David Holden / Jean-François Gratton

Galerie [sas]
8 October 2008













"Crawford Bridge", © David Holden 2006

An interesting marriage of the surreal with the ultra-real, which I think rather heightened the experience of both shows. I'd seen David Holden's last show at the [sas], and I must admit it threw me into actual raptures. I'm not quite sure what it was about the little cameos of urban wastelands in Ontario painted on little tea plates that got me into a tizzy, but I just loved it. All of it.

For this show, Holden really did something new with his style - the rundown parking lots and playgrounds and warehouses are still there, but the colours are amped up and the surreality has
crept in. I'm not sure he quite knows where he's taking this yet - the images were gorgeous, and
tickled me in the same way his older work did, but the new elements seem a bit uncomfortable... like the surrealist paintings they made my class do in the 6th grade - they looked weird, but was that enough? At any rate, the paintings are lovely and I can't wait to see what he does next.


Gratton's contributions fit perfectly into the smaller "espace 2", which is much more suited to this sort of concept art than it is to the miniaturized museum-displays they sometimes try to cram in there. Now, I call this ultra-realism because I don't actually know what the right term is, but I figure it's photos of a photobooth, and then taking adorable black and white photos of yourself in the photobooth from the photos... that's pretty real, right?

Also, they let us use a hammer.


To 22 November.

Blood Royale

Galerie d’art Yves Laroche
10 September 2008


I love this Old Port gallery - its gorgeous walls and beautiful view of the water are definitely worth the trip. The velvet curtains and high ceilings and DJ and boutique make it feel like you've wandered into some decadent gothic theater. This particular show, all work by tattoo artists, really fit the mood, and I noticed that the gallery appears to have the artists for each show paint the large windows in the main passage, which is really a cool idea. It makes you feel like the space was entirely created for the show that's going on, which is a lot more personal than most galleries feel.

There were little "trading cards" of some of the art, which my companions were happily snapping up... I found them creepy, but Chris loves them and now they're on our fridge. I'm getting used to them. The art as a whole was quite creepy, but gorgeously done, provocative, and violently colorful and iconic across the board. Even the ones by the guy who was totally inventing new, evil Pokemons. I swear he was, look:


It's a pokemon. An evil stopwatch-serpent pokemon. Awesome.

To 21 September.

Collectif photographes/chorégraphes & Carlito Dalceggio

Galerie [sas]
4 September 2008

I didn't get it at the time, but most of the exhibit pairs up dancers and photographers and then displays the results. Clever... each pair is quite different - there's the metallic one, and the orgy one, and the exotic looking woman who appears to be in the tropics but is actually probably in Oka or something. I was hotter on some of the pictures than others, but all together they make for a very interesting display.

© Carlito Dalceggio, 2008

Carlito's work is, of course, gorgeous and fun and colorful, and more or less a complete delight. He did a globe, some chairs, and butterfly wings this time, and I think he should keep this up, and just make one of everything.

The vernissage was a wonderful good time, as Carlito's always are - the gallery stays open late, the ice wine flows freely (though I heard some poor reviews of having wine on tap...), and everybody is behaving fairly badly so nobody noticed our little group of increasingly hysterical revelers. After we'd had enough, we retired to the church down the street to finish our beers on the steps and contemplate important philosophical questions.

Through October 4th

Dorea / Monumental Toc

Galerie [sas]
Montreal, 18 June, 2008

© Marie Reine Mattera / Emmanuel Joly : 2 de la série Doréa / 2006 / impression jet d'encre / 20x48

This is actually quite a good show to begin this "blogging" venture with. As far as vernissages go, this one was definitely a good time.

First of all, I love diptychs. Everything about them is so vastly superior to single-element pieces of two-dimensional art that I wonder sometimes that anyone would bother to even attempt other formats.

Secondly, the always-wonderful [sas] has switched from the merely excellent 1664 beer to the absolutely charming and infinitely more muscovite Boris label. The ice cider, of course, remains available in its cute little tin buckets, but it's still entirely too girly for my tastes, and the addition of the Boris beer with its darling alsatio-soviet bottle designs gets an absolute two-thumbs-up from my camp.

The crowd, as always, left something to be desired; I never can figure out how a place that gets as much good art through it as this one does can never manage to attract any bizarre japanese biker boys, little old Italian men with quivering purse-dogs under their arm, or any of the other wonderful sorts that make some of these vernissages so perfect.

I actually liked both of the exhibitions enough to entirely skip reading the long French artschool essays that the [sas] insists on including with all its shows. I glanced at the one for Monumental Toc, but it looked like it was some nonsense about showing ordinary things in ordinary contexts but upside down because of something to do with "the functional character replaced par l'intrigue du fonctionnement", so I gave it up. The piece in question was a large grid of metal boxes with motorized magnets inside which moved around small dioramas on the underside of each box. The funny little dioramas were interspersed with a variety of corporate and national logos for (I assume) the usual reasons, but they just all looked so damn nice that they could have been anything for all I cared.

My recommendation: See it! It doesn't even need the beer to be good. Through August 30th.