+ Programming + Archives Décades + News + Publications + Support Optica + Info

Décades Français

Exibitions 2017

Years
0 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |

Index of artists, authors and curators

| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y | Z |

OPTICA Fonds (Concordia University Archives)

Guidebooks to help in consulting the archives

Electronic Reproduction Fees




image
Nelson Henricks, Life Session, 2016.
Film 16mm, 2 min 30 s| 16mm film, 2 min. 30 sec.
Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Nelson Henricks
From January 28th 2017 to March 25th 2017
Life Session

Nelson Henricks installation takes its title from Falcon Film #615, Life Session (1977). Falcon Entertainment – also known as Falcon Studios – is based in San Francisco, California. Founded by the entrepreneur Chuck Holmes in 1971, Falcon Studios is one of the world’s largest producers of gay pornography. By the early 1980s, it had distinguished itself as a frontrunner at a time when distributing pornography was a criminal offence. Holmes was active in supporting politics at a local and national level, even helping to finance Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the 1990s.

Falcon Studios was criticized for their slowness in adopting safe sex practices during the early 1980s. As a consequence, many actors associated with the studio died in the first years of the epidemic. Before dying of AIDS-related illness in 2000, Holmes directed a large portion of his fortune towards philanthropic causes, funding HIV/AIDS outreach programs and other community initiatives. The Charles M. Holmes building at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center is named in his honor.

Via widespread mail order distribution, Falcon Studios contributed to the construction of a gay male aesthetic, a style that originated in San Francisco’s Castro District. Porn offered men living outside major urban centres images of gay lifestyles at a time when representations of this kind were scarce. In this sense, these films were affirmative and enabling in the formation of gay identity and aesthetics. Today, the porn industry rivals Hollywood as an image economy, generating between $2 billion and $4 billion annually worldwide.

Henricks’ Life Session is based on the first two minutes of the original ten-minute Falcon film. With the aid of several assistants, pencil drawings were made of this excerpt: these images became the basis for an animated film. The installation features a 16mm loop of the redrawn animated sequences intercut with the live action footage from the original film, as well as a series of preparatory drawings. Life Session examines the myth of the artist in popular culture via the framework of an artist drawing a film of an artist drawing a model.

COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW

GUILBERT, Charles. «Nelson Henricks, Life Session», published in Ciel variable, no. 107, «Ruines», Montréal, 2017, pp.85-86.

SIROIS-ROULEAU, Dominique. «Jim Holyoak, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes et Nelson Henricks, Life Session», Esse arts + opinions, no 90, spring-summer 2017, pp. 94-95.



Artist, author, and curator Nelson Henricks is best knows for his videograms and video installations. Works by Henricks, which have been shown around the world, can be found in the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the MoMA (New York), and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. He lives and works in Montreal. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.


image
Jim Holyoak, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes, 2002-2016.
Conte illustré, 500 pages, divisé en 19 feuillets reliés en accordéon, encre de Chine,
graphite, aquarelle, impression jet d’encre et collage sur papier,
30,48 x 43,18 x 30,48 cm.
Hand-drawn novel, 500 pages long, divided into 19 accordion books, India ink, graphite, watercolour, ink-jet prints, and collaged text on paper, 30,48 x 43,18 x 30,48 cm.
Avec l'aimable permission de
l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Jim Holyoak
From January 28th 2017 to March 25th 2017
Book of Nineteen Nocturnes

An inveterate night-owl and somewhat of a loner, Jim Holyoak works like a prowling cat: in tune with the shadows, his muffled movements hardly breaking the star-lit silence. In his wake, one usually finds formidable mural frescos bustling with curious life forms, suspended between terrestrial deep time and imagined future configurations rising from the ferment of life’s potentialities. His pictorial universe translates a fascinating empathy for all forms of life—extinct, current, and imagined—and a willingness to plumb their inherent strangeness. Holyoak inhabits an tremulous, evolving, hetero-chronic world that he renders for us in sensitive gestures of India-ink, graphite, and watercolour. If his mural installations sometimes derive from collaborative work, his constant production of sketches drawn from life reflects a rather hidden dimension of his sensory world. His sketches document his perambulations in the wilds of Northern Europe, China, Canada, and testify to an existential solitude imbuing these contemplative travels. At OPTICA, the accumulated drawings form the substratum of an epic narrative in nineteen chapters presented in the form of a mysterious archive.

A tentative, uncertain, and vaguely autobiographical odyssey, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes tells a story of wandering, a search for belonging, that ultimately results in the discovery of one’s own very intimate otherness. At the intersection of Lewis Caroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Guillermo del Toro, this travel narrative draws heterogenous, aeonic memories of Earth’s deep time into a monstrous, supernatural and dreamlike universe. As in a post-humanist dream, trees show off their capacity for reason, sensitive matter mingles with the living, species fuse into complex hybrids that defy classification. In the form of a tale, he reveals a twilight world where “reality,” merging with dreams and diverging from appearances, becomes a fleeting concept, intelligible only through a differed or displaced gaze. In this sense, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes echoes a long line of philosophical interrogations of the real, whether the latter be cosmic, quantum, or metaphysical.

Author: Gentiane Bélanger

Art historian Gentiane Bélanger is the director/curator of the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke.

Traductor: Ron Ross

PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW
SIROIS-ROULEAU, Dominique (2017). «Jim Holyoak, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes et Nelson Henricks, Life Session». Esse arts + opinions, no 90, printemps été, pp. 94-95.

KOZINSKA, Dorota. "Something's Stirring In The Night Or Jim Holyoak's Nocturnal Musings", Vie des arts, February, 21, 2017.

L’HEUREUX, Chantal. Interview with Jim Holyoak. Magazine radio In situ, Radio Centre-Ville, CINQ - Radio Centre Ville 102.3 FM, March 22, 2017.

L’HEUREUX, Chantal. "Événements", Magazine radio In situ, Radio Centre-Ville, CINQ FM - Radio Centre Ville 102.3 FM, March 20 – 26, 2017.



Originally from Aldergrove, British Columbia, Jim Holyoak lives and works in Montreal. His works are widely circulated in Canada, the United States, and Northern Europe, particularly at the bG Gallery (Santa Monica, California) and Centre Clark (Montreal). He holds an MFA in visual arts from Concordia University (2011), a degree from Álfaskólinn, the Icelandic Elf School in Reykjavik, in Elf and Hidden people studies, and has studied ink wash painting in Yangshuo, China.



From January 30th 2017 to June 17th 2017
Programme éducatif | Hiver - Printemps 2017

OPTICA aims to be a site of proximity, discovery and experimentation in contemporary art for all audiences. We offer educational activities to childcare centres (CPE), primary and secondary schools, CEGEPs and universities as well as families and community groups.

To book an activity or to get more information on our educational programming, contact
Daniel Fiset : mediation@optica.ca

CONSULTEZ NOTRE PROGRAMMATION ANNUELLE COMPLÈTE EN FORMAT PDF (pdf)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - PROGRAMME GRAND PUBLIC - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FAMILY SATURDAYS
Free and open to all
For children aged 4 and older
The workshop is open to the whole family and will run continually+


-->Workshop on the work of Jim Holyoak

Jim Holyoak’s pieces are swarming with creatures of all kinds, ceaselessly transfigured and reinvented under the artist’s pen and brush. While touring the exhibition and discovering Holyoak’s work, children will be convened to participate in a grand and elaborate cadavre exquis! They will first familiarize themselves with india ink and tempera, and then endeavour to imagine new creatures, inspired by Jim’s work, add their own creative touch to the continuous elaboration of a gigantic fantastical being.

February 4, 2017 - 1 pm to 4 pm
March 25, 2017 - 1 pm to 4 pm


-->Around the curatorship of Nicole Burisch

For the Family Saturdays presented in conjunction with I’ve Only Known My Own, participants will create their own temporary tattoos. Kids will draw inspiration from the exhibition’s themes as well as the physical traces of the performances in the exhibition space to design their tattoos. After the centre’s educator has printed them, participants can choose to keep their tattoos or give them to someone else, reactivating some of the exhibition’s key questions around transmission and sharing.

April 29, 2017 – 1 pm to 4 pm
June 10, 2017 – 1 pm to 4 pm


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - PROGRAMME SCOLAIRE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CPE ET ÉCOLES PRIMAIRES
Ateliers de création et visites interactives
Durée : 1h 15 min (visite 30 min + atelier créatif 45 min)
Enfants âgés de 4 ans et plus

 Les lundis
Gratuit et sur réservation uniquement




OPTICA offre des visites interactives destinées aux enfants qui leur apprennent à observer et à décoder une œuvre, à discuter en groupe de ce qu’ils voient et à partager leurs observations.

Les ateliers créatifs sont adaptés à l’âge de nos visiteurs et établis en fonction des directives du Programme de formation de l’école québécoise et dans un esprit de conformité aux compétences transversales mises en avant par l'éducation préscolaire et primaire.

-->Around the work of Jim Holyoak

After a guided tour of Jim Holyoak's exhibition, a creative workshop will be offered to the young people during which they will create a collaborative murals in Indian ink.

Date still available:
February, 13 and 20
March 6, 2017




-->What is performance?

In the framework of the group show I’ve Only Known My Own, curated by Nicole Burisch, the young visitors will take part in an exhibition tour, followed by a performance workshop inspired by works presented at OPTICA.

Date still available:
May 22, 2017



GROUPES COLLÉGIAUX ET UNIVERSITAIRES
Visites interactives et rencontres
Gratuit et sur réservation uniquement 



Des visites commentées des expositions en cours sont offertes aux étudiants des collèges et des universités. Nous pouvons organiser sur demande des discussions ou des tables rondes à propos de thèmes divers comme par exemple la mission d’OPTICA, le mandat des centres d’artistes ou tout autre sujet lié à l'actualité de l'art. Ces rencontres prennent place dans l’espace AGORA d’OPTICA.


The educational program is supported by the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the City of Montreal as part of the Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and Caisse Desjardins du Plateau-Mont-Royal.



Entente sur le développement art3




image
Atelier à l'école Buissonnière, 2017. Photo : Daniel Fiset

Exposition des élèves de 3e année de l’École Buissonnière (Mile End) sur une proposition de Jim Holyoak
From March 16th 2017 to March 25th 2017
Artiste à l'école

Opening on Thursday March 16th, 2017 from 5 pm to 6 pm

This winter, fifty or so third-graders from École Buissonnière (Mile End) will participate in a creative project developed by Jim Holyoak as part of the Artist at School program.

The children will explore the formal potentialities of India ink by collaborating on the creation of a large mural inspired by the artist’s singular iconography. After a few exercises to familiarize themselves with ink work, the schoolchildren will transform their individual drawings into a collective effort at inventing a new bestiary. Their work will be presented to the public during an opening at the centre, to be held in March 2017.

The works of the students will be presented to the public during a vernissage that will take place on March 16th, 2017, from 5 pm to 6 pm and will be exhibited at the center until March 25th, 2017.

OPTICA would like to thank the staff and students of l'École Buissonnière.

For more information, please contact Daniel Fiset: mediation@optica.ca

The educational program is supported by the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the City of Montreal as part of the Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and la Caisse Desjardins du Plateau-Mont-Royal.


Entente sur le développement art3





image
Autumn Knight, Documents, 2016. Performance
Photo : Lynn Lane
Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Nadège Grebmeier Forget
Ursula Johnson
Autumn Knight
Michelle Lacombe
Mikhel Proulx

Commissaire | Curator : Nicole Burisch

From April 21st 2017 to June 10th 2017
I've Only Known My Own

Opening, Friday, April, 21_6 pm to 8 pm

I’ve Only Known My Own is a group exhibition that explores how the materiality of the body is represented through measurements, process, and documentation. In many ways, the performance-based works included in this project reference and respond to the legacies of feminist and conceptual art. They reflect upon how the matter of the body might act as a force that generates its own (il/logical) systems, and how this material embodiment might function as a form of resistance. I’ve Only Known My Own also considers how the material body might intersect with new technologies, be altered or amplified through various modes of communication, take on forms of mediated presence, and activate questions around the presentation and dissemination of ephemera.

Rather than presenting a fixed set of works, the exhibition evolves over the course of its run, with objects, props, and actions being set in motion during the presentation of each of the four performances. First presented in Houston in the spring of 2016, the four artists were invited to revisit, re-perform or reinterpret their earlier performances for this second iteration at Optica, and to bring forward traces or echoes from the first exhibition. By reassembling these artists and works, the second version of the presents further opportunities to consider the role of documentary traces, as well as the evolution of each work in relation to this new site.

Ursula Johnson’s past performances have used traditional Mi’kmaw basket weaving techniques to trace Indigenous bodies’ presence within -and resistance to- legacies of colonial legislation and control. Through strategies of duration and display, her work interrogates outdated ethnographic and anthropological approaches to understanding Indigenous cultural practices. For this exhibition Johnson will present hide, a performance that uses leather tanning processes learned from her family and from YouTube tutorials to explore how material knowledge is transmitted from place to place, and from body to body – substituting a piece of fun fur in place of real animal hide. As in her other works, skillful making is downplayed in favour of an extended and difficult physical exertion, placing her body in close relation to her chosen material, and gradually improving her craft with each subsequent performance. Here, the body in question could equally be that of the animal (its form and qualities determining specific processes), or that of a body-of-knowledge generated through the repeated performance of the task and translated through alternate materials.

In Michelle Lacombe's multi-phase project Of All the Watery Bodies, I Only Know My Own, the artist used a monthly measurement of the volume of blood in her body to determine the placement of a tattooed water line around her calves. Here, the body's cyclical fluctuations became a rule for generating a monthly performative ritual, and a way of temporarily documenting and queering an unused reproductive potential. If, as in Sol LeWitt's well-known pronouncement on conceptual art, "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art," Lacombe’s project reworks this proposition: the fluctuations of the body become the machine that makes the art. In Houston, Lacombe cut into a series of photographs she took of the moon, and then returned the final 13th moon to her body by tattooing a new waterline mark onto her abdomen. At Optica, Lacombe will present The Mother Moon, which begins with the distribution of temporary tattoos that reproduce this circular shape. These will be offered for free until they run out. Once (or if) depleted, she will present a second action that will make the mark permanent.

Nadège Grebmeier Forget's ongoing series One on one’s for so-called fans involves private performances that are then translated through oral accounts and performative re-tellings, and continues the artist’s investigations into the role of documentation and technology in mediating access to her performing body. Walls of Wind: The mirroring and rendering, the latest in this series, takes up the idea of mirroring – responding first to the architectural features of the Houston gallery (and the performance that happened there), and then again to their absence in Montreal. While she initially limits the audience for her work, setting parameters around when and how she is seen, Grebmeier Forget then relinquishes control, relying on her chosen witnesses to transmit (sometimes inaccurately, but always personably) the story of what they experienced. The decadence and generosity of her performances are contrasted with her more austere architectural interventions which use forms that reference gallery spaces and display strategies. These spaces, while empty, are nevertheless invested with the presence of the actions that they once hosted.

Autumn Knight often uses conventions and props drawn from theatre, reworking these into performances that trouble the divisions between gallery and stage, performer and audience. Walking a line between something scripted and spontaneous, her performances centre the roles and presence of Black women, and use dialog, voices, and gestures to uncover and critique structures of power. Her performance Documents involves a public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship, adapted this time for a Canadian (and more specifically, Montreal) context. Central to this work is a filing cabinet that both holds the props required for the performance, while also serving as a portrait or trace of Knight herself. Knight’s interactive reading of the documents in the files addresses the embodied specificities of race, class, and gender to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent – while underlining how different audiences and relationships to power may influence this reading.

Central to this project is an interest in experimenting with the forms and sites for presenting performance art, and the ways in which artists, audiences, curators, and writers might work together to do this. In addition to these performances and traces, a small publication featuring documentation from the Houston performances, an extended curatorial essay, and a commissioned text by scholar Mikhel Proulx is also available in the gallery. A round-table between all the participants will provide the opportunity for each to speak in more detail about their involvement in the project, and to discuss their various approaches to performance and documentation. The notion of knowledge that derives from a body, and that may be specific to a particular body is evoked in the exhibition’s title (adapted from the title of Lacombe’s project); it is intended as poetic echo of the themes in these works. The title also speaks to the productive gap between an individual experience of a performance and the traces that (might) be known or circulated afterwards. Together, the works presented for this exhibition offer multiple positions from which to approach these ideas, and open new avenues for considering the materiality and presence of the body within performance.

Nicole Burisch



Programs

Friday, April, 21 2017

-Performance : 12 pm to 6 pm

Ursula Johnson

-Public Presentation : 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Autumn Knight

Topological Media Lab and Milieux Copresentation

Concordia University: 1515, Sainte Catherine St West | 11th Floor, Milieux Conference Room EV 11.705



Saturday, April 22, 2017 - 1 pm to 3 pm

-Round-table

In the presence of Nicole Burisch and the artists



Saturday, May 27, 2017 - 2 pm to 4 pm

-Performance

Nadège Grebmeier Forget



Saturday, June 3, 2017 - 2 pm to 4 pm

-Performance

Autumn Knight



PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW



TAN, Lumi. «Portrait Autumn Knight», CURA, Italy, no 33, March 2020, [p. 178-185].

DELGADO, Jérôme. "Pourvoyeurs de collectivités", Le Devoir, January 14, 2017.

Nicole Burisch (Ottawa, Ont./Montréal, QC) is a curator, critic, and cultural worker. With a background working in artist-run centres, her projects focus on discourses of craft, feminism, performance, publishing, labour, and materiality within contemporary art. Her writing has been published by the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, .dpi: Feminist Journal of Art and Digital Culture, La Centrale, No More Potlucks, FUSE Magazine, Stride Gallery, the Richmond Art Gallery and the Cahiers métiers d’art :: Craft Journal. Burisch worked as Administrative Coordinator at Centre Skol from 2011-2014, as the Director of Calgary’s Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival from 2007-2009, and as Managing Editor for MAWA’s upcoming publication on feminist art in Canada. She was a Core Fellow Critic-in-Residence with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from 2014-16, and is currently Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada.
http://www.nicoleburisch.com/

Nadège Grebmeier Forget (Montreal, QC) is a visual and performance artist, independent curator and freelance project manager. She has participated in numerous events, festivals, panels, residencies, and exhibitions in Canada, the USA and Europe. Her practice provokes reflection on the act of looking as a form of implicit consumption, as well as the power dynamics within which the gaze operates. Her work is characterized by a preoccupation with re-appropriation, actively exploring the role of meditation on identity construction and fiction. Circulating within the visual and live arts communities, she has most recently exhibited and performed at: Vu Photo, the Musée régional de Rimouski, the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides, OFFTA - Live arts festival, CIRCA art actuel, Sophiensale Theatre (Berlin), the HOLD-FAST festival of Eastern Edge Gallery (Newfoundland), Centre d’art Mains d’Œuvres (Saint-Ouen, France) and Friche de la Belle de Mai (Marseille, France).
http://www.nadege-grebmeier-forget.com/

Descendante de la Première Nation Mi’kmaq, Ursula Johnson (Dartmouth, NS) is a performance and installation artist of Mi’kmaw First Nation ancestry. She graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and has participated in over 30 group shows and 5 solo exhibitions. Her performances are often place-based and employ cooperative didactic intervention. Recent works include various mediums of sculpture that prompt consideration from her audience about aspects of intangible cultural heritage as it pertains to the consumption of traditional knowledge within the context of colonial institutions. Her solo exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn: Do You Remember (hosted by SMU Art Gallery) has recently toured to galleries across Canada. Johnson has been selected as a finalist for the Salt Spring National Art Prize and has twice been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. She has presented publicly in lectures, keynote addresses and hosted a number of community forums around topics including ‘Indigenous Self¬â€Determination through Art’ and ‘Environmental and Sustainability in Contemporary Indigenous Art Practices.’
http://www.ursulajohnson.ca/

Autumn Knight (New York, NY) Autumn Knight (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation and text. Her performance work has been included in group exhibitions at DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, and The Contemporary Art Museum Houston. Knight has been in residence with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan) and Artpace (San Antonio, TX). She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University. In 2015, Knight was an Artadia awardee, and she is currently a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Knight’s first solo museum exhibition, In Rehearsal, was recently hosted at the Krannert Art Museum (IL, USA).
http://www.autumnjoiknight.com/

Michelle Lacombe (Montreal, QC) Michelle Lacombe (Montreal, QC) has developed a unique body-based practice since obtaining her BFA from Concordia University in 2006. Purposefully minimalist, her research-based practice begins where gesture, corporeality and mark-marking are entwined and confused. Her work has been shown in Canada, the USA, and Europe in the context of performance events, exhibitions, and colloquiums. She is the recipient of the 2015 Bourse Plein Sud. Her practice as an artist is paralleled by a strong commitment to supporting the development of critical and alternative models of dissemination for live art and undisciplined practices. She is currently the director of VIVA! Art Action, a biennial performance event in Montreal.

Mikhel Proulx (Montréal, QC) Mikhel Proulx (Montreal, QC) is a historian of art and digital culture. His research considers Queer and Indigenous artists working with networked media, and he has curated exhibitions in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. He is a Canada Graduate Scholar and the Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow in Canadian Art History. Proulx is a PhD student in the department of Art History at Concordia University, where he teaches media art histories and Queer visual cultures.
http://www.mikhelproulx.com/




image
Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Rendition for Promotion (IOKMO), 2017.
Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Nadège Grebmeier Forget
May 27th 2017
I've Only Known My Own : Performance de Nadège Grebmeier Forget

Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s ongoing series One on one’s for so-called fans involves private performances that are then translated through oral accounts and performative re-tellings, and continues the artist’s investigations into the role of documentation and technology in mediating access to her performing body. Walls of Wind: The Mirroring and Rendering, the latest in this series, takes up the idea of mirroring – responding first to the architectural features of the Houston gallery (and the performance that happened there), and then again to their absence in Montreal. While she initially limits the audience for her work, setting parameters around when and how she is seen, Grebmeier Forget then relinquishes control, relying on her chosen witnesses to transmit (sometimes inaccurately, but always personably) the story of what they experienced. The decadence and generosity of her performances are contrasted with her more austere architectural interventions which use forms that reference gallery spaces and display strategies. These spaces, while empty, are nevertheless invested with the presence of the actions that they once hosted.


image
Edith Brunette, 2016

Edith Brunette
From September 1st 2017 to December 31st 2017

In partnership with OPTICA, artist Edith Brunette will undertake a documentation and art intervention project during the coming year in which she attempts to bring the worlds of art and multimedia closer together. This project falls in line with the artist’s ongoing focus on the economy of the art milieu.


Edith Brunette blends her art practice with theoretical research. Concerned with the discourses at work in the arts and with the political forces and power relationships they reveal, her recent projects have dealt, among other things, with video surveillance (Caméraroman, 2011), speaking out in times of social crisis (Consensus, 2012) and artists’ political agency (Faut-il se couper la langue?, 2013; Cuts Make the Country Better, 2015, in collaboration with François Lemieux).


image
Valérie Mréjen, Leur histoire, 2014.
Vidéo HD, couleur, son, 3 min 30 s, en boucle
Collection LVMH
Crédit : Paul Litherland

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Valérie Mréjen
From September 8th 2017 to October 21st 2017
De quoi l'image est-elle le nom ?

Guest Curator: Ami Barak

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image (formely Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal) presents, in collaboration with OPTICA, Valérie Mréjen –Q&R – Q&A from September 8th to October 21st. The opening is being held on September 8th at 7:30pm, in the presence of the artist.

Valérie Mréjen’s (France) moving and still images are inspired by personal memories, commonplace ideas, and misunderstandings. The exchanges taking place in her works, loaded with intensity, transform banal situations into existential metaphors. In Leur histoire (2014), two people seated at a restaurant table chat. Their conversation is punctuated by images collected elsewhere, as if these images could put some order in their relationship. In Déshabillé (2017), six characters evoke memories and personal stories related to clothing. In this situation the clothes make the man; it is appearance that reveals the characters’ psychological complexity. In La Baule, ciel d’orage (2016), the candour of the life stories and exchanges leaves room for a poetry of the everyday, an aesthetic of the refrain, in which such beings become innocent and touching heroes who easily inspire our affection.

MOMENTA 2017

For its 15th edition, MOMENTA has joined forces with curator Ami Barak, who has developed an outstanding program on the theme What Does the Image Stand For? The 2017 edition of MOMENTA explores the concept of photographic and videographic evidence for the prosecution, whether images are still or in motion, raising the question of images as avatars, and focusing on the fantastical and sublimated aspects of the reality that they convey. The 38 artists in this biennale invite us not to accept their testimony uncritically. The biennale comprises three segments. The first, which corresponds to the central exhibition at our headquarters, focuses on the work of 23 artists and is being presented at two sites: Galerie de l’UQAM and VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine. The second consists of 14 solo exhibitions spread throughout the city. And the third is an exhibition of documents located at Artexte. MOMENTA is also a vast program of public activities, talks, projections, and encounters, as well as many opportunities to meet the artists and see their works. The biennale would be incomplete without its catalogue, co-produced with the prestigious publishing house Kerber Verlag, which brings together texts by the curator and five authors who address the question What Does the Image Stand For?


EVENTS SURROUNDING THE EXHIBITIONS MOMENTA

Discussions and Talks


Day of discussion with artists of the Biennale

September, 9
10 AM to 12 PM

Maison Shaughnessy, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
1920 Baile Street, Montreal

Morning session
Erin Shirreff
Jayce Salloum
Nelson Henricks
Jonas St. Michael
Valérie Mréjen

Sujets a: desire — appeals

Sujets a alludes to a central concept animating Ami Barak’s curatorial theme: Jacques Lacan’s objet a. This series of discussions draws Lacan’s concept into a space for conversation, where the public is invited to engage with many artists in the biennale and reflect on some of the motivations behind their work.

Talk and signature session with Valérie Mréjen

September 9,
2 PM to 3 PM 30

Librairie Euguelionne
1426, Beaudry street, Montreal

On the occasion of the publication of Troisième personne, Valérie Mréjen will take part of a public discussion with Marie-Ève Blais, bookseller at librairie l'Euguélionne. The event will be follow by a signature session.
Mix and Match Tour

A Mix and Match Tour combining a guided tour of the exhibitions at Optica and Centre CLARK takes place on September 23 at 12 PM 30.

Screening nights at Cinémathèque québécoise

A screening night presenting a selection of the artist’s works takes place on September 27 at 7 PM.

So you won’t miss anything in the 2017 edition, a detailed program is available for free at all of our exhibition partners and on momentabiennale.com.

Providing access to all biennale activities, MOMENTA Passports are available at La Vitrine box office (online: lavitrine.com).

About MOMENTA

For nearly 30 years, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal has been offering a stimulating framework within which to study current practices, evolutions, and issues associated with the still and moving image in Western culture, and to take the pulse of trends in contemporary image making. Renamed MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image in 2017, the organization plays a crucial role in the local, national, and international ecology of the visual arts community. Through its curatorial approach, renowned guest curators develop rigorous artistic programming based on relevant themes; the biennale enjoys a well-established reputation in its city and country, as well as abroad. It actively contributes to the recognition of Canadian artists – who comprise more than 50% of the artists in each edition – by presenting their work within an international context, in association with 15 exhibition partners. In 7 editions, the organization has exhibited more than 2,000 works by 400 artists, and welcomed almost 22 million visitors.

COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW

DELGADO, Jérôme. «La Biennale, au-delà des clichés, Une sélection des expos solos qui ressortent du lot à Momenta», Le Devoir, September 16, 2017.

Valérie Mréjen (1969–) is a French artist, filmmaker, and novelist who lives and works in Paris. A graduate of the Paris-Cergy National Graduate School of Art, she has always been interested in different means of expression as ways of exploring the potential of language. She draws her inspiration from accounts of real-life experiences, which she rewrites and stages. She launched her art career with a number of artist’s books, before turning to video. In 2008, her work was featured in a solo exhibition, La place de la concorde, held at the Jeu de Paume Museum (Paris). She has also done many short films, documentaries (Pork and Milk, 2004; Valvert, 2008), and, co-directed with Bertrand Schefer, a full-length film titled En ville (Quinzaine des réalisateurs, Cannes, 2011). She published Mon grand-père (1999), L’Agrume (2001) with Les éditions Allia, and Forêt noire (2012) and Troisième personne (2017) with Les éditions P.O.L. She is represented by Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris).




image
Melik Ohanian
Portrait of Duration, 2015.
Sept photographies sur Duratrans, boîtes lumineuses,
animation Arduino, 1 seconde,
105 x 90 x 10 cm chaque
Collection Pomeranz
Crédit : Paul Litherland

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Melik Ohanian
From September 8th 2017 to October 21st 2017
De quoi l'image est-elle le nom ?

Guest Curator: Ami Barak

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image (formerly Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal) presents, in collaboration with OPTICA, Melik Ohanian – Portrait of Duration. L’instant S from September 8th to October 21st. The opening is being held on September 8th at 7:30pm, in attendance of the artist.

Melik Ohanian (France) explores the relationships between science, astrophysics, and the visual arts. In Portrait of Duration (2015), he reveals the change of state of cesium 133, the chemical element that defines the universal second in atomic clocks through its transition from solid to liquid state. Ohanian invites the viewer to experience a representation of time itself. Portrait of Duration – Expand Series (2015/2017) is composed of large scale images excerpted from the experiments conducted for Portrait of Duration. Each photograph proposes a figure of time. The Post-Image series (2014) is made from media content culled from the international press, meticulously torn to pieces by the artist. This gesture questions the nature, circulation, and reproduction of images in the present era.

MOMENTA 2017

For its 15th edition, MOMENTA has joined forces with curator Ami Barak, who has developed an outstanding program on the theme What Does the Image Stand For? The 2017 edition of MOMENTA explores the concept of photographic and videographic evidence for the prosecution, whether images are still or in motion, raising the question of images as avatars, and focusing on the fantastical and sublimated aspects of the reality that they convey. The 38 artists in this biennale invite us not to accept their testimony uncritically. The biennale comprises three segments. The first, which corresponds to the central exhibition at our headquarters, focuses on the work of 23 artists and is being presented at two sites: Galerie de l’UQAM and VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine. The second consists of 14 solo exhibitions spread throughout the city. And the third is an exhibition of documents located at Artexte.

MOMENTA is also a vast program of public activities, talks, projections, and encounters, as well as many opportunities to meet the artists and see their works. The biennale would be incomplete without its catalogue, co-produced with the prestigious publishing house Kerber Verlag, which brings together texts by the curator and five authors who address the question What Does the Image Stand For?

Mix and Match Tour

A Mix and Match Tour combining a guided tour of the exhibitions at Optica and Centre CLARK takes place on September 23 at 12:30pm.

So you won’t miss anything in the 2017 edition, a detailed program is available for free at all of our exhibition partners and on momentabiennale.com.

Providing access to all biennale activities, MOMENTA Passports are available at La Vitrine box office (online: lavitrine.com).

About MOMENTA

For nearly 30 years, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal has been offering a stimulating framework within which to study current practices, evolutions, and issues associated with the still and moving image in Western culture, and to take the pulse of trends in contemporary image making. Renamed MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image in 2017, the organization plays a crucial role in the local, national, and international ecology of the visual arts community. Through its curatorial approach, renowned guest curators develop rigorous artistic programming based on relevant themes; the biennale enjoys a well-established reputation in its city and country, as well as abroad. It actively contributes to the recognition of Canadian artists – who comprise more than 50% of the artists in each edition – by presenting their work within an international context, in association with 15 exhibition partners. In 7 editions, the organization has exhibited more than 2,000 works by 400 artists, and welcomed almost 22 million visitors.

PRESS RELEASE(pdf)



Melik Ohanian (1969–) is a French artist of Armenian origin who lives and works in Paris and New York. His work, which focuses on the question of time, borrows procedures and devices from cinema and projection technique to explore the relationships between science, astrophysics, and the visual arts. His most recent solo exhibitions include Under Shadows at the Centre Georges- Pompidou (Paris, 2016) and DAYS, I See what I Saw and what I will See at Art Basel (2015). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions, such as Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2016); Les Rencontres d’Arles (2016); the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016); and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), for which the Armenian pavilion, where his work was exhibited, won the Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion. Ohanian was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2015. He is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris) and the Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv, Brussels).




image
Caroline Mauxion, Une enveloppe sans contours, 2017. Impression sur verre trempé, 76,2 x 152,4 cm. | Print on toughened glass, 76,2 x 152,4 cm. Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Caroline Mauxion
From November 11th 2017 to December 16th 2017
Une enveloppe sans contours

“There is the puddle,’ said Rhoda, ‘and I cannot cross it. I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head. Its wind roars in my face. All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What, then, can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?”

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Rather than engaging in the practice of the photographic image, Caroline Mauxion explains that her work consists of practising the photographic image. The nuance is critical, as it reassociates photography with the idea of action and it emphasizes both the performativity of the image and its materiality, for which notions of contact and movement are essential. Mauxion’s images are thus to be seen as testing the limits of the visible and invisible, of transparency and opacity, of abstraction and figuration, of shadow and light.

The work presented at OPTICA is inspired by the originating conditions of photography. Through photographic procedures, which imprint intensities of light onto photosensitive surfaces, distinct materials become closely related. The sheet of cracked glass and the water puddle are imagined geographies, constant returns to writings of Virginia Woolf. The description of spaces between the tangible and the intangible in Woolf’s novels and short stories serve as a guide in the artist’s creative process. The presented works become reinterpretations of recurring motifs in Woolfian imagery, endeavouring to make visible that which is hidden in the “cotton wool of daily life.”

If Mauxion practises photography, she also installs it. The glass plate, become photographic support, depends on its installation in the space to reveal the image; the white page on which the photograph would normally be printed is replaced by the white wall. Some images become nearly invisible. Many can be read in different ways. They invite physical movement. All are created upon contact.

Author: Daniel Fiset

Daniel Fiset is an art historian and educator. He lives and works in Montreal.

Public Discussion between Caroline Mauxion and Daniel Fiset at OPTICA, November 22, 2017 from 6:30 PM to 8 PM.

PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW

DELGADO, Jérôme. «Invisibles corruptions, Teja Gavankar séduit avec des petits dérangements de l’ordre établi», Le Devoir, December 2, 2017.

DELGADO, Jérôme. «Un automne sous le signe éclaté de Caroline Mauxion», Le Devoir, September 5, 2017.



Originally from France, Caroline Mauxion has been living in Montreal since 2010. She is the recipient of the Sylvie et Simon Blais Foundation’s Award for Emerging Visual Artists (2015). Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Montreal, at Galerie Les Territoires (2014) and Galerie Simon Blais (2015), and in Rimouski, at Centre d’artistes Caravansérail (2016). She will be undertaking a residency in Banff in 2018, under the auspices of the CALQ’s residency program


image
Teja Gavankar, other’s spaces 002, 2016. Dessin, 21,59 x 27,94 cm. | Drawing, 21,59 x 27,94 cm. Avec l'aimable permission de l'artiste | Courtesy of the artist

Teja Gavankar
From November 11th 2017 to December 16th 2017

Indian artist Teja Gavankar’s field of investigation and action is the everyday and the transformation of space in its most mundane attributes. Her drawings and in situ interventions negotiate the territory’s modes of appearance, distilling its identity and extracting its specificities. She draws from constructed surroundings, made familiar through repeated experience, and teases out new configurations. While the artist has mainly produced site-specific projects in urban spaces, the work presented at OPTICA represents a first gallery production.

Interested in geometry and topologies, Gavankar revisits architectural elements—walls, floors, stairs, and recently, the corner motif—turning them into conditions for the emergence of an experience, seeking to break the tranquil poise of their functionality, structure, and particular characteristics. Yet, these very minimal artistic interventions, whether in two or three dimensions, generate an undeniable force. They manipulate little things, trivialities, in order to produce subtleties that bear great perceptual ambiguities.

The artist’s drawing practice challenges the ruled grid, the paper support-tool that gives one’s stroke a Cartesian guidance and orientation. Many Indian artists have given critical attention to the means of describing, calculating, and measuring various manifestations of the world. Deployed in India during British occupation and associated with modernity and colonialism, these markers have enabled the classification and topology of both the natural and human resources found on the territory. Even if Gavantar, like other artists of India’s new creative generation, does not make direct historical references, her use of the grid remains critical nonetheless. It is a question of tackling restrictive structures and their demands. At times, she will blow the grid apart, favouring curved lines and offset, oblique strokes that run outside the rectilinear compartments or erasing some of the squares. Reinventing the line through such gestures, she brings suppleness to structural rigidity.

Author: Julie Alary Lavallée
Julie Alary Lavallée is a doctoral student in art history at Concordia University.
Her research concerns group shows by contemporary Indian artists in a diasporic context.

Public Presentation of Teja Gavankar at Darling Foundry The event is organised in partnership with the Darling Foundry, 745, Ottawa st., H2C 1R8. The talk will be held in English, while the conversation will be in French and English. Thursday, November 16, from 6 to 8 PM.

PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

PRESS REVIEW

DERY, Milly-Alexandra (2018). « Teja Gavankar : Other’s Spaces », Espace art actuel. no. 119, printemps-été, pp. 89-91.

RAIKAR-MHATRE, Sumedha. «Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre: Born Out Of A Space Crunch, Back From A Show In Montreal, Artist Teja Gavankar Reflects On Mumbai's Geometry And Contradictions Of Urban Living», Mid-day, December 17, 2017.

DELGADO, Jérôme. «Invisibles corruptions, Teja Gavankar séduit avec des petits dérangements de l’ordre établi», Le Devoir, December 2, 2017.



With an MFA from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India), Teja Gavankar has completed a number of residencies, including one in 2014 at Darling Foundry, Montreal (with the support of the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation). In 2016, she took part in the Young Subcontinent exhibition (Serendipity Art Festival, India). She lives and works in Bombay.


image
Discussion entre Caroline Mauxion et Daniel Fiset à OPTICA, 2017.
Photo : Esther Bourdages

Caroline Mauxion
November 22nd 2017
Discussion publique : Caroline Mauxion et Daniel Fiset

Part of her solo exhibition at OPTICA, Une enveloppe sans contours, Caroline Mauxion will meet with Daniel Fiset in the form of a public talk. The activity takes place from 6:30 PM until 8 PM.



image
Présentation de Teja Gavankar à la Fonderie Darling, 2017.
Photo : Hugo St-Laurent

Teja Gavankar
November 26th 2017
Présentation publique de Teja Gavankar

Former laureate of the Indian Residency at the Darling Foundry (2014), Teja Gavankar gave a public presentation of her research as part of his solo exhibition other's spaces at OPTICA, a center for contemporary art that runs until December 16, 2017.

The event, which took place on Thursday, November 16, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, was organized in partnership with the Darling Foundry located at 745 Ottawa Street, Montreal, H3C 1R8.


image
Carton d'invitation, 2017.
Photo : Marie-Laure Robitaille

Artiste à l'école | Artist at School
From December 12th 2017 to December 16th 2017
Exposition des élèves de 5e et 6e année de l’école Saint-Enfant-Jésus (Mile End) sur une proposition de Caroline Mauxion

Opening on Tuesday December 12, 2017 from 5 pm to 6 pm

As part of the Artist at School program developed in 2014 by the OPTICA center, Caroline Mauxion gave a creative workshop to students in grades 5 and 6 of Saint-Enfant-Jésus Elementary School. Young people will explore the formal possibilities of cyanotic technique, inspired by the artistic language of the artist currently exhibiting at OPTICA. The students' art works will be unveiled to the public during a vernissage which will take place on December 12, 2017 from 5 pm to 6 pm and will be exhibited in the center's Agora space until December 16, 2017.
OPTICA would like to thank the staff and students of Saint-Enfant-Jésus Elementary School.

To get more information on our educational programming, contact Marie-Laure Robitaille: mediation@optica.ca

The educational program is supported by the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the City of Montreal as part of the Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal.



Entente sur le développement