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Laurent Grasso?s film Bomarzo is about a sculpture ?park of monsters.?
It?s a magical mystery tour through space and time in two new exhibitions at the Mus?e d?art contemporain.
Lynne Cohen: False Clues provides much of the mysterious space. The Montreal-based photographer reveals the weirdness of public and semi-public spaces we tend to pass through without really noticing. Once you do pass through her exhibition of 40 photographs, you enter Laurent Grasso: Uraniborg, a labyrinth of dark corridors where the sense of time is warped. Anticipating the past, remembering the future is how curator Marie Fraser describes the French artist?s preoccupations in her catalogue essay.
Cohen is a much-honoured artist ? including a Governor General?s Award in visual arts in 2003 and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2011 ? who has been lugging her view camera around the world for more than four decades.
People are absent in her straight-on photographs of the interiors of malls, hotel lobbies, hospitals, spas, gun ranges, science labs and more. Nothing is altered, but Cohen chooses the rectangle of space to record, and some of the strangeness of the scene comes from it being out of the context of its surroundings.
?There are no tricks, just the immaculate conception of the camera (lens),? Cohen said in an interview.
Cohen showed a dozen photographs in 2012 at an exhibition at the McCord Museum, where they lined the walls of a beautiful blue gallery.
Here, in a much larger space at the contemporary art museum, photographs that looked precious in a solemn setting jump off the walls, their wackiness set free.
?The conversation between them works, the way they contaminate each other,? Cohen said.
Each photograph in the exhibition catalogue includes comments by Cohen made during a conversation with curator Fran?ois LeTourneux and others. They reveal Cohen?s sense of the absurd, but also her working methods and how she composes her images.
Of Untitled (Red Cushions), she said: ?This picture works because there is so much that is wrong,? like the carpet that looks as if it would fly away if the chairs ? with the missing back legs ? weren?t holding it down.
Untitled (Plywood Walls) is less believable than a model of a room would be, Cohen said. ?I am interested in how I might capture wrongness.?
The scale is all-wrong in Untitled (Mauve Wall), Cohen says. The tilted floor, the mauve walls, the doorways of different sizes and a circular painting that looks like a mirror turn a three-dimensional room into a flat plane, she said. ?It epitomizes my work. ? It has a door that lets you in. But once you are in, there?s no way out.?
But once you do find your way out of Cohen?s curiously skewed visions of space, you enter Grasso?s time zone, where, as Fraser says, the past is anticipated and the future remembered.
It?s not really so difficult to understand Grasso?s approach to time if you recognize that he uses a bag of visual and historical ?tricks? ? knowledge of science, art and history, actually ? to tease our minds into thinking about time in new ways.
The idea can be as simple as viewing a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey to remember how the future was imagined in the past. Grasso anticipates the past in different ways; in paintings he makes that match the techniques and materials used by artists of the past, he inserts fragments of the future. Grasso is attempting to reconstruct our perception of the reality of another era, as Fraser writes.
His painting 1619 shows a Renaissance landscape with an aurora borealis in the sky. Galileo first used the term to describe the pulsating luminescence in the northern sky in that year, but Fraser notes that celestial phenomena rarely appear in painting before the 19th century.
Exhibition visitors are led by neon-letter signs through darkened hallways past video projection rooms and peepholes into displays of old books, images of 17th- and 18th-century scientific instruments, ambiguous objects and more anachronistic paintings ? in one, a medieval knight observes an eclipse. The voice, reading from a book Galileo wrote in 1610 that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, seems ? in this hushed atmosphere ? to be announcing a new discovery. It?s as if I was transported to a time when Galileo?s discoveries were as new and confounding as contemporary ideas like multiple universes or dark matter.
There are several videos in the exhibition. On Air features a falcon flying over an unidentified desert facility with a camera on its back as if it were a flesh-and-blood surveillance drone. Bomarzo is a film about a sculpture ?park of monsters? in Viterbo, Italy, built in the 16th century and discovered by the Surrealists in the 1930s.
Les Oiseaux shows a rhythmic dance of starlings flying in ever-changing formations in the sky over Rome ? ?a contemporary miracle in the sky near the Vatican,? Grasso said in an interview. Fraser writes that the birds seem to be animated by one of the invisible forces of nature, another of Grasso?s interests.
Uraniborg is a video about an island castle of that name, which the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe used as an observatory to measure the movements of the planets and stars. Brahe devised a platform ? before the telescope was invented ? from which to see the universe and ?to interact with other realities,? Grasso told Fraser.
Similarly, Grasso built the exhibition labyrinth to guide the visitor to new ways of perceiving the world and spark dialogues between different visions of reality, Fraser writes.
Laurent Grasso: Uraniborg and Lynne Cohen: False Clues continue until April 28 at the Mus?e d?art contemporain de Montr?al, 185 Ste. Catherine St. W. Information: macm.org.
john.o.pohl@gmail.com
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