Rainbow bright

>> Feast on blinking bulbs, artful dissent and Muscovite montage

By SIOBHAN O'CONNOR

There's something decidedly moody about Toronto-based Lisa Neighbour's Illuminations, which is set up in the darkened Liane and Danny Taran Gallery of the Saidye. Neighbour has been working on her electric light sculptures since the late-'80s and this constellation of 20-odd works are an eclectic bunch, some more innovative and fun than others.

The collection's arresting playfulness and rainbow-bright carnival colours call to mind the glitzy excess of a downtown thoroughfare or a Mexican festival--two sources of inspiration that the artist cites. Drawing on a medley of religious symbols (Sufi iconography, Portuguese festival decoration, a bible, dove, crown of thorn, lotus), Neighbour subverts these images in a commentary on "contemporary cultural hybridization" that volleys between the poignant and the unfortunately simplistic.

"Fireflies" stands out as a delightful installation made up of several-dozen kitschy lamps (the likes of which one finds in grandparents' basements and church bazaars) with exposed, winking white light bulbs. "Lemon Tree" is one of the more unique pieces, made up of heavy black wires against a white wall that reach up like the trunk of a tree, each "branch" bearing a lemon-yellow bulb at its tip. The most unusual, though, is "Hurricane Andrew," which is installed in the shape of an eye on the floor, with fans and thick wires swirling toward the bright red bulb that lies at its centre.

Around the world

Just down the block from the Saidye, at the Centre d'exposition of the University of Montreal, is a powerful exhibit titled Gravures et dessins au temps de la République de Weimar. This travelling exhibit brings together 146 drawings by Weimar-era, German artists such as George Grosz, Conrad Felix Mueller and Kaethe Kollwitz. Focussing on a period in art history that has often been considered "forgotten," the exhibit hopes to bring to light the often-caustic, brilliant work of these political dissidents, many of whom used caricature to denounce the politics of said republic of 1918-33 Germany. As well as the free exhibit there are lectures, Sunday concerts and weekly film screenings at the bastion of German cinema, the Goethe-Institut.

Also on the film tip, Montreal-based Russian artist, Katherine Liberovskaya, who works as both a professor of television production and with Studio XX, brings two decades of experience with experimental video to her most recent project, Post-Soviet Moscow Montages. This jet-setter, who regularly travels to Moscow and St. Petersburg, will present a montage of recent experimental video from post-USSR Moscow. It screens Tuesday night at Vidéographe, accompanied, appropriately enough, by a vodka cash-bar.

Illuminations shows at the Saidye (5170 Cote-Ste-Catherine) until March 4



Gravures et dessins... shows at the Centre d'exposition (2940 Cote-Ste-Catherine) until March 22. See repertory listings for film showtimes at the Goethe-Institut



Post-Soviet Moscow Montages screen at Vidéographe (305 Ste-Catherine W.) on Tuesday, Feb. 6 at 7:30pm, free