Spotlight: Changing of the Guard
Nicolas Baier arrived on the national art scene in 2000 via La Biennale de Montréal. Since then, the 35-year-old artist has joined Galerie René Blouin and, last fall, made his major-museum solo debut at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Baier's digitally manipulated photos read like passing glances at daily life suddenly stopped, refocused, then intensely examined layer by layer. He likens the final results to a tape mix where each song is completely different from the next. Next on his agenda is a massive public art commission for Concordia University—a translucent glass-curtain house plant set to rise five storeys above Ste-Catherine and Guy.
Anne-Marie Ninacs carries a business card from the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec that sums up expectations as she takes on the role of its curator of contemporary art. Officially her title is curator of contemporary art since 2000—curator of 21st-century art—the first to be carded as such, anywhere, to our knowledge. The museum is in Quebec City but Ninacs is a welcome and familiar presence on the Montreal art scene, where there is much appreciation for the intellectual rigour she brings to her job. In the new year she will work on a major project called Lucidité. It is about light, fear, repression and misinformation.
Pierre-François Ouellette is happy these days. His gallery, Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, celebrated its second anniversary only weeks after its return from Art Forum Berlin, the international art fair of choice for young contemporary galleries. Specializing in photography, new-media art and works on paper, Ouellette has parlayed a business background and time in Ottawa working with Shirley Thomson into an energetic new commercial space that has seen artists such as Alexandre Castonguay, Jérôme Fortin, Ed Pien and Michel de Broin emerge under its umbrella. And his future is mapped out: "It's about consolidating links and developing markets."
Bernard Lamarche is a familiar byline name for Montreal readers. As art and new-music reporter for Le Devoir, he reaches a select but influential audience. He is not shy about expressing his opinion or following a story into controversial terrain. During the past year the 33-year-old critic has branched out by taking on some significant curatorial work, organizing "Manif d'art 2" in Quebec City, a show of more than 50 artists from Canada, Europe and the United States. The theme was "Bonheur et simulacres," or happiness and its pretence—which follows a curve of intellectual undoing fitting for his role as critic and begs the question: is he smiling here?
Stéphane Aquin took over the reins as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1998, at a moment when the representation of contemporary practice had stalled in the venerable institution's exhibition offerings. He set about bringing in up-to-the-minute international artists and creating a project room that has showcased works by the likes of Christine Davis and David Hoffos. Most recently he brought us the genre-busting, freewheeling "Global Village: The 60s," a show that is praiseworthy for finding a viable curatorial agenda under which to exhibit Minimalist sculpture by Donald Judd alongside Janis Joplin's psychedelia-painted 1965 Porsche Cabriolet.
Caroline Andrieux now calls hip Multimedia City home, but when she first came to the Faubourg des Récollets in the early '90s it was a derelict industrial neighbourhood in the portlands west of Old Montreal. A decade later, her eyes still gleam when she remembers the urban ruin she found there. In her native France, she worked for a group that retrieved abandoned buildings for culture and it became the model for Quartier Éphémère, the growing arts organization that, under Andrieux's leadership, has created offices, exhibition space and visiting artist studios, becoming a model of art-driven civic creativity.
Stéphane La Rue upholds a great tradition. His day job is to confront the legacy of Quebec abstraction as it enters a third generation. The signposts are Borduas, Molinari, Tousignant, Gaucher, Leduc and Gagnon. La Rue pays them homage by pushing the boundaries of the monochrome painting they helped establish. With delicately textured white canvases La Rue retrieves the beginnings of abstraction. His paintings carry a deft sense of optical movement that washes across the surfaces and carries out to edges so that the paintings engage in a physical interaction with the space beyond them. The result makes for a visceral poetry of restless expansion.
Pascal Grandmaison poses for a classic portrait of the artist as a young man. His exhibition at Montreal's Galerie B-312 in spring 2003 became a critical favourite that launched his career. Soon after the opening, dealer René Blouin asked him to join his gallery and then the phone calls started coming, including one from the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, which is showing new photos (like the one on the wall). A billboard project launches in Montreal in the new year and in 2005 a solo exhibition is set for Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain. After that, Grandmaison plans to spend some well-earned time off windsurfing and snowboarding.
Karilee Fuglem begins with materials that are barely noticeable, like tape and fishing line. If her artworks sound delicate in conception, they are far from it in effect: encountering a room of the beautiful, understated, sometimes semi-visible constructions she has created for close to a decade is not just to see something new but to see, and to perceive with all the senses, in new and unsettling, even slightly alien ways—something that a lot of art promises, but little actually delivers. At a moment when contemporary art has seen it all, Fuglem's ability to leave viewers surprised by their own sensations is a fine, and characteristically subtle, accomplishment.
Winter 2003
This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by The Fraser Elliott Foundation in memory of Betty Ann Elliott
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