The Daisy Theatre

Ronnie Burkett, The Daisy Theatre, Photo Vanessa Rigaux

Centaur Theatre

49th Season

The Daisy Theatre

Quebec Premier 

Created and performed by Ronny Burkett

NOTE: For adults ONLY, 16 years and over.

February 20 - March 24, 2018

A world renowned puppeteer Ronnie Burkett makes his Centaur Theatre debut with over 40 personally hand-crafted marionettes. This is Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes' 13th production which follows previous international successes.

The audience will be surprised by the skill and mastery of the puppet manipulation and impersonations techniques displayed by Rony Burkett. Every puppet has a distinct personality and a unique voice, all their specific characteristics are portrayed and reproduced without skipping a beat. Spectators will also appreciate the puppets' many detailed movements and expressions, and the dexterity with which they are conjured. The vocal ranges and volumes Burkett projects are quite impressive. One only marvels how he manages not to over strain or injure his voice, regardless of the agility and diapason of his vocal cords.

Burkett puppets are the classical string-manipulated marionettes. Unlike some other puppeteers who prefer to remain hidden to the public, Burkett lets the audience to observe how he controls and animates his puppets from above. In this way, not only his puppets but he himself becomes a personage to look at, especially since he interacts directly with the audience, becoming the key character of the show he stages. At some instances, the puppets appear as a pretext to display his vocal and gestural choreography and to express, with an ironic twist, his take on many issues, mundane and political.    

Ronnie Burkett, Old Lady, Photo Vanessa Rigaux

The situation vignettes performed by the puppets were all written by Burkett himself. Yet he does not strictly adhere to any text but rather improvises according to his own and/or audiences's reactions and mood. Although he has a great number of puppets, he stages only a few such vignettes, and in the course of the evening he either chooses himself what he is going to present next, or asks the audience which particular personage they would like to see. This makes each performance quite unique.

Recognized as one of Canada’s foremost theatre artists, Ronnie Burkett has been credited with creating some of the world’s most elaborate puppetry. He designs and constructs all of his marionettes in a combination of hand-moulded papier maché pulp and hand-carved wood. Defining characteristics of each puppet, such as eye glasses, wrist watches, hats, and shoes, are fastidiously crafted with intricate detail. Though he works on several puppets concurrently, Mr. Burkett approximates that each one takes six weeks to make and an entire show roughly one year to mount, from concept to opening night.

Ronnie Burkett, Jolie Jolie, Photo Vanessa Rigaux

CREATIVE TEAM

Creator and Performer - Ronnie Burkett

Marionette, Costume and Set Design by Ronnie Burkett

Music and Lyrics and Sound Design by John Alcorn

Production Manager / Artistic Associate – Terri Gillis

Stage Manager – Crystal Salverda

Crystal Salverda, Ronnie Burkett and Eda Holmes at the Opening Night
Photo Nadia Slejskova

Click on images to enlarge them.

For more information, visit the Centaur Theatre website.

Sunday Chat-ups

Sunday, February 25 @ 12:30pm

FREE

Join Lucinda Chodan, Montreal Gazette’s editor in chief as she speaks with designer, director and puppeteer Clea Minaker.

In collaboration with the Montreal Gazette

Talk-Backs

Thursday, March 8

Following the performance.

FREE

Audiences are invited to stay 

after the show for a lively Q&A session

Art Souterrain 2018

Kelly Mark (Ontario) | The Kiss 

Art Souterrain 2018
10th Edition - Labor Improbus

March 3 - 25, 2018

Art Souterrain is an Montreal's annual event that invites a broad audience to discover contemporary art. It is spread over the seven buildings that make up its downtown underground pedestrian network, and nine additional satellite cultural venues.

The 2018 edition's theme is Labor Improbus and will launch on March 3, as part of the Nuit Blanche in Montreal. Art Soutterain festival will spotlight some 98 projects by 94 visual artists from Belgium, Canada, Chile, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, the Netherlands, Quebec, Russia, Spain and the United States.

Karine Giboulo, Hyperland 2014,
Expression

Johannes Zits | Staying on top

 (2017) Performance

Festival-goers will have three weeks to see a great number of installations, sculptures, videos, photographic and digital works, as well as performance art forms that all tie into this year’s theme. They can also participate participating in numerous daily activities.

Carole Condé, Karl Beveridge (Canada / Toronto) | Public Matters 2012 

(Work in Progress) | Photograph

The title Labor Improbus of this year's Art Soutterain festival was selected by Frédéric Loury, principal curator and artistic director, as well as Pascale
Beaudet and Emeline Rosendo, guest curators. The artists participating this year have a plurality of perspectives on the role of an individual in the modern workplace that reflects on new forms of alienation and prescribed conformity within the present global economy.

Frédéric Loury states:

“Labor Improbus stems from the location of the festival in downtown Montreal as well as the remarkable evolution of working tools in the West. Each day, more than 300,000 individuals pass through our exhibition area on their way to many working spaces. In sheer numbers, workers make up the main indirect audience for our annual event. It seemed pertinent to us that we reflect on notions of labour – its diversified and contradictory mechanisms. Citizens

have never been as free to choose their work environment as they now are, and yet they’ve also never been as exploited and vulnerable.” 

John Pilson, Mr Pickup (Video) 

Two main exhibition circuits are available free of charge:

The underground circuit will be spread across the seven following buildings: 1000 de la Gauchetière, Place Bonaventure, Place de la Cité Internationale/OACI, Édifice Jacques-Parizeau, the World Trade Centre Montreal, the Guy-Favreau Complex and the Palais des Congrès de Montréal.
Signage on the ground will guide visitors along the trail of artworks. Additionally, a Frenchlanguage audio guide, available free of charge on the Art Souterrain Festival website, will enrich the visitor experience.

The satellite circuit will, for its part, unfold across nine cultural spaces in Montreal, all of which are festival partners: Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, Art Matters Festival, the Centre de diffusion et d'expérimentation de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (CDEx), the Cinéma du Parc, Espace d’exposition Ubisoft, the Darling Foundry, The Fridge Door Gallery, Galerie Simon Blais and the Grande Bibliothèque, on this milestone year during which Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec.

Art Souterrain Poster

Click on images to enlarge them.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Access to both exhibition circuits as well as to festival activities are free of charge, save for Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, the Darling Foundry, the guided tours and the Focus visits ($7).

The festival brochure is available in both print and electronic formats.

Programming, activities and audio guide: www.artsouterrain.com

https://www.facebook.com/artsouterrain/

https://twitter.com/artsouterrain

https://www.instagram.com/artsouterrain

McCord Museum 2018: Michel Campeau

LIFE BEFORE DIGITAL
February 16 -  May 6, 2018

The McCord Museum is presenting a survey of work by the Montreal photographer Michel Campeau, who is also a collector of amateur photographs. Composed of works executed between 2005 and 2017, the exhibition reflects the artist’s subjective and emotional approach to photography before the digital era. The exhibition consists of approximately 90 works that summarize the material culture and aesthetic legacy of silver-based photography. They include images of historical colour and silver prints, photographs by Campeau himself, and reproductions of slides he bought on eBay.

Life Before Digital offer an exploration of the essential components of silver-based photography, including its cameras and darkroom process, as well as a number of amateur photographs that the artist has selected for their autobiographical resonance.

By combining his own images with those of anonymous photographers, Michel Campeau reveals a practice that has crystallized his childhood memories and his quest for the existential meaning, nourished his poetic vision and, ultimately providing him with an artistic family. His point of view is not to capture a sociological moment in the collective history, but rather to present his personal vision of the poetics of the past. Thus visitors will be drawn into the world of pre-digital photography as seen through the prism of Campeau’s love of the medium: its rituals, people and faces, its capacity to immortalize a moment and make it the stuff of history and identity. By encompassing the amateur snapshot, this artistic review of the tools and techniques of silver-based photography pays tribute to the universal community of photographers.

The exhibition also presents Romain Guedj’s film Michel Campeau: Looking Back at “The Americans” by Robert Frank, which shows Michel Campeau collecting and sorting anonymous slides taken during the 1950s and 1960s, searching for those that strike him as comparable to the photographs published by Robert Frank in his famous book The Americans (1959).

Hélène Samson, curator of the exhibition and Photography Curator at the McCord Museum, stats this about the exhibition:

“Michel Campeau examines a theme that is pivotal in the history of photography – the switch from silver-based or analogue photography to digital. All of us, as amateur photographers, have witnessed and been affected by the changeover. The exhibition explores a type of photography that has been practised for many years but that is now obsolete. It represented a quite different way of making, sharing and collecting images.” 

The exhibition coincides with the publication of Michel Campeau's book Rudolph Edse : Une autobiographie involontaire/An Unintentional Autobiography, which includes essays by Michel Campeau and Hélène Samson. Co-published by the McCord Museum and Les Éditions Loco, Paris, the book is on sale at the Museum Boutique.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a number of other activities, including lectures, discussions and screenings.The events calendar can be consulted on the McCord Museum website.

Three images below show Campeau's Rudolph Edse: An Unintentional Autobiography series.

Michel Campeau

Michel Campeau (Montreal, 1948) has been active on the Montreal photography scene for the past four decades. Since the documentary project titled Disraeli : une expérience humaine en photographie (1973), which marked a milestone in the history of Quebec photography, he has developed a practice that explores the subjective, narrative an ontological aspects of the medium. The extended series Week-end au « Paradis terrestre »! (1970s) expressed his fascination for his fellow human beings with an earthy realism reminiscent of street theatre. It was followed by a more introspective period, during which he examined his own life in relation to nature and photography. Around 2005, in reaction to the switch to digital, Michel Campeau began photographing darkrooms. The resulting series earned international recognition, giving rise to two publications and several exhibitions, notably at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa (2014), and at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris (2015). During the same period, he began collecting vernacular photography and pursuing his creative path via the photographs of others, seeking to unveil the underlying motive force behind the practice of photography and his own desire to narrate the world. Michel Campeau is a recipient of the Bourse de carrière Jean-Paul-Riopelle from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2009) and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (2010). The original and multifaceted path taken by Michel Campeau’s career establishes him as one of the most important photographers of his generation, in Quebec and beyond.

Two images below: Michel Campeau at the press conference and the press visit of his McCord Museum exhibition.

Click on images to enlarge them.

About the McCord Museum

The McCord Museum is dedicated to the preservation, study and appreciation of Montreal’s social history, both past and present, as well as its people, artists and communities. It is home to one of the largest historical collections in North America, consisting of First Peoples objects, costume and textiles, photographs, decorative and visual art, and textual archives, totalling more than 1.5 million artefacts. With its contemporary perspective on history, the McCord Museum produces exciting exhibitions that captivate visitors from Montreal, Canada and beyond. It also offers educational and cultural activities, as well as innovative projects on the Internet. McCord Museum: Our People, Our Stories.

All photos in this article © Nadia Slejskova

MMFA 2018: Napoleon

NAPOLEON

ART AND COURT LIFE IN THE IMPERIAL PALACE

Welcome to the Imperial Palace!

February 3 - May 6, 2018

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents a major exhibition that re-creates the grandiose ambiance of Napoleon’s court through the eyes of the Grand Officers and artists of the “Emperor’s Household.” Over 400 art works and objects from the French palaces, most of them never seen before in North America, reveal the essential role played by the Imperial Household during Napoleon’s reign, from his coronation in 1804 to his exile in 1815.

Some fifty distinguished lenders have allowed MMFA to bring to Montreal works from such institutions as the Louvre, the Château de Fontainebleau, the Mobilier national, the Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Préau, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The public will see the six departments that made up the “Imperial Household”. The institution with its 3,500 employees was responsible for the daily lives and ceremonies of Napoleon and his family. By studying the leading figures of the court, the visitors will discover all the luxury and prestige of palace life. In order to ally himself with the old nobility and register his new dynasty as a continuation of the Ancien Régime, Napoleon dreamed up an etiquette hedged about with strict regulations.

An innovative layout re-creates the splendour of the apartments by incorporating mapping projections. Visitors will discover paintings, sculptures, furniture, silverware and porcelain, tapestries, silk hangings and court dress illustrating the opulence characteristic of the Empire style displayed to serve the spectacle of power.

  

The exhibition is laid out according to the roles of the leading figures in the service of the Imperial family, which helped to shape the image of power. Grand Officers, chamberlains, equerries, master of ceremonies, ladies-in-waiting, pages, artists and artisans were all involved in composing the Imperial legend. Their origins, functions and everyday responsibilities fashioned the Emperor’s life. The exhibition follows the circuits of the courtiers as they moved through the living areas within the palace, the public staterooms that were open to visitors and also the private apartments strictly separated from the rest of the palace, where Napoleon shut himself off to conduct the business of government.

As a new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power at the end of the French Revolution. Transforming the Republic into a monarchy, he was depicted by the court painters as a modern sovereign and hero. With a series of portraits and historical scenes, the introductory gallery shows how artists like François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros and Andrea Appiani had to conform to precise requirements imposed by the Imperial administration in order to create visual propaganda glorifying the head of state.

The MMFA Napoleon Collection

In addition to the items that arrived from other institutions, some twenty of the works and objects presented in this exhibition are from the holdings of the MMFA. Some come from the large collection of objects bequeathed to the Museum by the collector and amateur historian Ben Weider: the recently restored Half-length Portrait of Napoleon in Court Robes (about 1805- 1814), an oil on canvas from the studio of François Gérard; one of Napoleon’s cocked hats worn during the Russian campaign, about 1812; riding gloves and a shirt worn by the Emperor on Saint Helena. Visitors will remark an outstanding pair of spindle vases in Sèvres porcelain, Fire and Water (1806), acquired in 2017. Also from Sèvres, a tea service presented to Cardinal Fesch, Grand Chaplain of the Imperial Household. This collection also contains a discovery, a sketch painted on canvas by Horace Vernet, Napoleon, on the Eve of the Battle of Borodino, Presenting to His Staff Officers the Portrait of the King of Rome Recently Painted by Gérard (1813).

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Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos in this article © Nadia Slejskova
Visit my previous article about a Napoleon exhibition here.

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

MAC 2018 Programming

Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art
2018 Programming 

Today, the MAC Museum announced its programming for 2018, which includes a number of large- scale exhibitions. This final year of its current location before the significant transformations that are  planned for 2019, MAC will present three new exhibitions.

First, visitors will have the chance to enter the universe of Mexican and Montréal artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose work will be showcased as a major solo exhibition. In the fall, the public will be invited to explore a retrospective of Françoise Sullivan, a Québec multidisciplinary artist and co-signatory of the Refus global, and to view Manifesto, a multi-screen cinematic work by Julian Rosefeldt, starring Cate Blanchett.

John Zeppetelli, MAC Director and Chief Curator, presenting 2018 Programming

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER – MAY 24 TO SEPTEMBER 9, 2018

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of the most prominent international artists working in Canada today. Over the past few decades, he has earned a reputation for large-scale, participatory installations that frequently incorporate technology, light and the architecture of public spaces. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work has gained international prominence and is regularly shown by major art institutions.

More than a mid-career survey, the exhibition offers a new conceptual perspective on the artist’s work over the past decade, exploring its poetic and political dimensions from the standpoint of one of its central principles: the notion of co-presence. This concept refers first and foremost to the coexistence of voices, perspectives and singular experiences in Lozano-Hemmer’s works: to the interactions between strangers, to the situations elicited by the dialogic devices deployed by the work. However, co-presence also evokes other, more asymmetrical relationships, such as forced cohabitations and power relations, and speaks to the interplay of gazes and bodies subjected to contemporary techniques of surveillance and control. Staying clear of techno-optimism, Lozano-Hemmer’s work reminds us that new technologies are often double-edged swords.

Coproduced by the MAC and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the exhibition will also be presented at the Museo de arte contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico, from March to August 2019 and  the SFMOMA from April 25 to September 6, 2020.

JULIAN ROSEFELDT: MANIFESTO – OCTOBER 18, 2018 TO JANUARY 20, 2019

Julian Rosefeldt is Professor of Digital and Time-based Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Inspired by the histories of film, art and popular culture, he is internationally renowned for his visually opulent and meticulously choreographed moving-image artworks, mostly presented as complex multi-screen installations.

Manifesto is an immersive video installation consisting of thirteen large-screen projections that stands as a tribute to the literary power of artistic manifestos. This artwork/event, which lies at the crossroads between film, performance and installation, allows audiences to experience a series of scenes screened simultaneously showing us the same actor, Cate Blanchett, taking on various roles. In a performance that “invokes immediate awe,” according to The Independent, and was described by the New York Times as a “tour de force,” the actress becomes a chameleon, showcasing the full extent of her extraordinary talent.

All of the monologues spoken—actually, the only words spoken in the piece—are formed out of various artistic manifestos published over the last 150 years or so. From schoolteacher to homeless man, the thirteen characters embodied by Blanchett pronounce the manifestos of Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, Elaine Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt and Jim Jarmusch, among others.

The MAC is particularly proud to welcome this work to Montréal for its second North American presentation, following the one at the Park Avenue Armory, in New York, in 2016. This famous installation was also presented in the world's largest artistic cities, including Paris, Berlin and Melbourne.

 Manifesto trailer

FRANÇOISE SULLIVAN – OCTOBER 18, 2018 TO JANUARY 20, 2019

This retrospective exhibition highlights the key role of artist, painter, sculptor, dancer and choreographer Françoise Sullivan in the history of modern and contemporary art in Quebec. It’s a chance for visitors to discover or rediscover an artist whose major impact on Quebec and Canadian culture deserves to be more fully recognized.

In addition to presenting the artist’s diverse and multidisciplinary practice, the exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of some of the milestones in her career. The various styles and approaches adopted by Sullivan over the years are contextualized with the help of archival documents

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MANIFESTES – OCTOBER 18, 2018 TO JANUARY 20, 2019

In connection with the exhibitions of Françoise Sullivan and Julian Rosefeldt, the Musée will be presenting a documentary exhibition consisting of original manifestos, including a number of the ones cited in Manifesto.

The presentation will also showcase local manifestos, such as the famous Refus Global, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2018, and was co-signed by Françoise Sullivan.

 PERMANENT COLLECTION: PICTURES FOR AN EXHIBITION

Ongoing since November 2016, Pictures for an Exhibition is an evolving cycle of exhibitions based on works from the collection and intended to generate new connections between historical works and recent acquisitions, between the different media and artists of various generations. This evolving series takes on various forms, the most recent being The Gaze Listens (presented until March 25, 2018) and That’s How the Lights Gets In (presented until August 26, 2018).

Pictures for an Exhibition will also take the form of two new exhibitions this year: The Prophets (April 6 to August 26, 2018) with artworks from Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, as well as Josef Albers, Jack Bush, Sol LeWitt and Jana Sterbak, and Alone Together (May 16 to August 26, 2018) with artworks from Sarah Anne Johnson, Graeme Patterson, Jon Rafman and Jeremy Shaw.

Credits for the top-most image above:

Left: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (in collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko), Zoom Pavilion, 2015

Shown here: Art Basel Unlimited - Art Basel 47, Bâle, Switzerland 
Projectors, 9x infrared cameras, 3x robotic zoom cameras, 3x computers, 2x IR illuminators, 1x ethernet switch, HDMI and USB extenders and cables 
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion

 

Center: Julian Rosefeldt, Stills from Manifesto, 2015

13-channel film installation 
Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, 2015 © Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

 

Right: Françoise Sullivan, Rouge no 3, 5, 6, 2, 1997

Acrylic on canvas

152 x 638 cm (total)

Click on images to enlarge them.

For more information on MAC museum exhibitions and activities, visit the museum's website.