Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik at Galerie Ephemere, Montreal

Some cities really go for pop-up art spaces, but in Montreal they don’t happen nearly enough. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of ambition or that most people are satisfied by the dozens of artist-run centres the city maintains. However, this summer Galerie Éphémère suddenly appeared in a shipping container at the Village au Pied du Courant by the Jacques Cartier Bridge, so you could enjoy a cocktail and wriggle your toes in the sand while checking it out. Each weekend the gallery hosted a new exhibition by an emerging artist. Earlier in the season local artists such as Luc Paradis and Elise Windsor were featured. This past weekend it was an installation by Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik.



Galerie Éphémère

I visited on a blistering Sunday afternoon and stepped through a rustic DIY door – the front of the container had up until this exhibition been open – to enter a space resembling an abandoned building site hanging with plastic sheeting and drywall. At the back was a slide show depicting abandoned rental spaces. Maybe it was just the extreme heat and lack of air, but I felt the photographs could have stood on their own without such an elaborate setting. Hiding just behind our quotidian experience, the abandoned spaces, in various stages of deconstruction and/or decay, hint at unknown histories and futures. I wish I could have spent more time looking at these images, but I had to go back outside and breathe.

Galerie Éphémère’s final exhibition featuring Cat Lamoureux and Milo Reinhardt pops up this coming weekend.


Galerie Éphémère: http://galerie-ephemere.com/
See website for current exhibition.


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.