Indoor activities

Pyjama parties, Dr. Stranglelove, fauvism
and abstraction to warm you up this winter

A FLOURISH ON THE FINANCIAL PAGES:
“Sabrina” from Sabrina Russo’s Shaking series

by STACEY DEWOLFE

Though it is considerably easier to snuggle up with a brandy and a good book, the winter months are actually an ideal time to get out and explore the city’s vibrant art scene.

Things get underway tonight, Thursday, Jan. 15, with the third of four “pyjama parties” at Articule (262 Fairmount W.). Hosted by Toronto-based performer Moynan King, Mothering is an interactive exhibition, breaking down the fourth wall so that audience members become part of the investigation, their engagement speaking to the performative nature of human relationships and family dynamics.

Also tonight, and just around the corner, Push Gallery (5264 St-Laurent) celebrates the opening of a solo exhibition by Mathieu Lévesque. Entitled Peripheral Vision, the show comprises a series of strange and magical multimedia works that carry echoes of pop-art and surrealism. And, as it was with the gallery’s previous show, the works hover provocatively on that fine line between abstraction and representation.

Meanwhile, over at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1920 Baile), there is a great opportunity to keep your year moving in the right direction, as What You Can Do With the City (until April 19) offers a multitude of inspiring examples of ways to make our cities more liveable. From an urban soccer field in downtown Sharjah to a herb garden grown on a busy Copenhagen street, the show makes real the possibility of creating meaningful change from small interventions.

Art Mûr (5826 St-Hubert) begins its winter season tonight, with three new shows. Scott Yeoll’s Abstractions of a Paradigm uses installation, drawing and video to comment on the detritus of the constructed world and its impact on the natural environment. Magalie Comeau’s The Emergence of Significant Being is a series of paintings that seeks to challenge the definition of space as a purely geometric construct, while the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2009 showcases the work of emerging photographers including Sabrina Russo.

Satirizing Strangelove

Vox Gallery (1211 St-Laurent) also has new exhibitions running: Kristan Horton’s Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove is a series of satirical reproductions of images from Kubrick’s much-loved film. The gallery is also showing Angela Grauerholz’s “Web experimentation” entitled At Work and Play, an archive of sorts exploring the vast array of media and documents that resonate in her body of work.

On Jan. 24 at 3 p.m., you can spend some time with artist Dominique Sirois, whose Factory Cubique runs at Skol Gallery (372 Ste-Catherine W., #314). Seeking to both emulate and subvert the world of many industrial workers, Sirois’s installation finds her manufacturing sugar cubes in a fantastic laboratory setting. Playing with notions of security and surveillance, the empty factory with its silent machines, sugary skeletons and mysterious residue raises more questions than it answers.

Also opening on Jan. 24, The Museum of Costume and Textile (349 Riverside, St-Lambert), in collaboration with The Montreal Oriental Rug Society, has a display of 19th century Antique Caucasian Rugs. Rich with historical and geographical significance, these textiles are works of art and beauty.

A fauve in the city

The big galleries also have new shows coming up. On Jan. 22, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1380 Sherbrooke W.) offers a rare opportunity to check out the work of lesser-known Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen with Van Dongen: A Fauve in the City. Over at the Museum of Contemporary Art (185 Ste-Catherine W.), three major video installations by Berlin-based Lynne Marsh are showing until Feb. 8, while Feb. 5 sees the opening of a retrospective of Canadian abstract painter Claude Tousignant, whose line drawings can be seen at a parallel show at Art Mûr.

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (1400 Maisonneuve W.) opens Jan. 30 with Silvia Kolbowski’s Nothing and Everything—a pair of installations that represent two diverse aspects of her work. 1999’s “An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art” is Kolbowski’s reassessment of conceptual art, while “After Hiroshima Mon Amour” from 2008 speaks to America’s current political climate through a reinterpretation of Alain Resnais’ 1959 film.

Hinterland who’s who

Artist Theresa Sapergia takes
inspiration from nature

by SACHA JACKSON

Though she’s been working with similar themes for a while, it wasn’t until exhibiting in the States that Theresa Sapergia realized her work was inherently Canadian. “Once you’re out of Canada, you start to feel like a Canadian—oddly enough,” she laughs.

For her latest show, Canada Day, on view at Parisian Laundry to Feb. 14, Sapergia, who completed her MFA at Concordia before moving back to B.C., where she recently opened her own tattoo shop and teaches painting at the UNBC, took her cue from questions her American exhibits raised.

“Americans kept asking me about Canadian art and what it’s like to live here. So, it made sense to localize the work, which I was doing anyway. But I hadn’t really put a finger on the fact that these were Canadian animals I kept dealing with.”

Alongside the large-scale wolves, the show includes moose, bears and a Canada goose. “It’s sort of a post-human Canada,” she says. “A fantasy Canada—without people.”