Sophie Jodoin / Jacinthe Lessard - L at Battat Contemporary.

Sophie Jodoin has been doing elegantly spare, slightly menacing collage work for years. These have tended to involve severed body parts with some additional ink or paint work and were filled with echoes of violent events (war, terrorism etc). Her new show at Battat Contemporary is far more pared down, but this has, strangely enough, added to her workꞌs suggestiveness. Spanning two walls, the pieces feature collages made from book pages. Things have been reduced to bare lines and the occasional rectangle. Stark black and white dominates the show with the exception of greyish and grizzled book sitting alone on a ledge and facing the other pieces. What the works suggest seems far removed from that which so much of her other work tends to hint at. Adding to this is her rather wise pairing with Jacinthe Lessard-L. Her work, including both large photos and a set of videos, involves the various combinations of the elements of a chair. The stark lines of the chair are set against a white background in different configurations. Both sets of work insist on their quality as assemblages that, in spite of their minimal qualities, also attest on their capacity for ready transformation. Their combination also brings out forcefully the architectural qualities which their images possess, the sense of interlocking elements for the creation of articulated spaces and neutralized negativity.

Letter from Montreal (July).

Dear X.,

Just returned from Montreal. The weather was less terrible than usual in July. The streets more clotted than ever by tourists. Yet, it still smells less horrible than most Canadian cities. The food is still good. My French is still bad. The flavour of beers more unique and more disappointing. Many galleries were closed to avoid the congestion. The John Heward show at Galerie Roger Bellemare was much like every other Heward show Iꞌve seen. They were mostly called masks or self portraits. Usually weighed down by metal clips. This was an unconvincing gesture but hinted that they may have had another life. Rags and lilting flags. The occasional reference in a title to spice things up. They are the remains of a shipwreck that never had a ship. But they were nicely laid out in the gallery. Across the hall were a few striking pieces by Angele Verret. Enjoyably irritating, mildly hallucinatory.

Dave Kemp: The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery.

Dave Kempꞌs PHD exhibition The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery includes two sets of photographs, a video series and one long-playing video work. One set of images were taken using the one pixel camera which the artist designed and built. Its severe restrictions create monochromes which are actually captures of deliberately clichéd subject matter (sunsets, birthday parties, Niagara Falls etc.). Facing these images is the Locations series which pictures banal landscapes, unremarkably composed and framed. The video works all play on boredom: watching water boil, watching paint dry, watching the grass grow etc. These idiomatic capsules of boredom are rendered literally and played out in time. The idiomatic aspect insists on their familiarity. Their literalizing seeks to actualize the rhetoric, passing from figure to phenomena.