Simon Bilodeau at Art Mur.

Ce que l’on ne voit pas qui nous touche pile #1, 2014

L'arc-en-ciel n'existe pas

Montreal artist Simon Bilodeau's latest show at Art Mur is something of a culmination of many of the tendencies that have been present in his work for more than half a decade. Unlike other artists who concentrate on 'materiality', Bilodeau's is a resolutely cold sensibility devoid of any of the touchy-feely aesthetic touches that plague so much current abstract work. He constructs mausoleums, not party spaces. Bilodeau has said, Par ce choix plastique de n’utiliser aucune couleur, je consens à ne susciter aucune émotion par les couleurs utilisées, puisque celles-ci, je crois, tendraient par comparaison à prendre pour réalité ce qui est présenté. (By the choice not to use any plastic colour, I agree not to provoke any emotion by the colours used, since they, I think, tend to take compared to what is actually presented.) Which is to say, the painting (or sculpture) negates the emoticon function for the sake of the image.

Jack Bush at the National Gallery of Canada.

Pinched Orange, 1964

The 2014 Biennial was bland. Even Mario Doucette's work couldn't lift it from feeling like a recycled lump. But it isn't as though the NGC was putting it in serious competition with their major show, the Jack Bush Retrospective, co-curated by Marc Mayer and Sarah Stanners. The show is big, perhaps too much so, and impressive. It's not impressive just because it's big, thankfully, although that's usually a significant help to it. For example, when the many rooms that make up the show open up into each other, when you can stand in a position and glance one direction to another to survey years of work in either linear path, there's a kind of overwhelming impressiveness. This linearity, which is chronological, is essential to the show and the workman-like quality that it gives to Bush's works.

Kent Monkman's Urban Res at PFOAC.

Kent Monkman - Red

I have to admit that I've always been ambivalent about Kent Monkman's work. That hasn't changed, but I've finally found a way to look at it and not see it as tedious. Monkman, winner of the Hnatyshyn 2014 Prize for excellence in the visual arts and winner of 2014 Indspire Award, has been the poster child (or pin-up girl) for politicized art in the country for awhile. His latest exhibit, Urban Res, at PFOAC displays homoerotic aboriginal youths with tattooed angels, spirit warriors, figures from Picasso and Francis Bacon, all running riot in what appears to be Manitoba. It plays on images of Christian martyrdom and echoes some of Attila Lukacs' earlier work. By coincidence, it also benefits from the imagery of the latest racial fiascoes south of the border to have become the fodder for an orgy of televised and online stupidity. I mention this largely because the sizable volume of writings to accumulate around Monkman tends to replay many of the same underlying moral and political arguments, albeit in more domesticated, if no less pretentious, tones.

On Bertram Brooker.

Glamour of the Underfolk.

"There is so much heat in my heart, that Humanity cannot escape being scorched, no man shall escape the heat of my heart. [...] I am the overflowing scourge whom God has sent down to chasten the earth. [...] I am the champion of the Underfolk." (Brooker, 155-156)

Unlike the majority of Canadian artists working in the first half of the twentieth century, Bertram Brooker wrote voluminously about his own work and that of his contemporaries, expounding and elaborating his aesthetic theories in different milieus. His attempt to articulate a peculiarly Canadian form of Modernism that could respond to the demands of his adopted nation frequently involved a mildly antagonistic engagement with the specifically English strains of Modernism, embodied, at least in his mind, by Wyndham Lewis, who he refers to as a pessimistic and reactionary humanist (Brooker, 215). And while the influence of Vorticism is clearly present in much of his work, and the critique of the Time Cult is also echoed, Brooker's answer to the issues which Lewis raised were very much his own.

Jared Peters’ Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery.

Surrealist of the bland unconscious

Car seats, toilets, bars of soap, sinks and industrial tiles. These are the dominant subjects of Jared Peters' Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery. Toilet is indicative of the show as a whole. Muted in colour, geometrical but soft on line and sitting with slight unease in a boxy but not quite square canvas space. It's a lot of not quite ball-in-a-box. Viewed from above, the toilet has only a subtle sense of depth. Like the sink in the painting beside it, the flattening wins out. With careful attention to the detail of floor tiles, it is also the decorative which dominates. This is only accented by the striking lack of any excretion in the toilet: just the twists of some paper rendered like the wrinkles of a shirt. While the clean/filth divide has been fairly overstated by anthropologists since at least Mary Douglas' seminal, if simplistic, Purity and Danger, there is remarkably little of the latter in evidence. Instead, it's a world so decontaminated that the only sense of life is the murkiness of its colour scheme.

Mike Pszczonak: Retrospective of an Emerging Artist.

My essay for Mike Pszczonak's Retrospective of an Emerging Artist
at The Petrified Forest Gallery.