McCord 2019: Haida - Supernatural Stories

Sding K’awXangs—Haida: Supernatural Stories

A Look at Haida Culture

April 23 - October 27, 2019 

McCord Museum has launched a new exhibition featuring the Haida Indian art and crafts from the archipelago of Haida Gwaii on Canada’s northwest coast. It features more than 100 rare objects, most of which came from the McCord Museum’s rich Indigenous Cultures collection. It also includes works by contemporary artists. This is an immersive exhibition of Haida culture of yesterday and today that showcases the beauty and unique treasures of people that were almost wiped out in the late 19th century. 

In addition to objects that originally came from a private collection of an adopted Montrealer George Mercer Dawson and were later incorporated into the McCord Museum’s collection, the exhibition showcases works by contemporary Haida artists that were selected by the guest curator Kwiaahwah Jones.

The exhibition highlits various aspects of Haida culture such as a unique artistic expressive vocabulary in-bedded into individual objects by various artists, the meaning they put into their works, the mastery of their individual techniques, and the spiritual context and essence they incorporate into their pieces. This always parallels the supernatural stories that inhabit and animate their artifacts. Also, the spiritual meaning of coming together within their community and utilizing the artistic creations at such gatherings and potlatches is also brought into focus.

Kwiaahwah Jones, Haida guest curator of the exhibition, stated:

“Descended from supernatural beings that emerged from the ocean, our people have occupied Haida Gwaii since time immemorial, surviving many challenges over the millennia. Today, we continue to work hard to build up our culture and our art, to preserve our endangered language and to heal from intergenerational trauma, all the while protecting and respecting the natural and supernatural worlds. The survival of the Haida is a story to be told, retold and celebrated.”

The legacy of adopted Montrealer George Mercer Dawson

The objects in Sding K’awXangs—Haida: Supernatural Stories are a testament to the know-how of the Haida culture, from the late 18th century to today. Most of them were collected in 1878 by adopted Montrealer, geologist and early anthropologist George Mercer Dawson on one of his trips through Haida Gwaii. The eldest son of Sir John William Dawson, principal of McGill University from 1855 to 1893, George Mercer Dawson was the source of most of the Haida objects now in the McCord Museum’s Indigenous Cultures collection. When his work took him to Haida Gwaii, Dawson was struck with admiration for the Haida people and their culture, which sparked his lifelong desire to preserve it.

The McCord Museum

Custodian of the vast Indigenous Cultures collection

The McCord Museum’s Indigenous Cultures collection consists of over 16,500 archaeological and historic artefacts recounting nearly 12,000 years of history—eloquent examples of the material culture of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis, primarily from Canada. It explores the deep meaning of the artefacts not just as historical evidence, but as expressions of the development, evolution and constant revitalization of Indigenous cultures. The Indigenous Cultures collection is a key component of the McCord’s permanent collections.

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For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.

Blind Date

Centaur Theatre / 50th Season

BLIND DATE

Spontaneous Theatre Creation 

by Rebecca Northon

April 9 - 28, 2019

Starring Rebecca Northan, Emma Brager, David Benjamin Tomlinson and Lili Beaudoin as Scenographer.

Blind Date, a comedy, is the closing play of the Centaur Theatre's 50th anniversary season (2018-2019). This is also a celebratory year for the Spontaneous Theatre Creation, their 10th anniversary season. Founded and created by the master improviser Rebecca Northan, the Spontaneous Theatre Creation performances had earned an acclaim in the on-stage theater world for it energetic, unpredictable stage enactments, where each night a different blind date encounter takes place.

A blind date partner is chosen from the audience. The play is about 90 minutes long, without an intermission, and the professional actor has to actively engage the "blind date" volunteer to support and navigate his untrained onstage presence. The clumsy, awkward moments have to be blazed over with the principle actor's acting skills, assuring the professionalism of each performance. 

Rebecca Northan's stage presence as Mimi is powerful and impressive. She makes the audience laugh. She is also tremendously skilled in making her volunteer "blind date" to navigate through the invented onstage story-line even when venturing into areas of discomfort.

In addition to the Mimi's principal onstage personage, a male sole principle actor was also added. Rebecca Northan stated:  

“… an audience member asked, ‘Would you ever do a queer version?’ and it’s in our nature to say, ‘YES!’”

You can see David Benjamin Tomlinson playing an onstage character Mathieu on Thursday nights April 11, 18 and 25.

Blind Date was originally commissioned as a 10-minute piece for the Spiegelshow at Toronto’s Harbourfront as part of World Stage. The full-length production has been touring since 2009 across Canada and the US, selling out in Toronto, on Broadway and in London's West End.

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITIES

Sunday Chat-Up

April 14 at 12:30pm

Join Lucinda Chodan, the Montreal Gazette's Editor-in-Chief, in conversation with Shôvàne Brisindi, from Clowns Without Borders, who will talk about her latest visit to Haiti. For over 20 years, Clowns Without Borders has been organizing shows and workshops for people affected by war, misery, or exclusion. This is also a free public event with refreshments provided by Bonaparte Restaurant.

 
Post-Show Talkbacks

Thursday April 25 and Sunday April 28

Audience members are invited to stay after the performances for insightful Q&A’s with these masters of improvisation and spontaneous theatre.
 
Saturday Salon

April 27 following the 2pm matinée in Centaur’s main floor gallery. Eda’s guest will be Rebecca Northan, creator and performer of Blind Date, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary and 800^th performance while at Centaur Theatre!  

For more information, visit the Centaur Theatre website.

The Shoplifters

Centaur Theatre / 50th Season

THE SHOPLIFTERS

Written & directed by Morris Panych

March 19 - April 7, 2019

Morris Panych, who wrote and directed of The Shoplifters, is the two-time Governor General’s Award-winning Canadian playwright. The Shoplifters is a comedy about the effects of consumerism on people from the lower socially divided strata of our urban communities.

The play had a world premiere in 2014, in Washington, DC, a huge metropolitan area and a capital city of the world’s most powerful country that is dedicated to free enterprise and the power of the dollar. Ironically, the plays’ character Alma remarks, “You wanna talk about stealing? Who stole the American dream?”

Alma, a feisty geriatric shoplifter, spends her time helping to redistribute what she classifies as undeserved corporate profit to her less fortunate neighbours. Through her interaction with the play’s other three characters, it become apparent she is quite conscious how her steeling actually creates jobs not only for the security guards, but also all those who design and produce security equipment. Her comments lead the audience to ponder on the mechanics of the modern capitalist societies, and how nothing can really be qualified as terribly bad because in the long run all people’s disruptive, negative behaviours lead to stimulating industries to curb them, consequently creating innovations, jobs, more capital and more money.

Eda Holmes, Centaur Theatre’s Artistic and Executive Director, stated:

“Morris is one of Canada’s best contemporary humorists, looking at important, timely issues with the social consciousness of the guy on the street. With The Shoplifters, he questions right versus wrong within the larger corporate context. Grey areas abound but at its core, The Shoplifters is a love story of sorts: loving your community and putting it first. The wonderful eccentricities of these characters give us hope for humanity.” 

PRODUCTION TEAM

Actors: Ellen David, Marie-Ève Perron, Michel Perron, Laurent Pitre

Set & Costume Designer: Ken MacDonald

Lighting Designer: Alan Brodie  
Fight Director: Sylvio Archambault

Associate Lighting Designer: Eryn Griffith
Stage Manager: Elaine Normandeau
Assistant Stage Manager: Danielle Laurin  

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Post-Show Talkbacks:  Thursday March 28 and Sunday March 31. Audience members are invited to stay after the performances for insightful Q&A’s with members of the play's production team.

For more information, visit the Centaur Theatre website.

McCord Museum 2019: Hannah Claus

there’s a reason for our connection

Dialogue and Encounter

Artist-in-Residence Program Exibition

6th Edition

March 7 - August 11, 2019

For the 6^th year of its Artist-in-Residence program, the Montreal's McCord Museum presents an exhibition by a multidisciplinary visual artist Hannah Claus who has Mohawk and English ancestry. Claus draws inspiration both from the McCord’s Indigenous Cultures permanent collection and the Text Archives. Her work portrays the concepts of dialogue and encounter, which are a cornerstone of what she refers to as relationality, further identifying it as “a principle that is at the heart of Indigenous cultures ".

The works on display are all new artistic pieces created specifically for this exhibition. They are presented together with museum’s object that inspired them, thus conjuring up the invisible encounters and exchanges across historical eras that are part of our shared histories. This also bringing into focus several artefacts from McCord’s large collection.

There are works that focus on writing and communication, others evoke temporality through repetitive imagery and translucent media. Claus uses these concepts to evoke what is not necessarily visible at first glance, but what the visitor might perceive or even feel on viewing her works.

“Culture is alive. It’s fascinating to draw inspiration from objects and to bring them to life, to make them live and breathe a little,” she states.

She further states about her work:

 “I use installations to create sensory environments that speak to memory and transformation. My works explore the relationships between the specific, the personal and the real, which lie at the heart of an Indigenous cosmogony—often the world view of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), in particular—in order to question our perception of time, space and memory… What I want to do is create a dialogue between present and past.”  

About Hannah Claus

Hannah Claus, a visual artist of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and English ancestry, has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) since 2001. In her installations, she explores our connections with memory, space and time; she often works in collaboration with other artists, using processes of repetition and accumulation to express an Indigenous method and perspective. A graduate of the University of Ottawa (1992), the Ontario College of Art and Design (1998) and Concordia University (MVA, 2004), she has exhibited her works in numerous arts centres and public museums across Canada, as well as in Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, Chile and the United States. Hannah Claus is a member of the Tyendinaga Mohawk community of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario.

Hannah Claus

Hannah Claus

Artist-in-Residence program

The McCord Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program invites artists from Montreal and elsewhere to explore and interact with the museum’s collections, casting a critical and conceptual eye and relating them to their own artistic practices. Through the works they create, artists in residence revisit the social and historical facets of artefacts in the McCord’s collections and address how they help construct our identity as Montrealers and as a society.

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All images @ Nadia Slejskova

For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.

MMFA 2019: Montreal Couture

Denis Gagnon

Denis Gagnon

MONTREAL COUTURE
10 contemporary Quebec fashion designers 

March 2 - September 8, 2019

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is showcasing Quebec fashion by bringing into focus for the first time creations of 10 local designers who define current Quebec fashion. These both established and emerging artists have very different and distinctive styles: Philippe Dubuc, Denis Gagnon, Ying Gao, Helmer Joseph, Nathon Kong, Marie-Ève Lecavalier, MARKANTOINE, Fecal Matter, Atelier New Regime and Marie Saint Pierre.

Not necessarily intended to be worn, quite a few of the exhibited pieces are simply artistic, design concepts to be admired and used to stimulates ideas for future fashion creations.

Denis Gagnon (see images at the top of the article) blew through the Quebec scene at the beginning of the 2000 with his irreverent style and spectacular pieces characterized by a sophisticated use of volumes, pleats, leather and zippers. In 2010, the MMFA dedicated an exhibition to him. It followed the 2008 Yves Saint Laurent exhibition and preceded The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier in 2011.

Marie Saint Pierre

Phiippe Dubuc

For more than thirty years, Marie Saint Pierre, the first fashion designer admitted to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, has created clothing with precise and timeless cuts, marrying form and function

Since 1994, Philippe Dubuc has reinvented the men's wardrobe with minimalist, modern lines, meticulous finishing and embossed materials.

Marie-Ève Lecavalier

Marie-Ève Lecavalier

Nathalie Bondil, MMFA's Director General and Chief Curator, explained what inspired this exhibition:

"This exhibition is a tip of the hat to Quebec fashion. It was born at last fall’s Museum Ball, NUIT COUTURE where dramatic installations paid tribute to Quebec fashion designers. Some were known to me, others were a revelation, but all amazed me with their talent ... these designers, established or emerging, experimental or international, were all notable for the quality of their output and the audacity of their inspiration. How could I ignore this opportunity to show off the couture created in our local ateliers? I have tremendous respect for these demanding métiers and the people who excel at them ... right in our own back yard." 

Markantoine

Markantoine

The exhibition also highlights the work  Ying Gao, whose work encompasses fashion, industrial design and robotics. She explores the use of new materials, such as medical latex, and interactive sensory technology that terns a garment into a participative piece.  Her creations were exhibited in the world’s major museums. 

Ying Gao

Ying Gao

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Montreal Couture exhibition is presented in conjunction with the retrospective Thierry Mugler: Couturissime exhibition.

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

MMFA 2019: A Model in the Studio

A MODEL IN THE STUDIO

MONTREAL 1880-1950

NEW ACQUISITIONS

January 29 – May 26, 2019

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' (MMFA) exhibition A Model in the Studio, Montreal 1880-1950: New Acquisitions, illustrates the development of live model representation in works by Montreal's leading artists.

Drawing life models was traditionally taught at the old masters’ studios and later at art schools as an indispensable study of the body’s proportions, poses, musculature, as well as the model’s overall compartment, including action, mood and even the emotion expressed through the bodily spacial gesture. It no longer seems to be viewed as fundamental in present day art teaching settings. Yet, I recently visited a school of animation art where nude model drawing techniques are taught and diligently attended by the future video games and futuristic films artists.

At the end of the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th centuries, at the Montreal art academy, only men were permitted to enrol into nude drawing classes. The female students were only allowed to draw models with their private parts covered, even when working with female models. There was also big difference between works executed by the academy students and the more daring posing from the artists’ own studios, whose drawings were rarely exhibited before the 1920s.

Additionally, nude images were censured in the art books of that time by either blackening them completely, or by inserting white strips to cover anatomically correctly depicted private parts. The visitors will have a chance to see example of such censorship at the exhibition.

Of the 70 works chosen for this show, most have never been exhibited before or are recent acquisitions. They demonstrate the creative impact of the nude drawing training process that was once the foundation of all representations of the human body. From the quick sketch to the completed drawing, not only the model but also the artist’s personality is revealed in the lines he or she created.

The exhibition features a number of graphic artworks, several pochades (the type of sketches used in painting) and sculptures, all executed between the late 19th century and mid-20th century. They were made by some thirty artists – including five women – who worked in Montreal: Louis Archambault, Ernest Aubin, Henri Beau, Fritz Brandtner, William Brymner, Edmond Dyonnet, Clarence Gagnon, Pierre Gauvreau, Henri Hébert, Louis-Philippe Hébert, Prudence Heward, Edwin Holgate, Alfred Laliberté, Ozias Leduc, Jean-Onésime Legault, Arthur Lismer, John Lyman, Mabel May, Rita Mount, Louis Muhlstock, Ernst Neumann, Moe Reinblatt, Jori Smith, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté and Lilias Torrance Newton.

Included is also a single contemporary work in a different medium: photography. In this black and white image that very much resembles a pencil drawing, the artist Donigan Cumming sought to provide some perspective for the timelessness and universal value of a nude body study of an ageing couple.

Jacques Des Rochers, the MMFA’s curator of Quebec and Canadian art before 1945 and also curator of the exhibition, explains the motivations for the show:

“Everyone recognizes the importance of representing the human body; it is such a cliché that we often fail to study its development in the studio, which is taken for granted. Although in the Western world it is associated with academicism and modernism, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the way in which it evolved in the Montreal context, with the help of recent acquisitions.”

The MMFA and live models in Quebec and Canada

The MMFA possesses an enviable collection of representations of live models by Quebec and Canadian artists. Interestingly, the Museum’s first academic nude, Eve, an 1879 painting by Wyatt Eaton, was only acquired in 1922, in the decade that gave rise to the modern nude. Then, in 1932, the Museum was offered its first modern nude, titled Studio Scenes No. 2: The Rest Period by Ernst Neumann.

The Museum’s recent major acquisitions include most notably Kneeling Nude in Profile or Sleeping Muse, 1921, and Discouragement, 1924, by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté; a group of drawings by John Lyman, Prudence Heward, Pierre Gauvreau and Louis Archambault, as well as bronzes by Louis-Philippe Hébert, Henri Hébert and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté.

The Art Association of Montreal

The creation of an art school was among the goals the Art Association of Montreal (AAM, today’s Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) set itself when it was founded in 1860. However, twenty years went by before the school’s first spaces were opened and an advanced course was offered. The art school, directed in 1883 by Robert Harris and then by William Brymner from 1886 to 1921, offered students an academic type of instruction modelled on that of the Paris studios in which Brymner had trained. From its inception, the AAM’s art school presented an annual exhibition of its students’ academic drawings and awarded prizes to them. As of 1912, the AAM was housed in a new Sherbrooke Street building, where the art school occupied three huge studios—the very ones where Edwin Holgate would give lessons in drawing in the 1930s. In 1940, Arthur Lismer agreed to be the director of the school, which became the School of Art and Design in 1943. In the years following World War II, many artists who were resistant to academicism, including Louis Archambault, joined the school as teachers and offered other perspectives. A number of the artists who taught at or attended the school are represented in the exhibition

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The exhibition is located at 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.