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.

McCord 2018: Marisa Portolese

IN THE STUDIO WITH NOTMAN

AN EXHIBITION OF ARTIST IN RESIDENCE MARISA PORTOLESE

May 25, 2018 - February 10, 2019

This exhibition consists of 16 large-scale colour portraits of women taken with an analog view camera using natural light. It is the result of Portolese's research on the McCord Museum's Notman collection as a McCord's Artist in Residence.

For years, Portolese has been preoccupied with taking photos of women she knew personally, always from the perspective of their female-feminist power. Additionally, she embarked on studying the decors of traditional studio photography, such as in Notman's portraits. Like Notman, she also photographs children, mothers and older women, and uses backdrops and props to showcase her subjects within a confined space. In her compositions, the decor chosen for a specific portrait has a primary aesthetic function and a specific personality. 

Inspired by the sets created by Notman, Marisa Portolese chooses decors that evoke the Victorian era, yet her portraits, rich colours, and the vitality of the floral motifs, represent her personal choices. She roots her photographic portraiture in a pictorial tradition borrowed from art history.

The backdrops in Portolese's works, especially the floral arrangements, are spectacular. They are taken from paintings of old Dutch masters. She found the photos of these paintings in the public domain on the internet, cropped out images and floral arrangements she liked, enlarged and printed them, than hanged them in her studio behind a sitter. Though the resulting photos are spectacular, and the photographs of old master can be freely found on the internet, a question still remains of legitimacy of using bits and pieces from other people's creations for one's own works. It is well known that photographers themselves do not like when their photos are cropped or edited, or even worse, when some elements are appropriated out of them, and out of the original context, and then implanted by others into their personal works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication, Marisa Portolese – In the Studio with Notman / Dans le studio avec Notman, published by the McCord Museum with the financial assistance of Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. This book explains the artist’s approach, what inspired her portraits and the decors chosen specifically for each model, and points to similarities between women from different eras.

It is a pity the source of backdrop imagery in each photo is not acknowledged in Portolese's exhibited works at the McCord Museum and, with an exception of very few, in her book. By cropping those images from photos of old paintings, most likely enhancing them to her purposes on a computer, then enlarging them, still does not make them to be her own creations, regardless of an erroneous understanding a viewer of her portraits might get. 

Marisa Portolese at her McCord Museum Exibition

About Marisa Portolese

Born in 1969, Marisa Portolese is a Montreal artist of Italian descent. A graduate of Concordia University's MFA program in 2001, she is now an Associate Professor of Photography in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Her practice includes photography, video and curatorial work.

Portraiture, representations of women, narrative, autobiography and the figure in nature are major and recurrent subjects in her work. She often produces large-scale colour photographs rich in painterly references, which focus on facets of human experience in psychological and physical environments, creating immersive landscapes for the viewers.

Since 2002, Portolese has produced a number of photographic projects for exhibitions or publication: Belle de Jour I, II, III (2002-2016), Un chevreuil à la fenêtre de ma chambre (2003), The Recognitions (2004-2005), The Dandy Collection (2008), Imagined Paradise (2010), and Antonia's Garden (2011). She is the recipient of several awards along with numerous grants from the Canada and Québec Arts Councils, and the Du Maurier Arts Foundation.

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All photos in this article by Nadia Slejskova.

For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.

PAC 2018: Queens of Egypt

Majestic Queens of Egypt
North American premiere

April 10 - November 4, 2018

This exhibition, produced by the Montreal’s Pointe-à-Callière museum of Archaeology and History (PAC) in partnership with Turin's Museo Egizio, unveils the splendour and mystery of Ancient Egypt and illustrates the importance of queens in Egypt's New Kingdom period. It gives visitors a rare opportunity to fully comprehend the grandeur of Egyptian civilization and especially power its women exercised during the New Kingdom period. The exhibition portrays the world of the Great Royal wives, sisters, and daughters of the pharaohs. It presents the Queens and illustrates the diverse and important roles they played in Egyptian society. Their lives are revealed in an immersive exhibits tour that features over 350 rare, precious, and symbolic objects.

Francine Lelièvre, the Pointe-à-Callière museum's executive director stated:

"Throughout history, women's stories have so often been obscured, but these Egyptian women of power played an important role in society. I hope that the tribute we pay to the queens of Egypt in this exhibition, and the exceptional quality of the objects presented, will remind visitors of how instrumental this society's contributions were. Ancient Egypt gave us ingenious irrigation canals; master artisans; incredible architecture in their temples, palaces, and villages; elegance in body care; and strong, intelligent women of power who had a great appreciation for beauty and meaning. We have so much to learn from their immense legacy."

Nile’s Right (east) Bank – The World of the Living

The first part of the exhibition shows settings frequented or inhabited by pharaoh and his queens during the New Kingdom period, some 3,500 years ago. According to the ancient Egyptian’s myth, the right bank of the Nile was the world of the living, with such landmarks as the city of Thebes, the imposing temples of Karnak, and Luxor. PAC presents the temple of the mythological war goddess Sekhmet, reveals the rules of life in the pharaoh and queen palace, and reveals the elegance and splendour of a harem.

The harem: for women only

The exhibition also portrays an Egyptian harem, a royal institution reserved exclusively for women and children, where the queen, noblewomen, and the pharaoh's concubines ruled and men entered only to serve them. One of the displays also ofers a chance to experience perfumes and beauty objects in Nefertiti's harem. The harem was a place of beauty, culture and education, but also a place to hatch a plot. The harem conspiracy papyrus, dating back 3,200 years, reveals secrets of a harem’s captivating world and tells the story of an elaborate plan by one of Ramesses III's wives, Tiye, to murder him.

Nile’s Left (west) Bank – The World of the Dead

In the exhibition’s second section, visitors travel to the world of the dead - the Theban necropolises on the Nile's west bank. They visit the village of Deir el-Medina, where artisans spent their lives building the royal tombs and objects to accompany the deceased in the afterlife. There are tools, everyday objects, and vases, along with other objects that reveal the reverence this village held for Queen Ahmose-Nefertari. There are also writing tools of scribes, papyruses, and a video explains about the Egyptian letters and how to read those ancient texts.

Voyage to the Valley of the Queens

The exhibition's final section is set deep in the Valley of the Queens. It featurs items from the royal tomb of Ramesses II's favourite wife Nefertari, and recreats the ambiance of the actual tomb discovered in 1904 by Ernesto Schiaparelli, former director of Turin's Museo Egizio.

The display reveals Ancient Egypt's burial rituals: tools and materials needed to transform the body, a hook, flint knife, and resin, funerary jars, and a papyrus excerpt of The Book of the Dead that illustrate the ritual of mummification. A mummy, resting on a transparent surface, forms the heart of this installation with magical amulets woven into the linen strips to protect the deceased. This section also features objects that accompany the deceased in the afterlife: amulets, canopic jars, and shabtis. There are also a dozen painted coffins that additionally demonstrate the ritual funerary practices and their role in achieving eternal life.

The final part of the exhibition presents the funerary chamber of Queen Nefertari and her granite coffin, shattered by looters. Yet looters left behind many lesser valued objects (but highly valued by archaeologists), and some of these items are among the exhibition's most rare artefacts.

Ubisoft: using technology to teach history

To give visitors a complete immersive experience, Pointe-à-Callière partnered with Ubisoft Montréal and the team of Assassin's Creed Origins, the most recent edition of this video game franchise, which takes place in Ancient Egypt. Exclusive and custom-tailored videos and soundtracks from the game's Discovery Tour enhance the exhibition: scenes from the sumptuous palace, seat of the pharaoh's power, the western desert, the houses, streets, artisans, village life, or the daily lives of women of power, these carefully crafted visual portrayals of ancient life in Egypt are also highly informative about the themes developed in Queens of Egypt exhibition, such as the mummification ritual, the work of scribes, and the writing of hieroglyphs.

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For more information on the current exhibitions, activities and programs, visit the PAC Museum's website.