Chrysalis and Butterfly

Opening: Saturday, April 12, 3 pm - 5 pm

As several streams run through the sand to meet the ocean, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley (Leisure) urge multiple social, material and cultural discourses to flow together into a synergic resource. This wellspring of discourses is an alive and dynamic commons which both sustains and is cared for and renewed by many humans and non-humans. A model of artwork as relational, intimate, and living emerges from Leisure's ongoing collaborative practice, and is offered by them here in Butterfly and Chrysalis as a possibility for future worlds.

L'orbe dérobé (Atlas des possibles) 30 years of drawing, performance and architectural practice

Opening: Saturday, April 12, 3 pm - 5 pm

In Stéphane Gilot’s art practice, parallel narratives accumulate, intersecting, merging, and eventually exploding into a multiplicity of possible versions. Gilot persistently examines the interconnections between the scale of architecture and its ideological implications, and the proximity between the architectural model and various types of indexes. Through large-scale installations, as well as drawings, scale models, videos, watercolours, and sculptures, he explores, often in collaboration with others, ways of inhabiting constructed, fictional, or real spaces. Architectural approaches associated with utopias, dystopias, social structures, and worldviews that recognize a plurality of universes are central to his research.

Public Education Program | Fall - Spring 2024-2025

OPTICA’s public education program proposes various creative workshops and interactive tours for audiences of all ages, from 4 and up. Daycare centres, public and private, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, retirement homes and community organizations can all participate in our activities. These ones place in an atmosphere conducive to discussion and reflection, in order to learn more about current creative production.

NEW PUBLICATION

Launch of the monograph
Clara Gutsche. Portraits d’enfants. Children
Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Alvaro Marinho, Recipient of the Intersections Residency at OPTICA

The Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM), Contemporary art centre OPTICA, and UQAM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques (ÉAVM) are very pleased to announce that Alvaro Marinho is the recipient of the Research, Creation, and Production Intersections Residency 2025.

The Dividing Line

“If we make mistakes with our border controls, it will hurt Bulgaria” reads the sign next to a painted border guard, armed with an AK 47 and a dog, looking off into the distance as the white plaster crumbles around him, revealing a ruddy brick wall beneath. In Thomas Kneubühler’s new exhibition The Dividing Line, this messiness of the Bulgarian borderscape comes into sharp relief. The past and present comingle. Walking through the gallery space, cut apart by a 30 foot long cold steel fence, we see crumbling Soviet walls juxtaposed with modern surveillance technologies. These contradictions between history and memory, innovation and contestation are common across the world’s borders, ever more so as border control is increasingly mechanized and automated.

Theodysseylysystratagilgameshwaspsbookofthedeadgoldenassgolemmarquiseofo

The artist Milutin Gubash and his practice have always been shaped by a family history marked by uprooting: in the early 1970s, the Gubash family fled the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for Canada. While Milutin Gubash still seeks to create a link with his homeland, his work also reflects on perceptions of cultural, political and social identity. His multifaceted practice offers a critique of political and economic systems that generate injustice and humiliation, within a comprehensive logic of the ancient and modern world.