Jeremy Shaw, Liminals (freeze frames), 2017. HD video installation, 19:43 min. On loan from the Bailey Collection, Canada. Courtesy of Macaulay Fine Arts, Vancouver
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec
Date
Curator
Geneviève Goyer-Ouimette
North American premiere of the video installation Liminals by Jeremy Shaw. The immersive installation explores the cathartic potential of spiritual ecstasy, in a fictional future. Liminals made a notable impact when it was presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Editors' Comment
Reviewing this work at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Jaclyn Bruneau wrote the following in Canadian Art: “In the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale, Liminals held a rare mirror up to the projects surrounding it, which more straightforwardly satisfied curator Christine Macel’s lazy tenet: spiritualism as whimsical trend and ideological free-for-all. The installations, in their forced unity, appeared parodied by the oblivious characters of Shaw’s fiction, described as ‘in no way puritanical in their appropriations of spiritual ritual.’ A contemporary approach to spirituality dislocates sacredness from any one thing. Sincerity is the new sacred, and people cite it like it’s an all-access pass to appropriation. Shaw’s critique is low-key and entertaining, detailing one of many possible conditions that could prompt a spiritual search, but its speculations about our collective fate linger.”