Grier Edmundson at Centre Clark

I meandered across my neighbourhood (the increasingly gentrified Mile End) the other day to check out Grier Edmundson’s exhibition at Centre Clark (an old resident of the “Pied Carré” complex under renovation on rue de Gaspé). In keeping with his usual practice, the exhibition is a stylistically heterogeneous mix of painting, sculpture, and print that refers to early Modern economic and social theory and its ripple effect on contemporary life.



Grier Edmundson (photo: Paul Litherland)

Un serpent dans la pelouse hangs its critical hat on the ideas of economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Edmundson has painted a reproduction of Malthus’s portrait, which hangs alone on one wall of the gallery. Large paintings of Monopoly property cards hang on two walls and a third is covered with wallpaper featuring the mustachioed Rich Uncle Pennybags in tiny multiples and a neon sign that reads “Content.” The dominant visual motif of Monopoly alludes to one of Malthus’s seminal texts, The Nature and Progress of Rent (1815), which introduced the concept of rental property as a profitable capitalist venture. Bringing Malthus’s theory into the quotidian present, several readymade elements sit on and around square white cubes stacked together in groups: a bowl of Cheerios, a child’s rain boot, a take-out coffee cup, two porcelain figurines, and a random table lamp. They are all signs of domestic life in an age when young families are increasingly squeezed by economic stress.

In the Mile End, where many Montreal artists live and work, it is now almost impossible to find an affordable rental apartment big enough to house a family and the transformation of the monolith block of artist studios on de Gaspé into “Pied Carré” is a well intentioned but fraught project. Not coincidentally, this exhibition references some of these issues and more in a delicate, personal, and highly crafted manner.


Centre Clark: http://www.clarkplaza.org/
Grier Edmundson: Un serpent dans la pelouse continues until November 21.


Susannah Wesley is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She has been a member of the collaborative duo Leisure since 2004 and from 1997-2000 was part of the notorious British art collective the Leeds13. Formerly Director at Battat Contemporary in Montreal, she holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She is Akimblog's Montreal correspondent and can be followed @susannahwesley1 on Twitter.