What Does the Image Stand For?

Guest Curator: Ami Barak

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image (formely Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal) presents, in collaboration with OPTICA, Valérie Mréjen –Q&R – Q&A from September 8th to October 21st. The opening is being held on September 8th at 7:30pm, in the presence of the artist.

What Does the Image Stand For?

Guest Curator: Ami Barak

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image (formerly Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal) presents, in collaboration with OPTICA, Melik Ohanian – Portrait of Duration. L’instant S from September 8th to October 21st. The opening is being held on September 8th at 7:30pm, in attendance of the artist.

Educational Program | Winter - Spring 2017

OPTICA aims to be a site of proximity, discovery and experimentation in contemporary art for all audiences. We offer educational activities to childcare centres (CPE), primary and secondary schools, CEGEPs and universities as well as families and community groups.

I've Only Known My Own: Performance of Nadège Grebmeier Forget

I've Only Known My Own

Opening, Friday, April, 21_6 pm to 8 pm

I’ve Only Known My Own is a group exhibition that explores how the materiality of the body is represented through measurements, process, and documentation. In many ways, the performance-based works included in this project reference and respond to the legacies of feminist and conceptual art. They reflect upon how the matter of the body might act as a force that generates its own (il/logical) systems, and how this material embodiment might function as a form of resistance. I’ve Only Known My Own also considers how the material body might intersect with new technologies, be altered or amplified through various modes of communication, take on forms of mediated presence, and activate questions around the presentation and dissemination of ephemera.

Life Session

Nelson Henricks installation takes its title from Falcon Film #615, Life Session (1977). Falcon Entertainment – also known as Falcon Studios – is based in San Francisco, California. Founded by the entrepreneur Chuck Holmes in 1971, Falcon Studios is one of the world’s largest producers of gay pornography. By the early 1980s, it had distinguished itself as a frontrunner at a time when distributing pornography was a criminal offence. Holmes was active in supporting politics at a local and national level, even helping to finance Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the 1990s.

Book of Nineteen Nocturnes

An inveterate night-owl and somewhat of a loner, Jim Holyoak works like a prowling cat: in tune with the shadows, his muffled movements hardly breaking the star-lit silence. In his wake, one usually finds formidable mural frescos bustling with curious life forms, suspended between terrestrial deep time and imagined future configurations rising from the ferment of life’s potentialities. His pictorial universe translates a fascinating empathy for all forms of life—extinct, current, and imagined—and a willingness to plumb their inherent strangeness. Holyoak inhabits an tremulous, evolving, hetero-chronic world that he renders for us in sensitive gestures of India-ink, graphite, and watercolour. If his mural installations sometimes derive from collaborative work, his constant production of sketches drawn from life reflects a rather hidden dimension of his sensory world. His sketches document his perambulations in the wilds of Northern Europe, China, Canada, and testify to an existential solitude imbuing these contemplative travels. At OPTICA, the accumulated drawings form the substratum of an epic narrative in nineteen chapters presented in the form of a mysterious archive.

In partnership with OPTICA, artist Edith Brunette will undertake a documentation and art intervention project during the coming year in which she attempts to bring the worlds of art and multimedia closer together. This project falls in line with the artist’s ongoing focus on the economy of the art milieu.