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9/10/2009

Three solo shows

Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal MACM, Montreal

Tacita Dean
curated by Mark Lanctôt

How to choreograph silence. That was the challenge issued by artist Tacita Dean to the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham, who revolutionized modern dance. From October 10, 2009 to January 3, 2010, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the exhibition Tacita Dean.

In 2007, British artist Tacita Dean invited Cunningham to choreograph John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. That piece—a 4-minute, 33-second silence “performed” in three movements—was highly influential in twentieth-century music and very emotional for the choreographer: Cage, who died in 1992, was his long-time collaborator and life partner. Cunningham, who was 88 at the time and in a wheelchair, accepted the challenge. On the afternoon of April 28, 2007, in the New York studios of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Dean filmed a total of six takes. Seated on a chair, before a wall of rehearsal-room mirrors, Cunningham performed silence by remaining immobile, adjusting his pose slightly between each of the movements in response to a signal from Trevor Carlson, the company’s director.

The show consists of an installation of six projections on screens arranged around the exhibition space, entitled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007. Each projection corresponds to one of the six performances presented by Cunningham and filmed by Dean. With 4’33’’, Cage set out to compose a piece made of unbroken silence. In Stillness, Cunningham transposes this silence into immobility and Dean uses a still camera, shooting each performance from a different angle. The screens’ dimensions are calibrated so that the choreographer, whether seen in close-up or long shot, is life-size. Here, music, dance and film simultaneously share a common space-time with the visitor.

The artist
Born in 1965, in Canterbury, England, Tacita Dean explores various media, including drawing, photography and sound, but made her name internationally with her films documenting the passage of time. She has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions since 1992, at Dia:Beacon (2008), Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Schaulager, Munchenstein/Basel, Switzerland (2006), National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2006), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003) and Tate Britain (2001), among others. Closer to us here, she participated in the 2000 Biennale de Montréal. She has won the Kurt Schwitters Prize (Germany, 2009) and the Hugo Boss Prize (United States, 2006), and was nominated for the Millennium Prize awarded by the National Gallery of Canada in 2001 and for the 1998 Turner Prize. Tacita Dean lives and works in Berlin.

The presentation at the Musée d’art contemporain is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.
Tribute to Cunningham 1919-2009
This work examining silence and the passage of time takes on added poignancy with the death of Merce Cunningham this past July.

The exhibition Tacita Dean was curated by Mark Lanctôt, curator at the Musée.

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Tricia Middleton
curated by Sandra Grant Marchand

From the moment they enter the “grotto,” visitors are plunged into the depths of a grotesque, baroque fictional world that closes around them. Two videos project a light that emanates from the bowels of the installation. A contemporary metaphor for Plato’s cave or a sensory experience of metamorphosing materials? From October 10, 2009 to January 3, 2010, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the exhibition Tricia Middleton.

Dark Souls
For the exhibition, the artist is creating a new installation here in which she explores the question of the transformation and destruction of materials, a process characteristic of the industrial production cycle, the outcome of which is that “natural resources and the labouring being’s élan become denuded and erased.” The title Dark Souls is inspired by that of the Nikolai Gogol novel Dead Souls, in which the author decried the decay of Russia’s social system. Middleton updates this critique with her denunciation of today’s consumer, and waste, society, which strips objects of their meaning and recognizes them only for their value as a form of currency.

Drawing on such architectural icons as the Palace of Versailles, and Notre-Dame Cathedral and the catacombs in Paris, Middleton uses painting, sculpture, video projections and recycled materials to create a phantasmagorical environment, a world of opulence and ruin, grand yet decadent, laid out along a series of Dantesque paths.

The artist
Tricia Middleton investigates the process of creating a work, in installations that borrow from the disciplines of sculpture, video and painting. For Middleton, the material itself is the subject of the work. Often site-specific, her pieces bring together the studio, which she views as a kind of “absurd laboratory,” and the exhibition space, ultimately making them one and the same.

Born in Vancouver in 1972, Middleton holds a B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and an M.F.A. from Concordia University. Over the past decade, she has taken part in numerous video festivals and biennials in collaboration with Joel Taylor: New York Video Festival (New York, 2001 and 2003), Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin (2002 and 2003), Les Rendez-vous du Cinéma québécois (2004 and 2005), and Video Art Stars Video Biennial (Ottawa, 2007). Among the main group shows she has participated in are Backpacker (London Biennial, London, 2002), Beyond Feminism (Parisian Laundry, Montréal, 2006); Dé-con-structions, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, 2007), and The Québec Triennial, here at the Musée in 2008. Her solo exhibitions include Ether Frolics at the Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark and The Woods/Dans la forêt at the Centre des arts actuels Skol, both in 2005. This presentation is her first solo exhibition at a museum. Tricia Middleton has lived and worked in Montréal since 2002.

Curator
The exhibition was curated by Sandra Grant Marchand. The artist thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts for the grants they provided for the preparation of the show.

Catalogue
A bilingual catalogue will be published a few weeks after the exhibition opens, in order to include reproductions of the work in situ. In addition to extensive visual documentation, it will contain an essay by the curator, Sandra Grant Marchand, and a biobibliography. The publication will be available at the museum’s Olivieri Bookstore or from your local bookseller.

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Francine Savard

For the past fifteen years, Francine Savard has explored the medium of painting, making it the very subject of her art. Her work is rich in references to the history of art, its writings and meanings, the studio and the painter’s tools. Taking the form of variously shaped, monochromatic canvases, her works intermingle, with poetic flair, formalist and conceptual approaches, art and language, art history, literature and geography, while offering a fresh interpretation of the vocabulary of painting.

The exhibition
This mid-career retrospective presents some sixty pieces produced by the artist between 1992 and 2009. Among the paintings featured is Promenade en 56 tableaux, 1993, which introduced the notion of mapping that would become a dominant feature of her subsequent work. In this first example, the starting point is an art tourist’s map of the Marais neighbourhood in Paris. In Le Dépôt de peinture, 2000, the mapping is inspired by a cracked surface discovered at the bottom of a can of paint.

Savard’s reading of two publications on the work of Québec artist Fernand Leduc was the impetus for the series Un plein un vide, 2001, in which she attaches the pictorial qualities they describe to shapes derived from Leduc’s paintings. The title Les Couleurs de Cézanne dans les mots de Rilke, 36/100 – Essai, 1998, refers to letters that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to his wife about the paintings of Cézanne. Fascinated by the poet’s rich vocabulary, Savard imagines what “du blanc comme couleur” or “jaune d’un vert terreux” might look like. A decade later, she takes on another monument of modern art, Marcel Duchamp’s Tu m’, 1918, which he himself considered a summary of his previous works and concerns. This artistic legacy provides the inspiration for Savard’s most ambitious work to date, Tu m’, un dernier tableau, 2009, a spectacular transposition of the famous colour chart into real space: a curve seven metres long that extends out from the wall, forming a transition between two and three dimensions. This “last painting” touches on the illusory nature of two-dimensional perspectival space and the debate about the death of painting. It concludes, and brilliantly sums up, this survey of an artist in mid-career that takes us on a journey to the very heart of painting.

The artist
Francine Savard is part of a generation of Québec painters, including Guy Pellerin, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber and Stéphane La Rue, who explore the formal vocabulary of abstract painting and probe the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, between painting and sculpture and, for Savard, between art and language.

Born in 1954, Savard studied graphic design at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Royal College of Art in London in the 1970s before turning to the visual arts, and earning an M.F.A. from UQAM in 1994. She gained critical notice with her first solo exhibitions, including La chambre à peinture at Galerie B-312 Émergence in 1997, “Muséumification” at Montréal Télégraphe in 2001, Un plein un vide at Galerie René Blouin in 2002, Vol d’un carré de toile at Blouin and A Square of Canvas at Toronto’s Sable Castelli Gallery in 2004, and Suite at Diaz Contemporary, also in Toronto, in 2008. She has taken part in a number of group shows, such as Le mensonge de la couleur at Montréal Télégraphe and the Peinture Peinture event in 1998, Lines Painted in Early Spring at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge in 2003 and De l’écriture/With Writing: Works from the Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2006. The latter two travelled extensively in Québec and the rest of Canada. The current exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to the artist. Savard is based in Montréal, where she enjoys a dual career as a visual artist and graphic designer, reflective of her twin-faceted training.

Organization and tour
The exhibition was organized by Lesley Johnstone, curator at the Musée. The works come from the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A tour of the exhibition is planned by the MAC to begin in April 2010, following its Montréal presentation.

Catalogue
A bilingual, 100-page catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition. It contains essays by Lesley Johnstone, Musée and exhibition curator, and Catherine Bédard, Director of Visual Arts at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, along with a list of works, a biobibliography and numerous colour reproductions. The publication may be purchased for $29.95 at the museum’s Olivieri Bookstore or from your local bookseller.

Image: Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films), 2008.

Press contact: Danielle Legentil, Media Relations Officer, at (514) 847-6232
or by e-mail at: danielle.legentil@macm.org

Opening 10 October 2009

Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal
185, Sainte-Catherine Ouest (corner Jeanne-Mance) Montréal, Québec

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