MAC 2018: New Museum Plan Unveiled

MAC Transformation

On April 9, 2018, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal - MAC) has unveiled the winning project of the architectural competition launched in June 2017 for the museum's renovation and transformation. The images in this article show the design and preliminary drawings for MAC's new look.

MAC enters a pivotal stage in its development. Museum attendance has increased steadily over the last 5 years, culminating with this year’s record of over 600,000 visitors. As an important national museum dedicated exclusively to the promotion of contemporary art, the MAC in its current condition faces a desperate lack of space to exhibit its vast collection.

It was the proposal of Saucier+Perrotte Architectes / GLCRM & Associés Architectes, a consortium of Quebec architects, that captured the top honours. This proposal was selected unanimously by the jury as inspiring, luminous, and relevant, and as resulting in a striking contemporary construction fully coherent with the Museum’s raison d’être. With this transformation, the MAC will embark on a new chapter in its existence and to embrace its full potential. 

Highlights of the new MAC:

• Close to a 100% increase in exhibition spaces and rooms, including three new exhibition rooms.
• Every space, from lobbies to circulation areas, has been redesigned to showcase contemporary art.
• New and expanded educational spaces.
• An exterior façade that has been transformed by the expansion of the main entrance and the added area on the 2nd floor.
• The optimization of the Beverly-Webster-Rolph multimedia room.
• New spaces for the Restaurant du MAC, including an outdoor terrace on the 2nd floor.
• New spaces for the MAC Boutique, including a bookstore and a coffee shop.

The new Museum’s architectural vision

The proposal by Saucier+Perrotte Architectes / GLCRM & Associés Architectes builds on open and light-filled spaces to strengthen the special connection that joins the MAC to the quadrilateral defined by Place des Arts and to the Quartier des spectacles. In particular, the essential link between the MAC and the Place des Festivals will be maintained with a new transparent, light-filled expansion. On level 2, a large window will showcase the Museum restaurant, a double-height space that will open onto an outdoor terrace.

The museum will enjoy far greater visibility on the lower, Sainte-Catherine Street of the Esplanade, with the angular overhang of the expansion. Under this jutting structure, the museum square will naturally guide visitors to the main entrance, while freeing up the space necessary for holding the festivals.

From an urban planning perspective, several features will link the new MAC to its context. On the ground floor, the Museum will glow with transparency and the hustle and bustle of its public spaces, while on the Place des Arts Esplanade level the architectural proportions and expression will integrate with the existing architecture. he upper section will be composed of an envelope of folded metal blades revealing the interior spaces and filtering natural light. The created verticality will express and harmonize - in a contemporary manner - with Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier and Théâtre Maisonneuve.

A new Museum in 2021

On the current timetable, the main project phases are scheduled as follows:

• April 2018 Start of architects’ mandate
• January 2019 Temporary closure of the Sainte-Catherine Street MAC
• Spring 2019 Opening of the temporary MAC
• Summer 2019 Start of the Sainte-Catherine Street MAC construction
• Fall 2021 Opening of the new MAC

The temporary MAC

The MAC must remain active and on hand throughout the construction period in order to maintain its relationship with the city and community presence. Between the closing and reopening, the MAC will set up headquarters in a permanent location and all the while make its influence throughout the city with multi-site and ephemeral exhibitions.

The programming, while limited, is nevertheless planned to be of excellence and rigour. None withstanding that this transition period will come with its share of challenges, it will also give the MAC an opportunity to explore both new partnerships and new exhibition spaces, and will challenge to display greater creativity.

Click on images to enlarge them.
All images in this article courtesy of @ MAC

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

FIFA 2018: L'Homme de l'isle

Fragment of Riopelle's Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg

L'HOMME DE L'ISLE

Documentary

Official Competition Art FIFA 2018

Director: BRUNO BOULIANNE

72 minutes | Québec, Canada | 2017

RELEASE date in Quebec cinemas - March 23, 2018.

The film elaborates how the hunting trips of the renown Quebec painter Jean-Paul Riopelle with Gilles Gagné, a geese hunting guide on Isle aux Oies, contributed to the artist's imagery, and how the brutal act of shooting, the death of geese and their blood found an expression in the Reopelle's monumental work Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, a legacy piece, which he began in his studio on Île-aux-Oies in November 1992 after learning of the death in Paris of his former close companion, the American painter Joan Mitchel. The work was displayed in full at the MNBAQ (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec - Quebec Museum of Fine Art) exhibition between January 29, 2014 - January 3, 2016.

Gilles Gagné in front of Riopelle's Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg

With this film, Bruni Boulianne brings into focus St Laurence River, especially its Isle aux Oises and Isle aux Grues which are actually two ends if the same landmass - the same long and narrow island in the middle of the river. He presents a skilled hunter Gille Gagné, a living incarnation of the place where he lives and practices his profession of the hunting guide in close connection with the elements, and of the times past, preserving the island's history and memory.

For thirty years, Gilles Gagné had guided the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923 – 2002) to the most spectacular goose hunts. More than an accomplice of hunting, he became an ally to some of Riopelle's artistic creations, a witness of the passing time. Now, in the film, he hunts on similar trails with another French Canadian visual artist Marc Séguin.

Marc Séguin and Gilles Gagné (right) 

In addition to artistic allusions and art connections, the film presents Quebec regional nature and also an ethnographic study of the life on the island, featuring even a local Pierrot costume festival. The island's  inhabitants French also differs from the standard or Montreal French, not only in pronunciation but also in some vocabulary. For the Anglophone viewers, even those who speak French, future English subtitles would be helpful.

The photography aspect of the film is quite stunning. The orchestration of the nature camera shots, sounds, and the dance-like movement of the birds and branches form a visual and auditory symphony that is hypnotic and induces an almost meditative state.

Click on images to enlarge them.

The film might be of great interest to hunters and could be promoted in hunting clubs across the continent. On the other hand, it might create too great an interest, many wanting to coming to hunt on the island where the geese population is drastically diminishing and is no longer plentiful even for the local hunters.

CREATIVE TEAM

Les Films du 3 mars

With participation of GILLES GAGNÉ, MARC SÉGUIN, GINA VÉZINA

Editing: VINCENT GUIGNARD

Photography: ALEX MARGINEANU, FRANÇOIS VINCELETTE

Sound: STÉPHANE BARSALOU, MÉLANIE GAUTHIER

Sound Director MARTIN ALLARD, SIMON GERVAIS

Audio mixing: SERGE BOIVIN

Director, Script and Producer BRUNO BOULIANNE

FILM TRAILER on Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/252349740

For more information and FIFA film festival and scheduling, visit the Art FIFA website.

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