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Exibitions 1991

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© Page couverture l Book cover, Hanna Luczak : Inside Mount Kilimanjaro, 1991.

Hanna Luczak
From February 2nd 1991 to February 23rd 1991
Inside Mount Kilimanjaro

Having roused a sense of the familiar, Hanna Luczak’s work provokes an accustomed experience, yet seems to be based on a set of opposites – east / west, male / female, communist / capitalist, Polish / Canadian. What is my place within these antithetical sets? If anything, this association can only be understood through the structure of difference. I would say this difference is neither a structure of opposites nor complimentaries but an association and organisation of parts one paradoxically calls fragmentation. There is no logical way otherwise to deal with these differences as there is no programme which controls nor determines any of these above associations, except those that seem to govern the practice of art which makes this venture, this type of exchange legible. To make any sense at all out of this situation (without looking to causes as legitimation), the question posed by a different attitude in thinking about art, remains the most meaningful placement for any interpretation. This form of unconditional acceptance is an appropriate component in the formation of an affiliation with an « other ».
-Gould Trevor, Francesca Pensirini, Hanna Luczak : Inside Mount Kilimanjaro, "Preambule", Optica, Montréal, 1991.

Go to publications catalogue.

- Gravel, Claire, «La montagne sacrée d'Hanna Luczak», Le Devoir, samedi 9 février 1991, p. C-10.
- «Optica, Programmation actuelle», Parallelogramme, vol. 18., no. 3, hiver 1990-91, p. 90.
- Moreau, Yvan, «Hanna Luczak, Inside Mount Kilimandjaro, Galerie Optica», ETC Montréal, no. 14, printemps 1991, p. 73.
- Slejskova, Nadia, trad. de Clément Fontaine, «Hanna Luczak, a model of conceptual thought / un modèle de pensée conceptuelle», ESPACE 17, automne 1991, p. 44-46.




Jocelyne Alloucherie, Patrick Altman, Guy Bourassa, Paul Lacerte, Alain Paiement, Sylvie Readman
From March 23rd 1991 to April 21st 1991
Photo sculpture

An exhibition presented jointly by OBORO and OPTICA

This exhibition presents some of the numerous artistic practices that explore the multiple relationships between photography and sculpture.

Photographic sculpture (where the merging of the two is strongest), sculpture which structures itself according to the parameters of the photographic, photographs integrated into a sculptural framework that refer to media or aesthetic contexts of viewing, incursions in the realms of landscape and portraiture, the deployment of viewing devices, the presentation of sculpture by photography ... these are some of the strategies through which photography literally invades the sculptural, through which the sculptural is disrupted and reassesed.

The works in this exhibition were created in the context of Studios d'été de St-Jean-Port-Joli, organized by Lesley Johnstone, Marie Fraser, Jacques Doyon, Michel Des Jardins and Jean-Pierre Bourgault.

Artists and members of the organizing committee will participate in a panel discussion on the question of photo sculpture in relation to the works in the exhibition. The artists will also talk about their experience at the Studios d'été de St-Jean-Port-Joli last summer. The catalogue will be launched on this occasion.
- Press release (Optica)


- Gravel, Claire, «Paul Lacert, L'envers du décor», MTL, avril 1991, p. 54-56.
- Cron, Marie-Michèle, «Trois petits tours...», Voir, du 11 avril au 17 avril 1991, p. 22.
- «Profil de deux centres, Galerie VU, québec, Galerie Optica, Montréal», Parallélogramme, vol 16, no. 4, 1991,p. 72-73.
- Gravel, Claire, «Penser la photographie», Le Devoir, mardi 9 avril 1991, p. B-3.
- Gravel, Claire, «Nos choix, arts visuels, photosculpture», Le Devoir, vendredi 22 mars 1991.




Ginette Prince
From September 7th 1991 to October 6th 1991
Croisades, chroniques de fin de siècle

Ginette Prince is a multidisciplinary artiste who incorporates installation, performance and photography in her work. She will be presenting at the gallery, as an integral part of "le Mois de la Photo à Montréal", a photographic installation dealing with the problematics of spatialization, of support and the theatreification of the photographic image.

This artist's work is fundamental to the issues of the boundary, the link and the limit, which are at the heart of this gallery's present course of exploration. Here is an approach which brings together the notions of structure, materiality, theme, process and surface. These elements, when combined with other clues, which resides in the passage between the objects and the temporality that compose the installation.

In a vein which could be qualified as 'Baroque', the symbols, analogies and iconographic formulas gather and settle in the space to reveal a "me" which taked root and takes body within a personal mythology.

The video night will focus on the video production of Chantal DuPont and include two tapes in which Ginette Prince participated.

Le marché de l'amour, 21 min./Corps d'oeuvres, 16 min/Paroles d'oiseaux à Toro Muerto, 12 min./Rivière aux cerises, 12 min.
- Press release (Optica)

- Cron, Marie-Michèle, «D'anges, de chateaux, et de donjons, Ginette Prince, Galeri Optica», Le Devoir, Mercredi 2 octobre 1991, p. B-2.
- «Lien, passage, limite / Présence empirique, Optica, Montréal, Québec», Parallelogramme, vol. 17, no. 2 1991, p. 65.
- Newman, Brenda, «A Quiet Crusad: Ginette Prince's installation work», VIEWS, May 1990, p. 6.
- Campeau, Sylvain, «Ginette Prince ou la lucidité multidisplinaire», ETC MONTRAL,p. 48.



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© Page couverture l Book cover, Empirical Presence : Six Essays, 1992.

Barbara Caruso, Jean-Marie Delavalle, Yves Gaucher, Ron Martin, Jaan Poldaas, Henry Saxe
From October 12th 1991 to November 10th 1991
The Empirical Presence

Curators : James Campbell and Yvonne Lammerich

This exhibition has been conceived from the observation that a tragic and serious gap exists between the dialogue of abstraction, as a highly relevant form of art today, and the public and art community in Canada. Those artists who have commited themselves to this path of investigation in Canada, unlike their American or European counterparts, have had to work much of the time in the last twenty years in relative isolation. This exhibition, although modest in scale and not definitive in representation, is intended to create a dialogue in an effort to close the gap.

Entering the last decade of the 20th century abstraction as an art practice is almost 100 year old. During this time major social, political and cultural changes have taken place. The six artists presented here have absorbed and understood the new code created by these dramatic changes. Their work speaks to us on these terms.

As we are moving closer and closer towards the acceptance that we are the product of worldly conditions and matter, and these in turn are modified by our manipulations, a new equation is in the making between human inherent material conciousness and the conciousness we impose on it. The mind and body appear to be constantly in the process of reconstructing itself, not just within but also outside of its corporeal limits. One of the ways in which this occurs is through the imaging or reading of matter and stretching the imagination forming a new equation or link.

Each of the six artists in this exhibition is concerned with the articulation of this experience, trusting entirely in its plastic and mechanical possibilities, as trusting in the inherent possibilities within each of us. Neither the maker nor the viewer need to be restrained by conventions. In a reciprocal relationship, these works are as much part of what we know or can know, of what we are or could become.

We now understand that our mental abilities are potential capacities which can only be realized in practice, in that we have to learn how to use them. Our ideas of material and matter should be regarded as mental constructions that have to be learned. This realization is already manifest in the works of Caruso, Delavalle, Gaucher, Martin, Poldaas and Saxe. Hence “The Empirical Presence”.
-Yvonne Lammerich, co-curator
-Press release (Optica)

Go to publications catalogue.

- Dumont, Jean, «Dernière chances», Le Devoir, samedi 9 novembre 1991, p. C-10.
- Campbell, James D. and Yvonne Lammerich. trad. Clément Fontaine, «The Empirical Presence: Sculptural Paradigm; Présence empirique: Un paradigme sculptural», ESPACE, vol. 20, été 1992, p. 48-54
- Hakim, Mona, «Galerie Optica: Sens Cible», Voir, du 31 octobre au 6 novembre 1991, p. 24.
- «Lien, passage, limite / Présence empirique, Optica, Montréal, Québec», Parallelogramme, vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, p. 65.




Alain Fleischer, Gilbert Boyer
From November 23rd 1991 to December 20th 1991
Artistes en miroir

The following document is only available in French :

« [...] Pendant un an et demi, Boyer et Fleischer ont établi des liens épistolaires relayés par ces systèmes de communication sophistiqués que sont le télécopieur et le téléphone, élaborant et peaufinant peu à peu ce work in progress insolite qui transporte désormais les marques et les indices de leurs correspondances épisodiques au-dessus des continents. Projeté grandeur nature dans la vitrine de l’ancienne librairie Champigny encore pleine de la présence virtuelle de tous les recueils qui ont garnis les rayons de ses bibliothèques, le spectre fugitif et colossal des couvertures de leur livre au titre visionnaire dont les maquettes figurent à Optica (Vues de loin (Vitrines), par Gilbert Boyer chez XYZ et L’exposition de projets par Alain Fleischer chez Gallimard), apparât et s’évanouit à la nuit tombée telle une éclipse insolente. Puis les livres quittent leur habitacle naturel, la librairie, pour hanter la galerie d’art et s’investir d’une aura singulière : ils deviennent alors une œuvre en soi, immense, agrandie par des projections diapo, un univers privé désormais livré en pâture au public. Ici, l’acte solitaire de la lecture se fait avec les autres, les spectateurs qui passent, s’arrêtent, ajustent parfois leurs lunettes pour pénétrer avec vous dans le corps de l’œuvre et amorcer un dialogue silencieux avec deux textes identiques où une phrase, perverse, jaillit de l’ensemble : « Ce qui compte, c’est le premier regard. »

[...] L’installation de Boyer et de Fleischer, ce tandem au verbe délié et aux origines linguistiques similaires, laisse résonner alors dans la tête du spectateur une folle envie de participer par l’imagination, au déroulement de cette histoire sans fin. »
- Cron, Marie-Michèle, « Artistes en miroir », Le Devoir, décembre 1991.

- Cron, Marie-Michèle, « Artistes en miroir », Le Devoir, décembre 1991. - «Artistes en Miroir, Optica, Montréal, Québec», Parallélogramme, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991-92, p. 80.