Can art exhibitions have upsets?

In the shadows of the big-name international art events of this past summer, the fifth Montreal Biennale opened the season with Crack the Sky, organized by Centre International d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, director and curator of Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design (and former director of the Power Plant in Toronto). The Biennale was initially scheduled for 2006, but for financial reasons was rescheduled to open in May 2007. In a departure from previous editions, Crack the Sky hosted a series of exhibitions and events dispersed across the city in a variety of venues. While the curatorial vision of Baerwaldt and collaborators such as Ray Cronin (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia), Louise Dery (Galerie de l'UQAM) and Sylvie Gilbert (Comic Craze) was distributed throughout the city, the majority of works were on display in the Bourget Building, Concordia University's old graduate studio premises. The opening weekend was disorganized and chaotic (many of the shows were not installed in time for the opening), but the lack of formality set the tone for a fun mix of events and installations.

Crack the Sky featured more than 50 artists and artist groups and focused primarily on emerging and established Canadian artists. It also included a handful of international artists whose work has, as Baerwaldt put it, an "aesthetic allegiance" to contemporary Canadian art. At the opening press conference, Baerwaldt announced his interest in the theme of borders as an overarching metaphor, proposing that Canadian artists are continually negotiating physical, geographical and imaginary borders that influence both individual and collective identities. If the goal of the Montreal Biennale was to focus on Canadian artists and their role within an evolving international scene, then Baerwaldt executed a successful initiative with one glaring omission: almost no diasporic artists from Canada were represented in the Montreal Biennale. It is surprising that while linking his selection of works and artists with the somewhat vague and predictable theme of "borders," Baerwaldt is indifferent to cultural race politics within Canadian art production, given its vital contribution to our contemporary understanding of borders in an international context. After all, several generations of migrants and refugees from around the world have crossed Canada's borders, and many are practising artists whose work is noticeably absent in the Biennale. While the show did include several artists who address indigenous and aboriginal issues in their work, including Dana Claxton, whose powerful video installation at the Cinematheque Quebecoise is a tribute to a tradition of aboriginal resistance to colonial culture, Crack the Sky was sorely lacking a more complex engagement with the broader race politics within Canadian art.



On the other hand, Baerwaldt, known for his queerly Canadian sensibility, was able to bring together an already existing network of queer Canadian artists, whose works in various media were among the strongest presented in the Biennale. Works of note included Luis Jacob and Noam Gonick's Wildflowers of Manitoba (2007), in which pastoral porn is projected onto a homo-hippie dome at Parisian Laundry; Lesbians on Ecstasy's rock opera, Amphitheatre of Homosexuality, presented at the Societe des Arts Technologiques (SAT) along with a performance by lesbian rock legend Carole Pope; and, at the Bourget, the haunting, erotic paintings of Paul P., Scott Treleaven's film installation and collage work incorporating images from North American queer punk movements, and a fun multimedia installation in a closet by Montreal's 2boys.tv (Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard). A highlight of the Biennale was a series of events featuring Toronto-born, Berlin-based gender-bending artist Peaches, whose various activities were a testament to her dynamism and included a lecture on gender and contemporary art at La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery, a performance at the SAT and a 12-foot-wide hair-cave video installation at the Bourget, filled with ephemera and objects that fans have thrown at her over the years.

Kitsch was a recurring motif, defining much of the work at the Biennale, including the melted white Darth Vader mask by Quebec art star collective BGL and American trio Paper Rad's temporary installation, The Gender of Space (2007), in which they displayed, in their signature neon colour palette, popular images taken from the wastebasket of our collective memory, such as old-school video-game geometrics and archaic computer graphics. The Gender of Space was installed at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse with Julie Doucet and Dominique Petrin's L'Animalerie Ju-Do (2007), a mock pet store that featured papier-mache birds, insects and even a pug--all caged and available for adoption by the viewing public. The popularity of L'Animalerie was a tribute to the spirit of self-made, self-distributed DIY art practice, and most of the animals found homes within an hour of the show's opening.



Parisian Laundry hosted some of the best of what the Biennale had to offer, and while works by Canadian heavy weight artists Brian Jungen and BGL were strong, they were overshadowed by the work of Saskatchewan-based artist Graeme Patterson, whose installation was arguably the most impressive at the Biennale. Patterson's sculptural multimedia work Woodrow (2003-06) is a scale re-creation of the small, nearly abandoned town of Woodrow, Saskatchewan. Once a thriving farming community, Woodrow, like many rural areas across the country, is now a decaying ghost town. By reproducing a number of sites, including the town's grain elevator, hockey arena, church and dump, as well as his own home and studio (which is housed in an old barn), Patterson creates a dark but romantic narrative about local history, rural decay and nostalgia. Woodrow's structures are complete with detailed interiors, and stop-motion animations shown on miniature screens dramatize key elements of the local culture. His work is at once deeply sentimental and obsessively archival, as he re-creates and records the minutiae that define Woodrow, and articulates a mythology of Canadian identity in the midst of continual urbanization.

David Altmejd's retrospective at the Galerie de l'UQAM also consisted of large-scale, sculptural installations. However, in contrast to Patterson's meticulously rendered rural narratives, Altmejd's sculptures represent a metanarrative of extravagance, fantasy, deviance and pastiche. In his work, hybrid, disfigured and mutated human and animal parts are embedded in crystal-like sculptures and mythical labyrinth structures to create a fantasy world. It is easy to see why Altmejd is the Canadian representative at this year's Venice Biennale and why his work has created such an international buzz. It has all the right elements: it is figurative, fantastical, sexy and detached from any particular history or context; it is nothing if not postmodern. Altmejd's work amalgamates many of the themes that are present throughout Crack the Sky, yet it also lacks the depth of many of the works by lesser-known artists. That this shortcoming of Altmejd's work becomes apparent within the context of the Biennale as a whole is perhaps one of Baerwaldt's greatest achievements. By placing artists who would normally be limited to the artist-run-centre circuit on the same stage as some of the biggest names in Canadian art, Baerwaldt gave a host of emerging artists the chance to outshine their more internationally established peers, and they took the opportunity to do just that.

Leila Pourtavaf is a Montreal based writer, independent curator and activist. She is the co-founder of the BOOKMOBILE project, serves on the board of Paint My Photos Gallery and is a member of No One Is Illegal Montreal. She holds an MA in Communication and Media Studies.