MAC 2020-2021: Materiality of Language

La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux

34 local artists reflect upon the materiality of language

Virtual preview of the exabits available from December 17, 2020

Click on 3 images on this MAC webpage

The Montreal Museum of Contaporary Art (MAC) presents La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux. It showcases two curators Mark Lanctôt and Francois LeTourneux and their engagement with the local art scene, as well as the notion of language in all its permutations. These ideas evolved considerably over the course of the past two years, with visits to more than eighty local artists’ studios, conversations with a multitude of artists, writers, researchers, thinkers and diverse art practitioners, culminating in the current exhibition. 

 
“The artists and collectives selected for the show represent an extensive and richly diverse body of works around the theme of language, and how, beyond its spoken and written form, it can also be inscribed upon bodies, gestures and on the very material world around us,” explain the curators. “These works enable us to observe the transmission and translation of knowledge, memory and affects as these come toe to toe with the boundary between the body and technology”.                         

World events shape the narrative
 
Numerous questions were raised during the preparation of this show, which bringing forth new meanings especially in light of the current circumstances. “What is body language at a time when a world-wide health crisis literally force the confined separation of our bodies? How our focus, awareness of time, and our physical senses have been transformed? How can the tools we now rely on to communicate with others subjugate their just scrutiny?”

The show assembles a number of works that explore these issues and offer responses that are, according to the curators, “significant for their kaleidoscopic voices each of which fragment into a unique view of the world.” Every piece contains its own logic while concurrently weaving conversations with other pieces at the exhibition, inviting the visitor to discover and to interpret.

Artists:

• Vikky Alexander
• Trevor Baird
• Thomas Bégin
• Simon Belleau
• Scott Benesiinaabandan
• Sandeep Bhagwati
• Jacques Bilodeau
• Rosika Desnoyers
• Mara Eagle
• Surabhi Ghosh
• Carla Hemlock
• Kristan Horton
• Sheena Hoszko
• Isuma
• Kelly Jazvac
• Suzanne Kite
• Moridja Kitenge Banza
• Karen Kraven
• Marlon Kroll
• Nicolas Lachance
• Yen-Chao Lin
• Anne Low
• Luanne Martineau
• Manuel Mathieu
• N.E. Thing Co
• Jérôme Nadeau
• Isabelle Pauwels
• Guillaume Adjutor Provost
• Walter Scott
• Erin Shirreff
• Eve Tagny
• Samuel Walker
• Nico Williams
• Thea Yabut

Noteworthy: digital preview, film program, podcasts, catalogue

• A free digital preview acting as an introduction to the exhibition, the works and the artists will be available on the MAC’s website starting December 17th.
   
• Author, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, proposes as guest curator a film program entitled chorus, talk through life during the course of the exhibition with artists Denise F. da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Esery Mondésir, Darlene Naponse, Jamilah Sabur, Kengné Téguia, and Suné Woods.
   
• Daisy Desrosiers, an independent curator, will host a series of podcast interviews with some of the artists of the exhibition.  Available soon on the MAC’s website.
   
• A catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes an essay by Krista Lynes, several short texts written by Nicole Brossard, Marie-Andrée Gill, Rawi Hage, Symon Henry, Joana Joachim, Michael Nardone, Madeleine Thien, Maude Veilleux, Jacob Wren, as well as a number of extracts compiled by Raymond Boisjoly, by Maya Deren, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Branden Hookway, Alfred Jarry, Catherine Malabou, Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Serres.

MAC is fully committed to supporting and encouraging the Québec art scene. 

 

McGill Library 2020: Greetings that Pop

SEASON'S GREETINGS THAT POP

The McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) has a fast number of books with cut out images inside them that pop out when you open the page. This season, the McGill Library's RBSC is bringing into focus three festive pop-up scenes from the Sheila R. Bourke Collection that consists of over 2000 items and is rich in the “golden age” of book illustrations from the 19th and to the mid-20th centuries like chapbooks, “toy books” as well as deluxe gift books. Watch the following video.

McGill rare pop up remix video

You can read about the McGill Pop-Up collection here.

The following two videos might also be of interest to you:

McGill rare wintry remix

A Rare Wintry Martlet Remix

 

McGill Library 2020: DIY rare holiday phenakistoscope

DO IT YOURSELF HERITAGE HOLIDAY PHENAKISTOSCOPE

With a slogan Trot away from 2020 with our DIY rare holiday phenakistoscope, the McGill University Library is offering to the public, especially to children and all those young at heart, a real treat of HOW TO make your own phenakistoscope. If you do not know what it is, do not worry. All you have to do is go to this library website and download a .PDF file with a cut out template. Than watch this YouTube video with the instructions how to make it.

Enjoy returning into the past discovering an ingenious invention from those past times.

Happy Holidays !!!

MMFA 2020: Virtual Exhibitions

MMFA MUSEUM'S GIFT OF THE HOLIDAYS:

THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS OFFERS ITS EXHIBITIONS VIRTUALLY

December 1,2020 - January 11, 2021

MMFA's  Gift of the Holidays has been extended until January 24, 2021.

To celebrate the holiday season despite the closure of cultural institutions, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is giving its large audience a present, it is inviting the public to explore its exhibitions in the comfort of their home. Go to mbam.qc.ca/en/museums-gift-of-the-holidays/ to access free 3D virtual tours of four exhibitions. After January 11, 2011 these virtual exhibitions will be reserved exclusively for Museum Members. It is a tremendous opportunity to experience these great exhibitions during the times when many of us are not with friends or family.

With great image quality, these virtual tours allow visitors to stroll through the exhibition space at their own pace, admiring each work, reading all the texts on the wall, and viewing the smallest details up close. There is no time limit on the tours, and visitors can return as often as they wish until January 11, 2021. The premature closure of Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism in early October due to the pandemic disappointed members of the public, and this virtual version provides a last chance to visit it. The audio guide has been integrated into the tour, letting you stroll through the exhibition almost as if you were there.

The virtual tours on offer are:

Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures
This major exhibition dedicated to Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), a towering figure in Canadian, Quebec and international modern art, is based on original research. The exhibition explores the artist's interest in the North and Indigenous cultures, with nearly 160 works and more than 150 artefacts and archival documents. It sheds new light on the artist's work during the 1950s and 1970s by retracing the travels and influences that fed his fascination with northern regions and North American Indigenous communities.

Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism: Signac and the Indépendants
Presented exclusively at the MMFA in the summer of 2020, this major exhibition invites visitors on a journey to the artistic effervescence of France at the turn of the 20th century. Through over 500 works from an outstanding private collection, the public will discover a magnificent body of paintings and graphic works by Signac and avant-garde artists: Impressionists, Fauves, Symbolists, Nabis, Cubists, Expressionists, and Neo‑Impressionists. (You can read more about this Impressionists exhibition in my blog here).

Yehouda Chaki: Mi Makir; A Search for the Missing
This exhibition pays tribute to the victims and survivors of the Shoah, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. It immerses the visitor in a poignant installation composed of shadowy portraits of individuals executed in concentration camps, as well as a sculpture of books sadly reminiscent of the burnings of Jewish, liberal or leftist books declared non-German by groups of Nazi students.

In mid-December, one other virtual exhibitions will be added to the list:  

Manuel Mathieu: Survivance
The exhibition brings together some twenty paintings never before shown in Canada, as well as an installation created especially for the MMFA, in which the artist's roots and memories gradually reveal themselves, punctuating the vivid, striking compositions. This first solo exhibition of the artist in a North American museum reveals a fluid, expressive, quasi-Expressionist and sometimes even abstract painting style, revealing a world of contrasts and tensions.

Enjoy the MMFA's Virtual Exhibitions and have a very Happy Holidays!

mbam.qc.ca/en/museums-gift-of-the-holidays/ 

Acknowledgments

The immersive 3D virtual tours were created by Gaspésie Virtuelle,
 
Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures
An exhibition presented by Hydro-Québec.
Major public partner: Government of Canada.
Major patron: Audain Foundation.
In collaboration with Hatch, the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation, the Heffel Fine Art Auction House, Tourisme Montréal, RBC and the MMFA's Angel Circle.
 
Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism 
The MMFA gratefully acknowledges the anonymous private collector for the very generous loan of his works for this exhibition.
Presented by Hydro-Québec
In collaboration with: XN Worldwide Insurance, Tourisme Montréal, MMFA's Angel Circle

Yehouda Chaki: Mi Makir; A Search for the Missing
Major Patron: Bensadoun family
In collaboration with: The Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal and the Azrieli Foundation
With the generous contribution of Roslyn Margles and the Jonathan and Susan Wener family
And support from the exhibition ambassadors: The Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation, The Saryl and Stephen Gross Family Foundation, Riva and Thomas O. Hecht, Sari Hornstein, Amy Weinberg and Norbert Hornstein, Joel A. and Rhoda Pinsky, Julia and Stephen F. Reitman, Irwin and Sara Tauben and Viscofan Canada
 
Manuel Mathieu: Survivance
In collaboration with the MMFA's Young Philanthropists' Circle.

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

All images courtesy of @MMFA, 2020.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover over images for description and credits.