Canadian Museum Shows in May

Last month I cast the ARTINFO museums net over Europe and hauled in a predictably tantalizing range of shows from which to cull a Top 5. This time around I thought we’d look north of the border in the direction of our oft-maligned Canadian neighbors. Perhaps inevitably, pickings were a little thinner up there. Outside of the major conurbations — Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec, Vancouver, Montreal — most Canadian art museums play a role of decidedly local significance for their communities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for ARTINFO’s international readership I can’t in good conscience recommend all those far-flung permanent displays of Canadian history and Native American art, or shows that come uncomfortably close to self parody: The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax actually has a show called “Arena: The Art of Hockey” (through June 8). So let’s stick to the big shows in a big country’s big cities.

1. Between Memory & History: From the Epic to the Everyday at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, through June 1

In Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is hosting the principal exhibition in “Contact,” the metropolis’s annual photography festival, which runs from May 1 through June 1. The festival is a big deal — it boasts 200 venues and 500 exhibiting artists this year — and this show, “Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday” has been curated by David Liss and Bonnie Rubenstein (who is also director of the festival). Their language rings a little over-theorized to my ear (“photography and its culture — the way in which images are created and used — are subject, as many things are, to cyclical evolutions of birth, growth, entropy, and renewal”), but they’ve selected nine fantastic photographers — including Luc Delahaye, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Thomas Ruff, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Bert Teunissen — which I reckon will make for a great show.

2. Simon Starling: Cuttings (Supplement) at the Power Plant, through May 11

Also in Toronto, at the Power Plant, 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling brings his unique brand of erudite nonsense to Canada. His show, “Cuttings (Supplement),” is vaguely organized around themes of (mostly unwelcome) migrations and disappearances of one sort or another. In one piece he submerged a facsimile of a Henry Moore sculpture in Lake Ontario, where it was colonized by East European zebra mussels. (Moore was once demonized in Toronto as an uninvited foreign artist, whereas the zebra mussels — imported in ocean-going ships’ ballast tanks — are wiping out native species in the great lakes. You get the idea.) Other pieces refer to Marcel Duchamp’s difficulties in importing a Brancusi sculpture into the U.S. and the disappearance of the rhododendron from Starling’s adopted Scotland. I really do recommend Starling’s work. It’s all absurdist, thought-provoking stuff.

3. ¡CUBA! Art and History from 1868 to Today at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, through June 8

Bizarre though it might seem to travel north to French-speaking Canada to see a show about Cuba, I couldn’t leave this one out of my top five: “¡CUBA! Art and History from 1868 to Today” is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through June 8, and it’s a tour de force of a show. The MMFA has brought together more than 400 objects and works of art in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Fototeca de Cuba, Havana, including extensive loans from the U.S. as well. There are paintings, drawings, photographs, a fascinating selection of pre- and post-Revolution posters, music, video, film, and even a 15-foot-high cooperative mural from 1967. Cuba is one of the most fascinating places on the planet, and this show is a worthy reflection of that fact.

4. The Québec Triennial at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, through September 7

The first Québec Triennial doesn’t open until May 24, but it still makes it into the top five. They’re calling this first edition “Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée. Tout se transforme” (Nothing is lost, nothing is created. Everything is transformed), which turns out to be a quotation from “the father of modern chemistry,” Antoine Lavoisier. Quite how that makes me feel about the prospect of the show, I’m not sure, but Musée d’Art Contemporain curators Paulette Gagnon, Josée Bélisle, Mark Lanctôt, and Pierre Landry are talking it up with phrases like “unique,” “most ambitious,” and “for the first time.” They’re promising a multimedia roster of thirty artists they have discovered by scouring exhibitions and studios across Quebec for the last year. What happens next time around, in 2011, when the Québec Triennial and the Biennale de Montréal will take place in Montreal in the same year I’m not sure, but maybe they planned it that way.