Wednesday, 1st January 2003, 12:41am
An opinion by: Rascal

 

The Montreal Biennale Rides Again by Rascal

This year's show was a bunch better than the previous, I say. There were a few highlights which I'll go into, but first let me say I love the poster they gave me. Artist Ed Pien is running along a backdrop of his colourful installation of drawings - very pretty. Oh, yeah, so is the art. They put the poster in a Biennale plastic bag so I could carry it around the show with me. It was a very daggy sight, all of us visitors walking around with these bags with nothing but a big ol'poster poking out if it. Made it easy for the checkers to i-d who'd paid to get in and who had not, that's for sure. So here we all are, me and gallons of students enjoying art on a rainy Friday afternoon.

Notable favourites:
Marcel Dzama's collection of small drawings, ink on paper - a combination of Kate Greenaway and Hieronymous Bosch on a Hellish day. Excellent colours, very skilled penwork and imaginative, controlled, twisted little scenes. Really nice to look at.

Matthew Hale's small drawings on found texts. I guess I am into small-sized works in series form. These look good and have quite good content most of the time, so they hold your interest.

There was another series of small drawings right across from Matthew Hale's set-up. I can't tell you the name because the artist isn't featured in the show pamphlet (the other two were, lucky for my review). But go see them, they were nice....or was it the frames I liked? Or was it that I was trying to discover if the frames were from ikea? Oh, go check them out anyway, maybe you can tell me if they were any good.

Notable Hates:
Only one artist really stands out. S/He gets my goat probably because in certain ways it is similar to my work, only WAY worse... Honest. Again, I can't tell you the artist's name, but you can't miss the work. It is scattered throughout the show, painted directly onto the walls - portraits and paragraphs of prominent Canadians. There is a Celine Dion one, There's one of that religious native woman (Tekakwitha?). There's a hockey player, a politician, I think. It knocked me out how ugly the drawings were and how not-interesting the writing was... very personally offensive to me.

Notable Disappointment:
Betty Goodwin's work. I liked the roots in her drawings until I got close and saw that they were actually bad photos - that's no fun Betty! As I was walking around the room, I remembered what my Ottawa friend said about the Goodwin exhibit at the National Gallery this past summer (and try to imagine this in a Malaysian accent): "Yeah lah, it was good, but it was so much of the same, all over..." One picture is worth a thousand pictures, if you get my drift.

I guess partly because it is such a big show you can't expect to love everything in there. I would recommend a visit to the smaller more focused drawing show at Pierre-Francois Ouellette At Contemporain This show is an invitational by gallery artist Ed Pien with 4 others who are doing really nice drawings, especially Chrisopher Lori. While you're in the neighbourhood, drop in at SKOL gallery, where you can see Maryse Larivière's great big photo self-portaits. Apparently she misses her Barcelona boyfriend. I like the unababshed self-involvement of women who take photos of themselves.