MMFA 2018: Book of Hours

RESPLENDENT ILLUMINATIONS

BOOK OF HOURS FROM THE 13th TO THE 16th CENTURY IN QUEBEC COLLECTIONS

September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

  

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) for the first time presents Books of Hours, conserved in seven Quebec collections. This exhibition is a result of an extensive research. It represents a unique opportunity to admire works primarily from illuminated manuscripts – the priceless legacy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe.

Books of Hours were works of private devotion that first appeared in the 13th century. They were the most popular prayer books made for the laity and were used as primers for learning to read. Often given as wedding gifts, they were “bestsellers” until the 16th century. Over time, they evolved in a variety of ways both textually and iconographically, adapting to the regional differences in devotions, languages and artistic styles of European Christianity.

The 59 artefacts presented for the first time belong to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, McGill University, the arts library of the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, the Archives of the Jesuits in Canada, to Concordia University and the Musée de l’Amérique francophone in Quebec City.

The works on display show the exquisite elegance of some Gothic and Renaissance illuminations from France, the Southern Netherlands, Italy and Southern Germany, as well as other contemporaneous expressions of popular piety. These small images, featuring decorations similar to decorative folk art carved into wood or painted, were probably produced for clients of more modest means. Seven books come from the early days of printing. The books illustrate the development of woodcuts and metal cuts that gradually replaced the art of illumination.

 Women were more than just pious readers of Books of Hours. As the works in the exhibition demonstrate, thye contributed their expertise at various stages of production.

In comparison with other collections of early books in North America, what is special about the Books of Hours held in Quebec is the fact that they were first and foremost devotional works of New France. This is evidenced in the Jesuit Relations as of 1653 and in requests made by the Hospitalières (nursing sisters in Quebec) between 1664 and 1668 to their benefactors in France. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these devotional books found a new vocation, becoming collectible artefacts. Whether complete or fragmentary, Books of Hours came into Quebec by way of inheritances or purchases in Europe. 

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This exhibition is located the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Graphic Arts Centre: Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, Level S2

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

World Press Photo 2018

World Press Photo 2018
61th InternationalEdition

Montreal 2018 - 13th Montreal Edition

August 29 - September 30, 2018

THis EVENT SHOWCASEs THE PHOTOGRAPHs FROM THE WINNERS OF THE WORLD’s MOST PRESTIGIOUS PROFESSIONAL Photo COMPETITION 

For the 61st edition of World Press Photo, the competition jury, chaired by Magdalena Herrera, director of photography for GEO France, sifted through more that 73,000 images submitted by over 4,500 photojournalists hailing from 125 countries. They awarded prizes to 42 photographers from 22 countries.

This photograph is part of an international exhibition that offers a visual journey through the year’s major events, broken down into eight categories: Contemporary Issues, People, Environment, General News, Spot News, Long-Term Projects, Nature and Sports.

Among the themes and topics explored: the terrorist attacks on London’s Westminster Bridge, the liberation of Mosul in Iraq, during which civilians were taken hostage, the exodus of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma) to Bangladesh to escape violence, young Roma refugees who suffer from resignation syndrome, the growing production of human waste in Nigeria, the anti-poaching efforts to protect rhinos in South Africa, the rescue of abandoned elephant calves in Kenya and a bioenergy village in Austria. 

Discover the Montreal's World Press Photo extensive exhibition, which offers a visual panorama of the year’s major news events, as well as a number of complementary exhibitions: The aftermath of Quebec City’s Great Mosque tragedy, by Alexandre Champagne; and also Dans La Rue Photos, by at-risk youths from the organization Dans La Rue; the 6^th edition of Regards by Oxfam-Québec about women’s fight for equality around the world; a photo reportage by LaPresse+; an ICI RDI installation in collaboration with MASSIVart about the work carried out on the ground by its international correspondents; and an interactive experience presented by Planète+.

NEW VISITOR EXPERIENCE FOR 2018: NEW LIGHTING AND PHOTOGRAPHS HUNG FROM CEILING

In partnership with Bonsecours Market, the World Press Photo Montreal team has invested in the acquisition of a brand-new lighting system and has hung the majority of photographs from the ceiling, thereby creating a superior visual environment to previous years.

The World Press Photo Montreal is presented daily, from August 29 to September 30, 2018 at Bonsecours Market in Old Montreal, andproduced by Arkar, in collaboration with Oxfam-Québec, ICI RDI, La Presse+, Planète+, Newad, La Vitrine culturelle, Nightlife.ca, Publicité Sauvage, L’Itinéraire and Urbania, and the support of the SDC Vieux-Montréal. 

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All Photos @ Nadia Slejskova

McCord Museum 2018: Cristóbal Balenciaga

BALENCIAGA - MASTER OF COUTURE
NORTH AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE

June 15 - October 14, 2018

This exhibition, the North American exclusive premiere, is a major fashion exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) of London. It is presented at the Montreal's McCord Museum by Holt Renfrew and Ogilvy.

The exhibition examines what made Cristóbal Balenciaga’s creations so special, offering a close perspective on the design of the garments and the precise skills that went into their making. His legacy is also portrayed through the display at McCord of creations by his protégés like Courrèges and Ungaro, who trained and worked at his Paris salon, and also through his self-proclaimed followers of the late 20th century and today.

Revered by his contemporaries and equally by the later decades fashion designers, Cristóbal Balenciaga represents the pinnacle of haute couture in the 1950s and 1960s. His exquisite craftsmanship, which pioneered the fabrics' innovative cutting and use, set the tone for the modernity of the late 20th century fashion.

There are some 80 garments on display at this exhibition, along with hats and accessories, drawn mainly from the V&A's extensive fashion holdings—the largest collection of Balenciaga in the UK. There are also sketches, photographs and fabric samples that contextualize the garments and patterns, while X-rays, toiles and film are used to reveal details how the garments were constructed and made.

Suzanne Sauvage, President and Chief Executive Officer of the McCord Museum, stated:

"We are thrilled to be the only North American venue for this unique exhibition highlighting the artistry of one of the 20th century’s greatest fashion designers....The exhibition is an opportunity for the Museum to present several Cristóbal Balenciaga dresses from its collection, in addition to offering insight into his lasting impact on generations of designers and the history and evolution of haute couture. Balenciaga's inspiration and influence continue to this day."

Very popular in Montreal

Something that people may not know is that Balenciaga was also very much a part of the imported fashion scene in Montreal. Beginning in 1939, the city's department stores offered seasonal glimpses of Balenciaga gowns in their fashion shows. Until the late 1960s, Holt Renfrew, Eaton's and Morgan's (now The Bay) each imported a few Balenciaga models and showed them to potential clients. Balenciaga garments were also featured in a Paris couture show brought to Montreal for Expo 67.

Thanks to this interest in Balenciaga, the great Spanish designer, the McCord Museum has gradually acquired some fifteen Balenciaga garments for its Dress, Fashion and Textiles collection. The exhibition features four of the most exquisite items in the McCord collection.

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For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.

Soirée Mode Montréal 2018 & Dress To Kill 10th Anniversary

La Soirée Mode Montréal with Dress to Kill
First Edition

June 6, 2015

This event celebrated the great Quebec and Canadian fashion design industry and especially its top notch designers. It is bound to become an annual tradition to accompany the start of the Formula 1 Grand Prix races, held in Montreal each year in the beginning of June. While the city celebrates the speed of the perfectly designed, sleek and powerful racing cars, this racing fervour also translates into other areas of power design that catches one's eye, attracting a special attention of onlookers. It overflows into fashion with the sense of excitement and high class living, as well as into the art of designing accessories and makeup, and also various drinks and cocktails. The downtown area of the city becomes abuzz with the excitement of the Grand Prix fervour, a perfect place for watching exciting designs and racing car celebrities. 

La Soirée Mode Montréal, that included the celebration of the 10^th anniversary of a fashion design magazine Dress to Kill,  kicked off with style and flair the festivities of the 50th edition of the Montreal Formula 1 Grand Prix.

This event was held at the opulent and classy Bar George in the Victorian Le Mount Stephen hotel. For this special occasion, the best personalities in the Canadian fashion design and promotion industries were invited:

Adonis Stevenson, Alanis Désilets, Alexandre Bilodeau, Alicia Moffet, Amélie B. Simard, Amelia Racine, Anne-Marie Losique, Andy Mailly Pressoir, Angelo Cadet, Antoine Olivier Pilon, Béatrice Bouchard, Brigitte Bédard, Camille Felton, Carole-Anne Toupin, Claudia. Marques, David La Haye, Grégoriane Minot, Kevin Raphael, Jessica Harnois, Jessica Lapointe, Joannie Rochette, Jonas, Isabelle Charest, Isabelle Racicot , Lucie Laurier, Marie-Pier Morin, Marie St-Pierre, Matières Fécales, Mathieu Courtemanche, Maxim Roy, Mitsou, Patrick Côté, PO Beaudouin, Philippe Berghella et Crystal Miller

Many celebrities posed on the red carpet, displaying their unique taste and specific designs. The great attendance and success of this event predicts that its future editions will be equally great or even bigger platforms as a meeting place of the top Canadian fashion design industry. 

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All photos in this article by Nadia Slejskova.

MAC 2018: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
UNSTABLE PRESENCE

May 24 - September 9, 2018, 

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is hosting an exhibition by the Montreal-based and internationally-acclaimed artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It is his largest solo show in Canada or the United States. It provides an unusual and a unique museum experience where the visitor participation and interaction with the exhibited pieces is necessary for the full functionality of the art work. Those participating will in effect become a part of the works since they are needed to reveal the installations' underlying central concept.

Unstable Presence is a major survey of Lozano-Hemmer’s work over the past 18 years. It brings together 21 pieces, including several large-scale immersive installations. In his work, Lozano-Hemmer draws on science, technology, politics, sociology, poetry, music and art history, while engaging the public in a conversation

Born in Mexico, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as a conceptual artist, is a leading international figure in participatory and digital-media practices. He is known on the art world stage where his work is regularly shown in the most prestigious institutions. During the 1990s, he began exploring the performance and interaction potential of his works, in particular, the merging of various artistic disciplines with technology, which he described as the language of our time, basic and inevitable.

The participatory and technological aspects of Lozano-Hemmer’s works are based on co-presence, where live and recorded data overlap. Through the use of microphones, face-recognition algorithms, biometric scanners and computerized surveillance, artworks interact with the visitors in performances that could be perceived as both playful and intimate, but where the technology underlying the interaction often echoes more troubling social, economic and political dynamics.

Showing how we interact with technology and making the internal mechanisms of devices visible is one of the strategies deployed in Lozano-Hemmer’s works. As one walks through the exhibition, the physical presence of the works and their sculptural occupation of space, makes the invisible digital world on which they are based quite factually present. This concept overpowers the visitors right in the Museum's entry hall, where the impressive Pulse Spiral (2008), is displayed. 300 light bulbs and kilometres of electrical wire are configured to reproduce, through light, the beating hearts of the Museum’s visitors. The evanescent spiral of lights swill betrays the fascination with seeing one’s heartbeat, and the way it eventually merges with the recordings of the previous 299 participants.

For music lovers, there is Sphere Packing: Bach (2018, a new work by the artist presented for the very first time), and Sphere Packing: Wagner (2013). These installations are two in a series of 17 works that concentrate the entire musical production of a composer into a single multi-channel sphere. The black-glazed porcelain sphere dedicated to Richard Wagner (13 centimetres comprising 110 channels of sound) hangs from the ceiling and visitors have to bring their ear up close in order to hear the individual compositions. The far more prolific composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, required 1,128 individual speakers distributed through a 3-metre sphere that visitors may physically enter and thus immerse themselves in the totality of the Baroque composer’s opuses, played simultaneously.

In Call on Water (2016), the writings of celebrated Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who was the artist’s uncle, are presented in a fountain that acts as a poetry machine. The water is turned into cold vapour by ultrasonic atomizers, which project the words into the air above the basin for a few compelling instants. Contemplative and poetic, the work highlights the materiality of language and converts it, as the poet would probably have appreciated, into a breathable atmosphere.

In a whole different register, one which engages with power relations and surveillance equipment, Zoom Pavilion (2015), made in collaboration with Polish artist Krzysztof Wodizcko, is a room-sized interactive installation where participants are surrounded by projected black-and-white images of faces and bodies localized within the space. Twelve computerized surveillance cameras track the presence of participants and, employing facial recognition combined with background subtraction and machine-learning algorithms, record their spatial relationships to one another. The piece makes evident the omnipresence of surveillance cameras, but what is at stake is the tracking of public assembly, and keeping an archive of how long and how far each visitor was from each other.

Vicious Circular Breathing (2013),  is a large sculptural installation evoking both a curious scientific device and a gigantic musical wind instrument, similar to an organ. It consists of brown paper bags that inflate and deflate at human breathing rates, a set of motorized bellows and valves that control the bags, and a sealed glass room with a decompression chamber. Visitors are invited to enter the glass chamber to breathe the air that was previously breathed by earlier participants. Despite its amusing musical allusions, the piece is disturbing and uncomfortable: it includes warnings regarding the risks of asphyxiation, contagion and panic. Among other interpretations, the piece is a statement on the limits of the planet’s resources but also a commentary on the supposedly empowering culture of participation, — in this piece your participation makes the air more toxic for future visitors.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a recipient of the 2015 Governor General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts. In June 2016, he was named a Companion of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

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For more information about MAC, visit the museum's website.