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Benoit Aquin, a Montrealer from birth, is documenting climate change in China. Storm in Hangsibao is one of Aquin?s photographs in the biennial.
Photograph by: Benoit Aquin , Galerie Hugues Charbonneau
MONTREAL - The theme of the National Gallery of Canada?s biennial is the artist as builder, a term that might relate to how deeply artists see their creations as a process.
Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 is a showing of some of the Ottawa institution?s acquisitions of the past two years.
Eleven of the 45 artists have a connection with Montreal. They include David Altmejd, Benoit Aquin, Michel de Broin, Dil Hildebrand, Michael Merrill and Lynne Cohen.
Altmejd, who was born in Montreal and now works in New York, is certainly process-driven in his art. ?Every little step predicts the next one,? he says in a video excerpt from an episode of PBS?s Art in the 21st Century (go to pbs.org/art21 and search the artist by name).
Altmejd is shown in the video working on The Vessel, his contribution to the biennial. His mixed-media sculptures are ?too structurally and spatially complex to be grasped all at once? because they come from an interest in nature, he writes in the catalogue, and The Vessel exemplifies this. It is a modular structure made of Plexiglas that looks abstract from a distance, but the parts become recognizable on closer view.
Plaster casts of Altmejd?s hands and ears are suspended by thread, trails of wire swooping them into motion. Capturing energy is one of Altmejd?s goals.
Aquin, a Montrealer from birth, is documenting climate change in China. Eighteen per cent of China?s land mass is desert, he says in the catalogue. A quarter of those deserts are new, created by human activity that has turned arable land into sand dunes, he writes.
Sandstorms are generated that reach the Korean peninsula, Japan and even North America.
Aquin?s photographs were made in a city of 200,000 that China constructed for people fleeing the advancing sand dunes and as a base for a huge restoration project. There are a lot of good jobs in Hangsibao, but Aquin shows the price of those jobs ? choking winds that buffet the city.
Storm in Hangsibao is one of Aquin?s photographs in the biennial. Another print of it can be seen locally in a group exhibition that opens Saturday at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (huguescharbonneau.com) in the Belgo building. Others in the series are on Aquin?s website (benoitaquin.com).
The McCord museum (mccord-museum.qc.ca) will show another aspect of Aquin?s photography in the exhibition Haiti: Chaos in Daily Life, which opens Feb. 28.
De Broin, who is based in Montreal, the city of his birth, has the most visible work at the biennial. Majestic, a sculpture made from nine New Orleans street lamps uprooted by hurricane Katrina, is permanently installed on museum grounds and can be seen from the biennial galleries.
De Broin created Majestic for Prospect 2, the New Orleans biennial in 2011. The lamps, in styles from old to modern, represent districts they once illuminated.
Majestic remains a working light source. It resembles a jack with three extra arms: three that lay on the ground, three that point outward and three that arc through the sky.
It is also a kind of a machine installation animated by its own flickering lights and neighbouring ones that reflect on its metal arms.
It?s media art, too, transmitting a message. ?It?s a star that evokes the unity of the people who rallied to rebuild the city of New Orleans,? de Broin writes in the handsome catalogue.
Mark this piece a big steal for Canada. You can see Majestic on de Broin?s website (micheldebroin.org).
Hildebrand is a Winnipeg native who makes his home in Montreal.
His Studio D, which is a representation of his own workspace, is two paintings on one piece of canvas. An abstract set of lines in florid oil colours scraped over the canvas overlays a flat background that is blurred in the uniform manner of an out-of-focus photograph.
The foreground is so aggressive that it takes a while to notice the perfectly discernible ? if fuzzy ? image of the studio that it frames.
In a video on the National Gallery website (go to gallery.ca/builders, click on videos), Hildebrand likens the painting to stage architecture, with curtains hanging in front of a photo-like backdrop.
Hildebrand?s work will be seen in Galerie de l?UQAM?s survey of current Canadian painting this spring. The Painting Project will have two parts, one opening May 1 and the second on June 7.
Merrill, also Montreal-born and based, has three ink drawings in the biennial that were created alongside the gouaches he made as records of work done in 2010 and 2011 at the Museum of Fine Arts as it built the new pavilion of Canadian art and transformed some of its older galleries.
The drawings are loose and luscious; they hover between abstraction and representation.
Other artists in the biennial include Lynne Cohen, a Montrealer by choice, whose solo exhibition of photographs opens at the Mus?e d?art contemporain (macm.org) on Feb. 7.
A notable non-Montrealer in the biennial is Michael Snow, who is featured in Solo Snow, an exhibition at the Galerie de l?UQAM that opens Thursday. (galerie.uqam.ca)
Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012 continues until Feb. 18 at the National Gallery of Canada, 380 Sussex Drive, Ottawa. For more information, visit gallery.ca
john.o.pohl@gmail.com
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