped the period of reconfiguration of the "world order", according to Pedro Pablo Gómez1, into three options: "rewesternalization, dewesternal...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Metal

Flooted Building
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft and the geometric paintings of Peter Halley. While Halley's paintings refer to philosopher Michel...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

City
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instag...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Digital

Rechargeable Batteries
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft and the geometric paintings of Peter Halley. While Halley's paintings refer to philosopher Michel...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Digital

Stock Market
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft and the geometric paintings of Peter Halley. While Halley's paintings refer to philosopher Michel Foucault's panoptic prison cells...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Intensive Egg Farm
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscape...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Cargo
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft and the geometric paintings of Peter Halley. While Halley's paintings refer to philosopher Michel...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Light Traffic
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instag...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Surveillance
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For the exhibition Panorama of the Anthropocene, Oli Sorenson presents an array of works created in a hybrid style that evokes the square layout of Instag...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Cloud (Angel)
By Robbie Cornelissen
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein. Always working with graphite and charcoal, Ro...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Pencil, Pastel

Places (Underworld)
By Robbie Cornelissen
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein. Always working with graphite and charcoal, Robbie Cornelissen’s limited palette emphasises the stark sombre nature of his metaphysical drawings, The Undertow is his sixth solo exhibition at Art Mûr. At the centre of the exhibition hovers Terra Nova, a dark and desolate world parallel to our own. Robbie Cornelissen’s drawings, such as The Space of Absence and Thriller, seem to pull from the stop motion’s frames. Other images, made especially for The Undertow isolate key fragments; the cloud, mounds and timeless dwellings, Cornelissen’s signature technical interest. In addition to his methodical approach, Cornelissen uses the written word, scrawling and erasing terms repeatedly, in English, French, and German, these fastidious markings and exact translations leave a trace and a glitch on paper and screen. Much of his existing work includes words and phrases like “tribunal,” “myself when I am real” and “the need to disappear.” Do they identify what forms, systems and sentiments that are, or could be present? Or do they warn of what is to come? Suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body, Cornelissen’s clouds extend down to the surface, looming over Earth and Terra Nova. But are they harmless clouds, or associated with nuclear explosions? And is that the ash, dust, pollution and detritus of these invented places, the remnants of an unsustainable society, a dream factory? Or the promise of life anew? In weather forecasting, or aeromancy, the presence of clouds can promise darkness and gloom, but they can also bring cleansing. The ominous aura of the grid, an applied system and structure used by many, including draughtsmen, architects, urban planners, designers and artists to organise and sometimes classify information, is a recurring element in his work. The grid can be observed from a distant bird’s eye view, or close up, allowing Cornelissen’s large format drawings...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Pencil, Graphite

Four Clouds
By Robbie Cornelissen
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein. Always working with graphite and charcoal, Ro...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Pencil, Graphite

A Balancing Land
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

There Remains and Irreducible Parity
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Holding Up and Attracting the Earth
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Around Us and Within Us
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Impossible Abyss Which Separates the Two Sides
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Of a Difference in Which the Differences Are Inseparable
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Both Above and Below
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Compass Rose
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

To Hang In Between
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Sky Was A Doorway
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Drawing in Water
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Taking Place
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

The Fatigue of the Conquest
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and sky are tinged a movie musical pale blue and their gear is a bit too colorful for the era of man-hauling. And then there’s the sled, piled high not with boxes of supplies but with a jumbled heap of antiquities: Greek Athenas, bits of a coliseum, a ship’s great wheel. In Jessica Houston’s collage “The Long Haul,” the explorers drag history itself into the great beyond, their backs turned from their absurd load. But we take in the entire scene. In her suite of works, Over the Edge of the World, Houston uses oil on wood, ink on paper, and collages of found images, many from National Geographic Magazine, to rearrange the evidence – and thus history’s possibilities. Houston joins visual artists such as Judit Hersko, Katja Aglert, and Isaac Julien who have been inspired by the explorers of the past. Like them, she draws, in part, on the singular tradition of polar exploration narratives as well as fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s “Sur” (1981), a utopian feminist hoax in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of European explorers. Le Guin’s explorers do not feel compelled to leave any written record or physical proof of their presence at the South Pole. If Le Guin’s women might have made it, what other traces have been missed? Collage can work alongside alternative history: it interprets, interrupts, and rearranges. It questions the completed whole, instead emphasizing composition and relation. Collage suggests it all might be … otherwise. Houston’s collages flaunt their second nature. Yet what they show remains somehow plausible. You want to believe what you’re beginning to see. In “A life Attuned to Larger Rhythms” Houston grids out rectangles of captured images to overwhelm the eye as the polar environment itself might (whiteout is a paradoxical species of optical overstimulation). Through the strangely ordered confusion of an ice survey grafted atop a chessboard, the mind begins to recognize new connections, emergent shapes: a different future? In “Launching Strategy” a yellow-orange pyramid balances garishly atop a tent. Which came first, the realist tent or the Platonic shape? Can we ever be sure that we’re not already seeing through premade abstractions? Or is it that baggage we’ve been dragging along? In “Architecture of the Anthropocene” and “Red Blood, Red Earth” Houston reroutes visually symbolic through-lines between women and non-European people and the official history in which they appear dimly or not at all. A full-skirted woman holds onto the tether of a kite that seems to pull her upwards towards a weather balloon floating above an Antarctic base’s radio tower; a row of tropical workers wielding pickaxes folds into the trajectory of a sailor aiming a bow and arrow at an iceberg stained with red. These are not people or images normally associated with polar discovery. But shouldn’t they matter? “Territory Over Land” strips in a scene from a painted depiction of the tropics, possibly from one of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations. “Captain Cook’s Legacy” more directly confronts an official portrait of Cook with the torn-in eyes from what can only be described as the explorer’s anonymous dark Other. The hybrid portrait is a kind of contact zone. “Henson and Peary – Past Entanglements” is a cooler, less volatile twin portrait of disputed discoverer of the North Pole Robert Peary...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Of the return voyage...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Of the return voyage there is nothing to tell… In 1912 all the world learned that the brave Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole; and then, much l...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

She dug out one more cell...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“She dug out one more cell just under the ice surface, leaving nearly a transparent sheet of ice like a greenhouse roof; and there, alone, she worked at sculptures...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

instead of a narrow bight...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Eight Adélie Penguins...
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
“Eight Adélie Penguins immediately came to greet us … They insisted on us going to visit Hut Point, where the large structure built by Captain Scott’s pa...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The little Yelcho
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

…last Thule of the South
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
"…last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, suppositious islands, headlan...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

The Second Flight
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Into Mystery Land
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Undercurrents
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

No Such Border
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Henson and Peary - Past Entanglements
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

The Forward March Loses Ground
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A group of figures heads for icy distant mountains. A familiar enough scene of polar explorers hauling their sledges. Yet somehow this does not quite fit the heroic mold. The ice and...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Scream
By Judith Berry
Located in Montreal, Quebec
The themes visited in this show stem from a desire to extend the vocabulary of my painting while forming a metaphor for the chaos of contemporary life. The title, Escalade, has differing and complimentary functions in English and French. Continuing to paint, over a lengthening career, the medium poses more questions than answers. The title is a reference to my attempt to overcome these difficulties through the expansion of my painting language. The title also refers to the escalation of crises in the world at large. It is the larger picture in which I am a small person trying to make my way. In a concrete sense, the title also refers to a strategy I have taken in a number of these paintings. That is, to re-examine very small paintings...
Category

2010s Abstract Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Flying Logs
By Judith Berry
Located in Montreal, Quebec
The themes visited in this show stem from a desire to extend the vocabulary of my painting while forming a metaphor for the chaos of contemporary life. The title, Escalade, has differing and complimentary functions in English and French. Continuing to paint, over a lengthening career, the medium poses more questions than answers. The title is a reference to my attempt to overcome these difficulties through the expansion of my painting language. The title also refers to the escalation of crises in the world at large. It is the larger picture in which I am a small person trying to make my way. In a concrete sense, the title also refers to a strategy I have taken in a number of these paintings. That is, to re-examine very small paintings...
Category

2010s Abstract Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Au Revoir
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Random Stone of Oblivion
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup being handed to me, and I can vividly remember the very first time I was able to wield colour with a red crayon. As a painter, I acutely feel the significance of this change in colour of the world’s landscapes...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

So Long
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Overview
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Great Expectations
By Adam Gunn
Located in Montreal, Quebec
I made these paintings in response to a prediction for a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a consequence of man-made climate change. This idea described by Peter Ward in his book Under a Pale Green Sky is based on his study of the great mass extinction events of the past. For many of these extinction events the earth’s chemistry changed the sky to green and the oceans purple. My personal memories are often tied to colour – my first recollection is of an orange cup being handed to me, and I can vividly remember the very first time I was able to wield colour with a red crayon. As a painter, I acutely feel the significance of this change in colour of the world’s landscapes...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Untitled
Located in Montreal, Quebec
In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Digital

Untitled
Located in Montreal, Quebec
In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Digital

The Faraway Nearby
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Nancy Webb In Jessica Houston’s Afterward, Silence (Franklin’s Crewmen’s Grave, Beechey Island) a single pale gravestone stands on an otherwise desolate ashen shore – a reli...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Digital

The Long View
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Nancy Webb In Jessica Houston’s Afterward, Silence (Franklin’s Crewmen’s Grave, Beechey Island) a single pale gravestone stands on an otherwise desolate ashen shore – a reli...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Digital

Cheminées / Chimneys
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Building on a series of exhibitions titled Panorama of the Anthropocene which examined the ecological impact of human activity through an array of paintings, digital prints and video...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Shopping
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Building on a series of exhibitions titled Panorama of the Anthropocene which examined the ecological impact of human activity through an array of paintings, digital prints and video...
Category

2010s Contemporary Montreal - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic, Wood Panel

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