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+ Archives Décades

2011 - 2012

Programming

Raymonde April
from September 9th 2011 to October 15th 2011

Laurent Pernel
from October 1st 2011 to December 31st 2011

Olivia Boudreau, Sorel Cohen, Raphaëlle de Groot, Suzy Lake, Claire Savoie, Jana Sterbak
from November 12th 2011 to December 17th 2011

Sophie Bélair Clément, Raphaëlle de Groot, Vera Frenkel, Clara Gutsche, Emmanuelle Léonard
from January 21st 2012 to February 25th 2012

Date limite | Deadline
le February 28th 2012

le March 1st 2012

Scott Wallis
from March 17th 2012 to April 21st 2012

Oli Sorenson
from March 17th 2012 to April 21st 2012

En conversation avec Michel de Broin
le April 12th 2012

Cynthia Girard
from May 12th 2012 to June 16th 2012

Julie Trudel
from May 12th 2012 to June 16th 2012

Raymonde April, Autoportrait au balcon, 1985. Épreuve à développement chromogène. | Chromogenic print. Avec l’aimable autorisation de l’artiste et de la Galerie Donald Browne, Montréal. | Courtesy of the artist and Donald Browne Gallery, Montreal. © Raymonde April

Raymonde April
from September 9th 2011 to October 15th 2011
My Glance Is Clear Like a Sunflower

Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, in collaboration with Optica, a centre for contemporary art, present the exhibition My Glance Is Clear Like a Sunflower by Raymonde April. Lucidity. Inward Views is the theme proposed by Anne-Marie Ninacs for the 12th presentation of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, which will be held from September 8 to October 9, 2011. For the occasion, 25 solo exhibitions will be spread throughout Montreal transforming the city into a vast and coherent group show.

Raymonde April has been recognized since the late 1970s for her photographic practice, inspired by her private life, which she skillfully balances at the confluence of documentary, autobiography, and fiction. An insatiable lover of people, landscapes, stories, objects, and other apparently ordinary things that form identity, she constantly returns to the same sites, and the same subjects, in order to understand her own inner life. For more than fifteen years, this work has also led her to regularly reinterpret her own photographic archives. And this is what she has done here, upon the request of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, by examining these archives in the light of the notion of self-representation. The resulting composite self-portrait is made of a number of previously unseen prints and brand-new images.

Anne-Marie Ninacs

Source :: Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal :: Media relations
Chantale Crépeault
chantale.crepeault@moisdelaphoto.com
T 514 390 0383
moisdelaphoto.com

Guided tour by Raymonde April on Saturday, October 1st at 2pm (in French only). Free activity organised for the Journées de la culture.

The artist wishes to thank her models/subjects, family and friends, her collaborators Andreas Rutkauskas, Clare Samuel, Noémie Da Silva, Martin Schop, as well as curator Anne-Marie Ninacs and Le Mois de la photo à Montréal.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies at Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts, and Hexagram, Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies.

Raymonde April's work is mentioned in a newly published article by Jerôme Delgado (Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011 - Chercheurs de lucidité, Le Devoir, September 3rd, 2011), as well as on Jörg Colberg's blog (Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011 (part 2), Conscientious, October 5th, 2011). She is also briefly acknowledged in Nightlife (Le Mois de la photo à Montréal: 4 tendances lourdes, September 19th, 2011) and Canadian Art (Mois de la Photo: Into the Deeps). My Glance Is Clear Like a Sunflower constitutes one of four exhibitions recommended by Nicolas Mavrikakis in Mois de la Photo 2011 : L'image ouverte? (Voir, September 15th, 2011) and is one of Damien Fière's three major favorites ("coup de coeur majeur" : Le «moi» de la photo, regardemontreal, September 22nd, 2011).

Raymonde April was born in 1953 in Moncton, New Brunswick. She lives and works in Montreal. She has gained a large following in Canadian photography circles. Her work has been shown widely in Canada and Europe and she has had major solo exhibitions, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1986), the Musée d’art de Joliette (1997), and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2001). In 2010, Équivalences was presented jointly at the Occurrence, Les Territoires, and Donald Browne galleries in Montreal. April has received the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas (2003), the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography (2005), and the Order of Canada (2010). She is represented by Donald Browne Gallery in Montreal.

Laurent Pernel
from October 1st 2011 to December 31st 2011
Résidence de recherche jeune création (Montréal)

Laurent Pernel (Lyon) deploys his work in public space like a perpetual construction site: his polymorphic pieces—tiny devices of his own making, monumental constructions, burlesque athletic actions—interact with the urban landscape, subverting its meaning and perception. Once an architecture student, the artist declares that he has been “liberated from the overly rigorous technical constraints of construction by working with simple materials.” Based on contextual observations of the host location—the particularities and formal or historical incongruities of each urban area—, he attempts to bring disparate elements into a consistent reading, which he interconnects with other spaces or with his personal background. In collaboration with art3 (Valence, France), OPTICA is proud to welcome Laurent Pernel in Montreal from October 1rst to December 31rst, 2011!

In this public presentation, the artist focused on the research and video work he did in Montreal; he also unveiled three bookets that were entirely produced during his stay. Please note this event was combined with the launch of the publication Résidence de recherche jeune création : Anne-Lise Seusse, Olivia Boudreau, a copiously illustrated diary (co)produced with art3 (Valence) that benefited from the support of the Ministère des Relations internationales du Québec, Région Rhône-Alpes, and the French Consulate in Quebec City.

Suzy Lake, Une simulation authentique de... no 2 | A Genuine Simulation of... no. 2, 1974. Maquillage sur photographie noir et blanc. | Make-up on black-and-white photograph. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Achat, collection Saidye et Samuel Bronfman d’art canadien. | Purchase, Saidye and Samuel Bronfman Collection of Canadian Art.

Olivia Boudreau, Sorel Cohen, Raphaëlle de Groot, Suzy Lake, Claire Savoie, Jana Sterbak
from November 12th 2011 to December 17th 2011
Archi-féministes! : Archiver le corps (1rst part)

Under the curatorship of Marie-Ève Charron (independent curator and art critic for Le Devoir), Marie-Josée Lafortune (director of OPTICA), and Thérèse St-Gelais (professor of art history specialized in gender and women’s studies at UQAM), the exhibition “Archi-féministes!” brings together a significant body of historical and contemporary work by female artists who have contributed to the centre’s history since 1972. For the first time, we are broaching that history from a feminist point of view, an archival feminism proposing a retrospective and updated perspective concerned, among other things, with performativity in artistic practices and strategies deployed through photography, video, and the document.

Drawing not only on the OPTICA Archives, but also on private, public, and the artists’ own collections, the exhibition will occur in two parts. “Archiver le corps” (“Archiving the Body”) will first broach issues of identity in contexts interrogating relationships with oneself, with the other, and with art history. The works of Olivia Boudreau, Sorel Cohen, Raphaëlle de Groot, Suzy Lake, Claire Savoie, and Jana Sterbak reveal figurative and sometimes troubled stagings that revisit representations of the body and its historicization, via an intimacy imbued with eroticism or emotion.

Olivia Boudreau holds a masters’ in visual and media arts from UQAM and has taken part in several events in Montreal and Toronto. Following her residency at art3, Valence (France) in 2010—as part of the joint residency program initiated by art3 and OPTICA, where she showed Les vaches in 2007—she presented her first solo exhibition in Europe at Néon, diffuseur d’art contemporain, Lyon (France). This fall, she is participating in the “Québec Triennial 2011” at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Boudreau is an artist in residence at the Darling Foundry, Montreal.

With arts degrees from the universities of McGill and Concordia, Sorel Cohen has had many solo exhibitions, in particular at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1986) and Ateliers Nadar, in Marseille (1994). She has taken part in group shows in Canada and abroad, mainly in Cologne, New York, and Mexico. Her work was shown on several occasions at OPTICA—eight times between 1978 and 2000—where she has also been a board member. Cohen is represented by Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal.

With a master’s in visual and media arts from UQAM, Raphaëlle de Groot has, for the last ten years, been engaged in work that revolves around the figure of the artist. She has a great many group and solo exhibitions to her credit, the most important of which took place at Galerie de l’UQAM in 2006. In 2001, she took part in “Artists’ Gestures”, organized by OPTICA as part of the Saison du Québec à New York. De Groot is represented by Galerie Graff, Montreal.

Emeritus professor at Guelph University, Suzy Lake earned a master’s in multidisciplinary studies and photography at Concordia University. She has exhibited all over the world and was part of “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” presented at the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2007. She took part in “Camerart” (1974) and “Towards the Photograph as a Vulgar Document” (1988), two major exhibitions in OPTICA's history. Lake is represented by Michael Solway/Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Georgia Scherman Projects Inc, Toronto, and Galerie Donald Browne, Montreal.

Claire Savoie is a visual and media arts professor at UQAM, from which she obtained her graduate degree. She has taken part in many group exhibitions, the most recent being “Femmes artistes: L’éclatement des frontières, 1965-2000” (2010) at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In collaboration with the Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2011, she is presenting “Aujourd’hui (dates-vidéos)” at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. She presented “Les épithètes” at OPTICA in 1994 and has been a member of its board of directors since 1998.

A graduate from Concordia and Toronto universities, Jana Sterbak—with many awards and distinctions to her credit—has taken part in several biennials, including the prestigious Venice Biennale (2003). Her work is included in major public art collections in Canada and abroad. Besides the solo exhibition “Travaux récents” shown in 1980, she was assistant to OPTICA’s founding director in the centre’s early years. Sterbak is represented by the galleries Toni Tàpies – Edicions T, Barcelona, Raffaella Cortese, Milan, Barbara Gross, Munich, and Donald Young, Chicago.

Marie-Ève Charron, Marie-Josée Lafortune and Thérèse St-Gelais
editing : Geneviève Bédard
translation : Ron Ross

OPTICA and the curators gratefully acknowledge the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, volet soutien à des projets pour les organismes et les commissaires indépendants. Deepest thanks to the partner institutions that placed their trust in us : the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Michèle Thériault, Director and Mélanie Rainville, Max Stern Curator); the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Nathalie Bondil, Director, Anne-Marie Chevrier, Loan Officer, Marie-Claude Saia, Technician, Photographic Services and Copyright, and Simon Labrie, Shipping Management / Exhibitions Services); the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Stephen Borys, Director, Helen Delacretaz, Chief Curator and Curator, Decorative Arts, and Karen Kisiow, Registrar). Thank you to Josianne Monette for the background research, to Geneviève Bédard for the loan process, to Marc Dulude and Pierre Przysiezniak for the gallery installations. Thank you to Olivia Boudreau, Sorel Cohen, Raphaëlle de Groot, Suzy Lake, Claire Savoie, and Jana Sterbak for graciously accepting our invitation.

A 'not to miss' for Fall according to Jérôme Delgado («Galeries et centres d'artistes - Photos et déclics historiques», Le Devoir, August 27th, 2011) and Nicolas Mavrikakis («Rentrée 2011 | arts visuels : Faits au Québec», Voir, September 1rst, 2011).

Other interesting reads : an interview with Olivia Boudreau, Marie-Josée Lafortune and Thérèse St-Gelais (Jérôme Delgado, «Les archi-féministes s'exposent chez Optica», Le Devoir, November 12th 2011), a critic on the webzine ratsdeville («Claire Moeder sur Archi-féministes! ~ volet 1», December 2nd 2011) & a parodical article signed Nicolas Mavrikakis («Matantisation, Germaines et Cie!», Voir, December 7th, 2011)!

Marie-Ève Charron lectures at colleges and teaches art history at UQAM. An art critic for the Montreal daily Le Devoir, she contributes to several art journals, including esse arts + opinions, where she is a member of the editorial board, and Parachute, for whom she was production coordinator and editorial assistant from 2003 to 2006. She has also overseen publications for artist-run centres and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec and was curator of the exhibition “Au travail” at the Musée Régional de Rimouski in 2010.

Marie-Josée Lafortune is the director of OPTICA, a centre for contemporary art; she has been in charge of the gallery’s artistic, critical and editorial activities since 1992. She was also chairwoman of the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec from 2006 to 2010. She has published articles in Parachute, esse arts + opinions, and Critique d’art (France). She also co-directed Creative Confusions with Lynn Hugues (Les éditions OPTICA, 2001), among others. In 2006, she initiated a joint research residency program with art3, Valence (France), a new platform for young creators from Quebec on the international art scene.

Thérèse St-Gelais is an art history professor at UQAM, where she lectures on contemporary art and on historical and contemporary issues related to art by women. She edited The Undecidable: Gaps and Displacements of Contemporary Art, published at Les éditions esse in 2008. In 2010, she organized the symposium État de la recherche “Femmes: théorie et création” dans la francophonie. She is currently preparing the group show “Loin des yeux près du corps” at Galerie de l’UQAM (January 13 – February 18, 2012) and a solo exhibition on the work of Ghada Amer at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (February 2 – April 20, 2012).

© Sophie Bélair Clément (avec la collaboration de | with the collaboration of David Jacques), See you later / au revoir : 17 minutes en temps réel, 2008 (1/3). Installation vidéo, son | Video installation, sound. 18 minutes. Collection de la Galerie Leonard & Bina ellen, Université Concordia | Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Achat | Purchase, 2011.

Sophie Bélair Clément, Raphaëlle de Groot, Vera Frenkel, Clara Gutsche, Emmanuelle Léonard
from January 21st 2012 to February 25th 2012
Archi-féministes! : Performer l'archive (2nd part)

*Guided tour :: Friday, February 10th (4pm)*

Under the curatorship of Marie-Ève Charron (independent curator and art critic for Le Devoir), Marie-Josée Lafortune (director of OPTICA), and Thérèse St-Gelais (professor of art history specialized in gender and women’s studies at uQAM), the exhibition “Archi-féministes!” brings together a significant body of historical and contemporary work by female artists who have contributed to the centre’s history since 1972. For the first time, we are broaching that history from a feminist point of view, an archival feminism proposing a retrospective and updated perspective concerned, among other things, with performativity in artistic practices and strategies deployed through photography, video, and the document. The exhibition, occurring in two parts, draws not only on the OPTICA Archives, but also on private, public, and artists’ collections.

After “Archiver le corps” (“Archiving the Body”), “Performer l’archive” (“Performing the Archive”) brings together artists rooted in the documentary tradition, or revisiting it by way of performance, appropriation, accumulation and repetition. Besides interrogating notions of authorship and artistic tradition, these strategies examine and key off the artist’s body and the time of production and reception of the work. The practices of Sophie Bélair Clément, Raphaëlle de Groot, Vera Frenkel, Clara Gutsche, and Emmanuelle Léonard probe a variety of production processes through critical operations employing fiction, the body, personal narratives, reflexivity, and subjectivity.

Since the 2000s, Sophie Bélair Clément has been producing collaborative installations that revisit contemporary works and reconstruct historic museum and gallery exhibitions. For OPTICA in 2009, she presented “Le son du projecteur,” a project based on her experience at the Museum Anna Nordlander (Skellefteå, Sweden) the previous year. With a master’s in visual and media arts at UQAM, Clément has exhibited in Quebec, Canada and abroad. Last fall, she took part in “The Québec Triennial 2011” at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Also holding a masters’ from UQAM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques, Raphaëlle de Groot has, for the last ten years, produced works that often rely on the collection and archival reorganization of material. She has a great many group and solo exhibitions to her credit, the most important of which took place at Galerie de l’UQAM in 2006. In 2001, she took part in “Artists’ Gestures,” organized by OPTICA as part of the Saison du Québec à New York. De Groot is represented by Galerie Graff, Montreal.

Vera Frenkel, who studied at McGill University, has won numerous accolades and awards, including the 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Her installations, performances, videos, and multimedia works present narrative elements that blur the distinctions between fiction and reality. Frenkel, a professor emerita at York University, has taken part in major solo and group exhibitions, including Documenta IX (Cassel, 1992) and the Venice Biennale (1997). At OPTICA, she took part in the exhibitions “Vérifications” (1984) and “Exposition rétrospective: volet II,” marking the centre’s twentieth anniversary in 1992; she is also among the contributors to “Creative Confusions: Interdisciplinary Practices in Contemporary Art ” (2001).

Clara Gutsche holds a masters in photography from Concordia University where she also teaches. She is noted for her documentary photography, particularly a renowned series on the Milton Parc neighbourhood jointly produced with David Miller and presented at OPTICA in the exhibition and catalogue “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Till It’s Gone... The Destruction of Milton Parc” (1973). Since 2000, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of venues, including the Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi, Belgique), the Casa delle Letterature (Rome), VU (Quebec City), and Occurrence (Montreal).

Having studied at UQAM and Concordia University, Emmanuelle Léonard broaches the status and tradition of documentary photography. Winning the Ville de Montréal’s Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2005, she has taken part in many group and solo exhibitions, notably those held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Neue Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin). In 2007, as part of the 10th edition of the Mois de la Photo à Montréal, OPTICA presented Léonard’s “Une sale affaire.”

Marie-Ève Charron, Marie-Josée Lafortune and Thérèse St-Gelais
editing : Geneviève Bédard
translation : Ron Ross

OPTICA and the curators gratefully acknowledge the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, volet soutien à des projets pour les organismes et les commissaires indépendants. Thanks to Ms. Natacha Martin and the organizations that have partnered with us: the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Michèle Thériault, Director, and Mélanie Rainville, Max Stern Curator) and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Jan Allen, Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, and Jennifer Nicoll, Collections Manager and Exhibition Coordinator). We are also grateful to Josianne Monette, who processed the works, Geneviève Bédard for managing the loans, Marc Dulude and Pierre Przysiezniak for the gallery installations, and to the artists Sophie Bélair Clément, Raphaëlle de Groot, Vera Frenkel, Clara Gutsche, and Emmanuelle Léonard for having graciously accepted our invitation.

A 'not to miss' for Fall according to Jérôme Delgado («Galeries et centres d'artistes : Du trafic...dès maintenant», Le Devoir, January 14th-15th, 2012, p. E12.) and Nicolas Mavrikakis («Expos à contenus», Voir, January 12th, 2012.

Date limite | Deadline
February 28th 2012

Click on the following link for more information on our annual call for projects.

March 1st 2012
March 1rst : Résidence de recherche jeune création, Valence (France)
call for proposals

For more information, please click on the following link for our research residency program (Montreal - Valence, France). Thank you!

Scott Wallis
from March 17th 2012 to April 21st 2012
Solo exhibition

Scott Wallis’ work is as much of space as in space, exploring and (re)negociating the disciplinary limits between the sculptural and the pictorial through abstraction. His practice is in line with formalist and modernist tradition, a fully assumed heritage the artist goes so far as to defend and promote: citing Hal Foster, Wallis states that “minimalism appears as a historical crux in which the formalist autonomy of art is at once achieved and broken up”(1); Wallis addresses the force of this contradiction in his work. This exhibition results from an invitation by Marie-Ève Beaupré (independent curator and doctorand in art history at UQAM).

(1) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 54.

Oli Sorenson
from March 17th 2012 to April 21st 2012
Solo exhibition

Oli Sorenson defines his approach as that of an art operator: “I produce art like a DJ produces music.” He (re/de)constructs the narrative structures of the moving image and foils conventions by engaging in editing, citation, and sampling as creative acts in their own right. With subtle alterations to a motif that suggests Daniel Buren, Sorenson’s Antimap series recalls the aesthetic of Op Art or of the Supports/Surfaces group while alluding to video mapping techniques currently popular in electronic music festivals; in the process, he puts his unmistakable signature on the accumulation of recontextualized operations in the gallery.

En conversation avec Michel de Broin
April 12th 2012
Cocktail | Conference | Art exhibition + sale

Thursday, April 12, 2012, 5pm-8pm
L’Arsenal (at Division Gallery): 2020, William, Montreal (Quebec) H3J 1R8
Reservations: 514.874.1666 | communications@optica.ca

Michel de Broin, recipient of the 2007 Sobeys Art Award, has garnered an international reputation. His many solo exhibitions throughout the world include “Disruption from Within” (Plug In, Winnipeg, 2009), “Reciprocal Energy” (Mac/ Val, Paris, 2008), “Machinations” (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2006), and “Reverse Entropy” (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2006). He is known for such large-scale, space-investing projects as Majestic (The Third of May Arts Inc., New Orleans, 2011), La maîtresse de la Tour Eiffel (Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2009), and Révolutions (Collection de la Ville de Montréal, Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, 2003). He is represented by Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona.

Michel de Broin will present the development of his work during an exhibition and art sale to be held at L’Arsenal. Proceeds will go toward supporting OPTICA’s activities and the William A. Ewing grant. The gallery is registered with the Gouvernement du Québec’s Programme Placements Culture.

Cynthia Girard
from May 12th 2012 to June 16th 2012
Pierre Vallières + Josée Yvon

Two Pasolinian antiheroes inhabit and infiltrate the artist’s mind, almost unconsciously: they are Pierre Vallières and Josée Yvon. Vallières appears in the guise of St-Francis of Assisi, feeding birds from crumbs and from his book White Niggers in America. Yvon, for her part, asks the artist to paint portraits drawn from the covers of her utopian, erotically charged publications' titles, including Travesties-Kamizaze, Filles-missiles, and Les laides otages. In this project—an installation of paintings, objects, and sound sculptures—Cynthia Girard draws from an unbridled imagination to revisit the revolutionary ideals of a modern Quebec.

© Julie trudel, Test 44, projet CMYK project, 2011. Acrylique, encre de sérigraphie et gesso sur contreplaqué | Acrylic, silk screen printing ink and gesso on plywood. 35 x 35 cm. Gracieuseté de l’artiste | Courtesy of the artist. Photo : Richard-Max Tremblay.

Julie Trudel
from May 12th 2012 to June 16th 2012
Solo exhibition

Julie Trudel’s practice marries abstract with conceptual art, an approach the artist calls post- structuralist. Fascinated with the representational systems we use to rationalize some complex realities—like the four printing colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) in her CMYK project—Trudel proposes a systematic exploration of pictorial method. Establishing a simple working protocol, she then repeats it in serial fashion: a limited colour palette, a basic motif, a predefined application procedure, non-hierarchical all-over composition... The repetition of such operations reveals—and fully exhausts—all the potentialities in the process.