The 2007 Biennale de Montréal Crack the Sky presents new and recent work from more than fifty artists and artist groups from across Canada and abroad.
Crack the Sky promotes the curatorial visions of several other contributors such as curators Louise Déry at the Galerie de l'UQAM who had curated an exceptional show of recent and new work by David Altmejd; Ray Cronin at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia whose exhibition of recent intermedia sculpture by Graeme Patterson is a delight; Heather Smith at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery who had curated Dana Claxton's Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux; Sylvie Gilbert whose expansive exhibition, Comic Craze, was produced for the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts and then scheduled for the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, under the expert guidance of Director/Curator, Renee Baert; Meredith Carruthers of the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, who had curated Montreal Comic City; Alexandre Lemieux of High Food and Bruno Ricciardi-Rigault of Laïka who co-curated with us the performance events with Peaches, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Carole Pope, Les Georges Leningrad, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Julie Doucet and Dominique Pétrin's project Le Pet Shop Ju-Do at La Centrale/Galerie Powerhouse, Paper Rad at Société des arts technologiques [SAT] and the presentation of Daft Punk's Electroma at the Cinémathèque québécoise; visiting Central Asian scholar at the Université de Montréal and Université Laval, Boris Chukhovich, who presents a selection of recent video work from Central Asia entitled Return of the Metaphor; and 2boys.tv, comprised of Montreal-based Aaron Pollard and Stephen Lawson, whose investigation creates a new, transitive form of cabaret performance.
Crack the Sky also invited the editorial support of PUBLIC. The York University-based cultural journal has published thematic issues for more than twenty years. Curatorial themes taken up in the Biennale can be found in the editorial directions of PUBLIC over the years.
Crack the Sky aims to challenge viewers with a range of propositions, driven by the ideas of mostly Canadian cultural producers and shaped by new media. The majority of the artworks are generally interrelated by an overarching genre hybridity and an elliptical return to shifting border concepts.
The cultural production presented in Crack the Sky is formidable as an abstract cross-section of contemporary art. Artists such as Stephen Andrews, BGL, Lynne Cohen, Beth Derbyshire, Brian Jungen and My Barbarian are well known for their engagement in the fragmenting state of cultural identity politics that have superseded any identifiable, current movement. Others, such as Scoli Acosta, Janice Kerbel and Numa are emerging in very different critical arenas, equally divested of participation in any particular style or art movement. It should also be noted that a growing number of works are the result of collaborations among two or more artists: Julie Doucet and Dominique Pétrin, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Les Georges Leningrad, Paper Rad, Pil and Galia Kollectiv and 2boys.tv. Such collectives engage in artistic sharing and openness around creative production that facilitates a crossover activity between disciplines such as art, music, theatre, architecture, and the social and natural sciences.
Some of the artists in Crack the Sky oare no longer concerned with the permanent form of a work but are instead focusing on the immaterial and the invisible, offering unique interpretations of the constructed realities of daily life. They vary considerably from the spatially complex sculptures and photographs of Evan Penny and Michael Awad to the perspectival drawings of Annie Pootoogook and Will Kwan's highly structured analytical research on theChinese diaspora. Geoffrey Farmer adapts and reinvents his Puppet Kit Personality Workshop concept from the detritus found in and adjacent to his exhibition space. The undertaking includes the performative and rebellious visual poetry of Peaches, the elegant paintings of Paul P. alongside the raw stencilled forms on canvas by Paulo Whitaker, the collective actions and recordings of Lesbians on Ecstasy and My Barbarian, and the ambiguous artworld associations of Carole Pope and Les Georges Leningrad. Each artist and group has navigated the demarcated lines of authority that determine the material and psychological integrity of a culturally defined entity to acknowledge issues of inside and outside, legal and illegal, fact and fiction. For example, the digital photographs of Scott McFarland can isolate, magnify and make benign any cultured landscape's dark impulses. David Hoffos likewise inhabits and remolds a world of hybridity. Iran Do Espirito Santo's site-specific installations explore the seemingly uncontested spaces between the concrete and the abstract. Christine Davis' installations describe a state of being that dismisses the complex intricacies of a cultural context.
A range of artists in Crack the Sky engage subject matter to suggest positions of dissent or resistance to the homogenizing effect of globalism and its attendant mainstream values. With their geodesic dome installation, Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob imagine an alternative form of resistance whose strength is found in appropriated imagery. Scott Treleaven's tentative young post-punk subjects embody a noble, independent character, with their tattooed arms and chests, pierced body parts and defiant posing.
Current conceptions of the "end of ideology" express the view that in contemporary society the class struggles that punctuated nineteenth-century European history, have today dissolved. In the face of this tendency, artists such as Dana Claxton, Jeff Funnell, Ignacio Iturria, Sarah Anne Johnson, Brian Jungen, Will Kwan, Kent Monkman, Annie Pootoogook and Susan Turcot, remind viewers of the ubiquity of social conflict. Susan Turcot's dedicated front line reportage in the form of drawings, describe a narrowing strip of Boreal forest north of Quebec, while Dana Claxton proposes another form of reportage that reinterprets the maligned history of her Sioux ancestors after the late nineteenth-century Wounded Knee massacre. Turcot and Claxton reveal what the dominant resource exploitation companies in the Americas are best known for: violence. Ryan Sluggett's paintings and animation seek to illustrate the primitive within ourselves and bemoan the failure of affluence to civilize. Theo Sims' The Candahar is a bar where the young will verbally deplore the violence of elders and are tempted, after so many pints, to use violence against them.
This implied violence and resistance plays off the seeming vulnerability and transcendent qualities of the many depictions of human figures. They appear to linger as survivors in Funnell's drawings documenting the judicial investigation of the death of Manitoba aboriginal chief J. J. Harper. Stephen Andrews' graphic vision in hundreds of drawings and an animation is of some incomprehensible account of violence and, in the work of Iturria, among the archetypal city's modernist office and apartment buildings located anywhere between Montevideo and Toronto's St. James Town. The most abstract curtain by Virgil Marti, composed of strings of translucent replicas of human bones, the emotionally vacuous institutional interior depicted in a Lynne Cohen photograph, the rhetoric of painting by Eleanor Bond, Numa and Paulo Whitaker are informed by their mass-media reality. Most are laden with dissent, situated somewhere between the established world of political conformity and the vision of an underworld of violent revolution, freedom fighting and disobedience.
Crack the Sky stretches the boundaries of various media and overlapping disciplines from visual art to biology. The latter form can simulate an updated version of a cabinet of curiosities for which the act of drawing has proven to be a common porthole for investigations. Several artists invigorate approaches to traditional drawing techniques and reconsider the act of drawing by incorporating various unconventional media, for example the representations of human forms and clothing rendered in felt in Luanne Martineau's soft sculptures. Chris Cran's melding of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation is unparalleled in his ability to reposition sly references to Duchamp and William S. Burroughs. Incorporating a series of visual and aural cues, Jesper Just seduces and deceives his audience with the most common cinematic devices. Julie Doucet constructs her neo-French language poems from an alphabet she hand-cuts from newspapers and pastes to construct new word associations, while Bill Smith's sculptures can simulate environmental dilemmas or suggest biological forms to be deciphered.
This implied violence and resistance plays off the seeming vulnerability and transcendent qualities of the many depictions of human figures. They appear to linger as survivors in Funnell's drawings documenting the judicial investigation of the death of Manitoba aboriginal chief J. J. Harper. Stephen Andrews' graphic vision in hundreds of drawings and an animation is of some incomprehensible account of violence and, in the work of Iturria, among the archetypal city's modernist office and apartment buildings located anywhere between Montevideo and Toronto's St. James Town. The most abstract curtain by Virgil Marti, composed of strings of translucent replicas of human bones, the emotionally vacuous institutional interior depicted in a Lynne Cohen photograph, the rhetoric of painting by Eleanor Bond, Numa and Paulo Whitaker are informed by their mass-media reality. Most are laden with dissent, situated somewhere between the established world of political conformity and the vision of an underworld of violent revolution, freedom fighting and disobedience.
Crack the Sky stretches the boundaries of various media and overlapping disciplines from visual art to biology. The latter form can simulate an updated version of a cabinet of curiosities for which the act of drawing has proven to be a common porthole for investigations. Several artists invigorate approaches to traditional drawing techniques and reconsider the act of drawing by incorporating various unconventional media, for example the representations of human forms and clothing rendered in felt in Luanne Martineau's soft sculptures. Chris Cran's melding of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation is unparalleled in his ability to reposition sly references to Duchamp and William S. Burroughs. Incorporating a series of visual and aural cues, Jesper Just seduces and deceives his audience with the most common cinematic devices. Julie Doucet constructs her neo-French language poems from an alphabet she hand-cuts from newspapers and pastes to construct new word associations, while Bill Smith's sculptures can simulate environmental dilemmas or suggest biological forms to be deciphered.
Crack the Sky, representing CIAC's latest profile of a burgeoning Canadian contemporary art scene, moves both within and beyond imaginary and real borders. It represents in many ways the end of an era, being already less regionally based than before, more fluid and operative across borders, and ultimately, against all odds, one of the most uniquely productive and relevant to a living culture.
Wayne Baerwaldt