Friday, September 23, 2005

Mois de la photo

And Montréal keeps stunning me. I had seen a poster on a wall about a month ago of this so called "mois de la photo" (www.moisdelaphoto.com), and finally yesterday i was able to visit a few galleries and nurture my culture. It was surprising to see quite an array of topics, specially in the Bronfmann Gallery (Saidye Bronfmann i think) where 4 artists presented works to form the "Trading Spaces" Exposition - The first artist took old pictures from american indians, and she posed as the subject on a "remake" of each... she being an indian american and changing the navajo style clothing and jewelry with indi stuff; another japanese-american artist did a switch within the family, he took pictures of the teenage daughters trading places with their middleaged mothers... clothing included. The only difference of course where the sizes, so Im sure some "teens" where having problems (wonder if they used undergarments as well). Next was a jewish artist who did a portrait remake of his ancestors, dating back between the 1900´s and 1970´s, with his own face- which is was quite funny to realize that the portrait of the rabbi and the lady next to it where actually the same person. The interesting thing here was the artist capability of changing costumes (both physically and digitally) in order to actually look natural in each take; the last one, by Michael Ensminger is a series of shots where he is posing as a hobo (homeless person) in ragged clothing and looking smelly with cardboard signs that read different lines, some quite funny, some hard social protest... it is a must I would say. After that ( i was quite on the other side of town) I made my way back downtown, where according to the map there were a few galleries from the same festival, one beside the other, we (me and my iPod) went along Ste Catherine in front of the Place des Arts until we found the building... From the outside it was a simple building, but it is actually quite interesting. You see, on its 6 floors (counting ground level) there are a few modern art galleries, most of them open to the public, and some of them contributed to the festival. I spent the next couple hours walking from side to side, from floor to floor, visiting every door that was open... all the empty spaces, all the focus to the artists thoughts and feelings... it was quite overwhelming. It makes think as if I would like to actually put my own show someday...

...(sigh)...

... I liked several of the artists there, some playing with digital images, some going more dynamic (using projectors) and even some sculptures or "toys" that of course where all for sale - still, what can ME buy? To close the entry on the Photo thing, I went last nite to an exposition by an englishwoman (http://www.karenbrett.com/) called "The Myth of Sexual Loss" which includes a few captions of (in layman´s terms) old grunts dancing the horizontal mambo... but all put in a nice setting, nothing dirty, so no, it is not grandparents faking sado-masochists or in an orgy... they are just simple pictures, tender if I may say so, and actually quite moving.

so, if you ever come across any Photograph expositions, film fests, anything you have liked, just drop a line in here.

ta-taa!

ps- tonite we are going to see a movie from the "new" montreal international film festival (there are other 4 film festivals here... so what the hey, we will go anyways).

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home