Art Reviews: Robert Polidori, Betty Goodwin & Spring Hurlbut at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

On our recent trip up north we paid a visit to Montreal's Museum of Contemporary Art and saw the following exhibitions:

Robert Polidori: This exhibit of large color focuses on interior space. Taken at various times and various places, these images all share a quality of dishevelment and decay. Interiors of Versailles, Havana, New Orleans & Chernobyl/Pripyat all evoke a creepy, elegiac elegance. In many of them you might expect to see the aged Miss Havisham coming through a doorway. They all possess a creepy beauty.

Mr. Polidori has an amazing ability to bring life to the most inanimate of objects. His documentation of architecture is second to none and I hope the editors of the New Yorker will him another juicy assignment SOON!

Note to the curator: the four exterior images, two of Lebanon, two of India, are beautiful but extraneous to the bulk of the exhibit and add nothing to the loving elegance of the other photographs being exhibited.

Betty Goodwin: This survey of the Montreal artist's work spans 40 years and follows an interesting, but unremarkable, arc. Early work from the late 60's and early 70's shows the artist at her most original; prints and multimedia works rooted in the image of clothing, primarily vests, have a shadowy, eerie feel, as though the occupants of them have been wiped out or erased. I particularly liked a wall piece that contained several vest buried in dirt.

If only she had kept along those lines and been true to them. The rest of the exhibit is interesting but derivative. Large canvas pieces recall the works of Burri and Beuys. Tall, narrow, hermetic sculptures in metal bring to mind the spindly houses of Louise Bourgeois, and large figurative works on tiles from the 80's echo the works of Jennifer Bartlett.

Spring Hurlbut: This large installation piece entitled "Le Jardin du sommeil", or "The Garden of Sleep" is another wonderfully evocative, eerie work from the museum's collection. The work, which dates from 1998, is deceptive in its presentation. I wasn't sure what I was going to see, if anything, since the first gallery consists simply of several funeral wreaths. After circumnavigating the wall which displays them, one stumbles into a large, dimly lit space consisting of row upon row of cribs, cradles and bassinets, most for actual children, a few for dolls. Laid out in almost Minimalist fashion, most of them are metal though a few incorporate rope netting in various states of decay. Some are static, some rock (when given a push). The entire effect is amazing at first, but after spending a minute or two walking around the large gallery a sad, funereal gloom falls over the work; who's beds were these? what happened to these children? Were they lost in infancy or merely swallowed up by life? The piece produces a gut-wrenching punch by simply letting these empty 'containers' produce more and more questions in the viewer's mind.

A definite must-see.