“Montreal has it all.”
This was how I neatly summed up the city, when writing home about my first impressions of my student-exchange destination. And it would seem that the world-renowned Italian photographer Mimmo Jodice agrees, putting Montreal in league with an impressive list of the worlds’ metropolises featured in his photo exhibition Sublime Cities, at the McCord Museum.
I was lucky enough to attend the exhibition’s vernissage, and in my eagerness, arrived too early. The woman who welcomed me looked slightly stressed as she checked her watch and twisted her bracelet, before deciding to pull back the no-entry rope at the exhibit’s entrance, telling me to take a quick tour of it before everyone else arrived. She then hurried off, leaving me to embark on a solitary tour of the world through Jodice’s lens.
A journey from the history-filled cities of ancient Europe to the (by comparison) modernized capitals of America and Asia, Sublime Cities places Montreal in a unique position at the meeting point of two different worlds: the antique Europe of Naples, Venice, Rome, and Paris, where Jodice’s aesthetic inspiration was born, and the flashy skylines of steel and glass in the skyscraper-dominated urban centres of New York, Tokyo, and Sao Paolo. Montreal, as a city which is still developing and asserting its rich European heritage in a strongly North American-influenced geographic setting, lies at the very heart of this clash of cultures.
The exhibition could have focused on this fairly obvious juxtaposition of the old and the new; however, Mimmo Jodice is not merely documenting the specific features of the different cities he visits, contrasting the antique and the modern. He also seeks something beyond the visual. His dozen black and white photos of Montreal portray some of the city’s most significant landmarks, yet the manner in which they are taken adds new dimensions of mystery to scenes normally taken for granted. Through Mimmo Jodice’s lens, Montreal emerges as an ethereal metropolis, taking on the very definition of sublime.
When I returned to the museum foyer, the floor was packed with what I presumed to be art and photography connoisseurs, all well-dressed and drifting about while elegantly sipping their wine. Three glasses of wine, numerous canapés, and 45 minutes of excellent people-watching later, the few hundred guests were finally allowed to view the exhibition. As people slowly started jostling their way into the exhibition rooms, elbowing each other in order to actually see the photographs, I snuck out and made my way home, feeling strongly inspired to fire off a few more e-mails about my study-abroad experiences, this time concluding them all with the words: “Montreal is sublime.”
Mimmo Jodice—Sublime Cities runs from Oct. 11 2012 to Mar. 3 2013 at the McCord Museum. General admission $14, student admission $8.
