MMFA 2017: Chagall

CHAGALL

COLOUR AND MUSIC

January 28 - June 11, 2017

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Chagall in Canada exhibition event is presented as part of the 2017 Montreal’s 375th anniversary celebration.

Chagall: Colour and Music is the largest exhibition ever devoted to Marc Chagall (1887-1985) in Canada. The exhibition explores the omnipresence of music in the artist’s life and work, through close to 340 works and additional music and documentary film projections. This unusual approach demonstrates the degree to which Chagall’s aesthetic and artistic world is imbued with music, from his paintings, works on paper, costumes, sculptures, ceramics, stained glass and tapestries, as well as theatre stage grand decorative and architectural projects.

Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator of the MMFA stated: “An artist without borders, Marc Chagall orchestrated a work consisting of many forms of expression: easel painting, mural decor, book illustrations, lithographic collections, stage costumes, sculptures, ceramics, stained glass windows, mosaics… In this score, music provides all the harmony: songs from his childhood, religious prayers, fairs, readings, ballet and opera performances, and of course a broad repertoire from classical (Bach and Mozart) and contemporary (Schoenberg and Messiaen) composers. Here, astonishingly, for the first time, the soundtrack of his life forms the subject of an exhaustive exhibition.”

“This exhibition is an original exploration of all the sounds and all the colours of which the oeuvre of Marc Chagall is made. Multidisciplinary and interactive, with the exceptional works, and the inclusion of music, photographs, and films along the way, it is an invitation to a sensory immersion in the work of one of the most important and remarkable artists of the 20th century,” said Ambre Gauthier, Guest Curator.

The exhibition reveals many imaginative and intriguing costumes rarely seen by the public and some decors produced by the artist for the ballets Aleko (1942), The Firebird (1945) and Daphnis and Chloé (1958-59), and the opera The Magic Flute (1967), thanks to exceptional loans from the Opéra de Paris, the New York City Ballet and the New York Metropolitan Opera. They are staged in such a way as to recreate the particular atmosphere of each show by addition of some special effects.

With fully spatialized musical scores, the exhibition is accompanied by various multimedia devices: music, films, photo slides, and especially an impressive projection of the famous ceiling of the Opéra de Paris in Palais Garnier opera house. In partnership with the Opéra national de Paris, Google lab and Google Art Project in Paris digitized in ultra-high definition this 220 square metres painting, completed by Chagall in 1964. A huge technological challenge, some stunning zoom effects were used for these images to reveal the splendour of the material and the meticulous details of this monumental decor - Chagall’s tribute to 14 composers - which up to now have been invisible to the naked eye.

Following the joint presentation of this exhibition at the Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, and La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent de Roubaix in 2015-2016, the Montreal edition has been enhanced by over 100 works, including some rarely loaned masterpieces: Golgotha (1912), Self-portrait with Seven Fingers (1912-1913), the Birth (1911-1912) and the Green Violinist (1923-1924), brought together by some major institutions, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris), the Musée national Marc Chagall (Nice), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Bâle) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Twin granddaughters of Marc Chagall attended the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's celebrations of the opening of the exhibition. On January 24, 2017, they participated at the press conference and the press visit of the exhibition, and posed in front of their grandparents' painting: a self-portrait of Marc Chagall with his wife Bella. See below: Meret Meyer, left, and Bella Meyer, with the same first name as her grandmother.

Quote by Bella Meyers, stated at the press conference:

"This exhibition is like a book that opens a possibility of dreams."

This exhibition is highly recommended. It presents  a unique possibility to see so many original works of Marc Chagall right here, in Montreal.

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For more information about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions, visit the museum's website.

You can also read my article about a documentary film on Marc Chagall with a similar topic: Chagall, Painter of the Music here. 

PAC Museum 2017 Celebrations

Pointe-­à­‐Callière Museum 2017

25th ANNIVERSARY

May 19 - June 20, 2017
Free admission to PAC Museum and all its exhibitions.

2017 will be a year of great celebrations in Canada and Quebec, as well as at the Pointe-­à­‐Callière (PAC) Museum of Archaeology and History, located in the Old Montreal. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the PAC Museum's existence, the 375th anniversary of the founding of the city of Montreal, and the 150th anniversary of the Canada Confederation signed on July 1, 1867, the date of birth of Canada as a country.

The PAC museum was first opened to the public in 1992, to mark the Montreal's 350th birthday. On January 25, the Museum has already started to celebrate it's 25th anniversary. A splendid birthday chocolate cake was cut by Francine Lelièvre, the Museum’s Executive Director.

Pointe-à-Callière plans to be one of the key sites for Montréal’s 375th birthday celebrations thanks to its rich and varied program of activities. The highlight will be the opening of a new historic site, a new PAC building named Fort Ville-Marie – Québecor Pavilion, and an opening of an access to the Montréal’s first sewer collector. Starting on May 19, 2017, the visitors will be able to stroll through a 110-metre section of the sewer collector and enjoy a multi-sensory, contemplative experience thanks to the Memory Collector, a light installation projected onto the stone walls within a specially designed sound environment.

The Montreal was founded on May 17, 1642 (375 years ago), under the authority of the Roman Catholic Société Notre-Dame de Montréal. Right on the site of the present PAC museum, missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance, and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie, to create a colony dedicated to the Virgin Mary. See the maquette - model of the Montreal's first fortification just below. The settlement was enclosed by the St. Laurence river (pictured above the Fort in the photo below), and the small Sainte-Pierre river that was enclosed by the city's first underground sewer collector canal in 1832 (image above).

The PAC Museum had also just launched a new multi-media show that complements the Nicilas Sologub's stained glass work featured at the very top of this article It will also commemorate the events that led to the signing of the Great Peace Treaty of Montreal between the New France and 40 First Nations of North America on August 1, 1701. Here are some images from that show:

In addition, the PAC's permanent exhibition called Building of Montreal, located under the street level, now has a new multimedia installation. It brings to life and illustrates the remains of old masonry and building structures in the museum's archaeological crypt, including one of the only walls from the 1744 fortification that has been preserved and can be seen by the visitors.

In addition to a one month of free admission for everybody between May 19 -June 20, 2017, anyone who is celebrating his or her's 25th birthday (the same as Pointe-à-Callière), will get in for free all-year-long, with proof of age. Another PAC's birthday present: every month, a lifetime membership to the Museum will be awarded to a visitor who has shared a photo taken at the Museum on Instagram, with the #pointeacalliere hashtag.

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For more information about the museum and its 2017 activities, visit the PAC Museum's website.

MAC 2017: Pictures for an Exhibition

FOR TIME IS THE LONGEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO PLACES
Pictures for an Exhibition

Until March 12, 2017

This exhibition is part of the cycle Pictures for an Exhibition, a new series of projects based on works from the MAC Museum’s permanent Collection. The exhibition features around twenty works. It presents works that express need to define a typology of people’s relationships within time and space, and reveals artists’ desire to depict this relationship. All the works on display form a one whole, a single conceptual installation about a human being vis-a-vis a time-space continuum.

Its title “For time is the longest distance between two places” is a quote from Tennessee Williams’ 1944 play The Glass Menagerie. In this play, the characters turn out to be victims of time, faced with its irreversible linear nature. Their lives have temporal coordinates that center in the present moment.

The exhibition offers a selection of works that come from the MAC Museum Collection in which time is a subject of examination. They are works by Nicolas Baier, Patrick Bernatchez, Eric Cameron, Paterson Ewen, Charles Gagnon, Betty Goodwin, Eadweard Muybridge, Roman Opalka, Alain Paiement, Guy Pellerin, Jana Sterbak, François Sullivan, Serge Tousignant, Bill Vazan, Lawrence Weiner, as well as a work by Sarah Sze, titled Measuring Stick, 2015, which looks at the measurement of time and space through the moving image. (See top-most image in the article for Sarah Sze's work).

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Three other versions of Pictures for an Exhibition will be presented over the following periods:

March 28 - September 10, 2017
April 11 - August 13, 2017
August 22, 2017 - January 14, 2018 

The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art - Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) - website.

Auto Show 2017: Toyota Design

Montreal International Auto Show 2017
Toyota Concepts - Design

January 20-29, 2017

As always, the annual Montreal International Auto show presents many surprises to the visitors. This year, it is the Toyota's avant-garde design of their fuel cell car concept prototype that stands out. Toyota's FCV Plus, a Fuel Cell Vehicle (FCV), is hydrogen-powered, but also designed to be itself a power source. It represents the most futuristic concept with multi-purpose global hydrogen-power-grid implications presented in a design of a single car.

Toyota FCV Plus is purported to be more than just a car but also a mobile power source, to be used as a "stable source of electric power" either for home, to feed energy back into the grid, or to charge other cars. The car is designed to be a clean energy source, to operate as part of an "electric power-generating infrastructure," helping to protect the environment and providing energy security.

Actually, the FCV Plus concept is not only about an efficient car. It rather represents Toyota's vision of a sustainable hydrogen society in which hydrogen energy is widely used, and a clean production of hydrogen from a wide array of primary sources will make local, self-sufficient power generation a global reality.

FCV Plus has four in-wheel motors, a fuel cell behind front wheels, and a hydrogen tank behind the rear seats. It will be possible to remove the fuel cell and use it independently of the car as a portable generator. Other electric vehicles could be charged using wireless charging panels on the rear wheels and under the front floor. The car's energy status at any given time could be displayed on the windscreen and on the rear window.

Toyota's concept electrical cars also merit attention. They are COMS, the Supper-Compact Electric Vehicles.

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Also read my other article about the Montreal International Auto Show 2017 here.

Location of the Montreal International Auto Show:

Palais des congrès de Montréal

For more information visit the Montreal International Auto Show website.

MMFA 2017: Leila Alaoui

Leila Alaoui

No Pasara

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting an exhibition of works by a French-Moroccan photographer and video artist Leila Alaoui. Born in Paris in 1982, she lost her life in Burkina Faso a year ago, on January 15, 2016, when gunmen attacked a restaurant and a hotel in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou. She was one of thirty victims, six of them Canadians, humanitarian aid workers from Quebec, who had gone there on a photographic assignment for Amnesty International to produce a report on women’s rights.

The MMFa exhibition is dedicated to her series No Pasara. The title means “Entry denied,” and is a reference to the famous anti-fascist slogan from the Spanish Civil War “No Pasarán” (they shall not pass). This series of 24 pictures was commissioned by the European Union in 2008. It features young Moroccans dreaming of an “Eldorado” located to the north, across the Mediterranean Sea. They are mostly portraits on the theme of migration, borders and freedom.

The exhibition is located on Level S2, in the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, at
1380 Sherbrooke Street West. 

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All images above feature photos by Leila Alaouiare shown at the MMFA No Pasara exhibition.

After its presentation in Montreal, the exhibition will travel to New York, where it will be shown at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair from May 5 to 7, 2017.

For more information about the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, visit the museum's website.

Photo: Leila Alaoui