HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR ONE VOICE TO REACH ANOTHER?

The big fall show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has a complicated backstory, a long title and an abstract theme. But at the core of How Long Does It Take For One Voice To Reach Another? is a decision to haul a bunch of big and fabulous contemporary art works out of storage and into the light.

Making a virtue of necessity, chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais has fashioned a thematic exhibition from the permanent collection because delays and cancellations related to the pandemic left the institution with an empty spot on the exhibition schedule. The title is from a poem by the American poet Carolyn Forché and it inspired the late Betty Goodwin, who included it, in metal letters embedded in pavement, in a site-specific architectural installation she created in a glasscovered walkway when the museum opened its new Desmarais wing in 1991.

Not too subtly, the work, which sits just outside the opening to this new exhibition, features a giant ear.

The nearby exhibition also opens with a blast: the massive wooden megaphone created by artist Rebecca Belmore in the aftermath of the Oka crisis and now playing exhortations by Indigenous land-claim activists of the day.

From there, the show mixes historical, modern and contemporary art as it wafts about considering different kinds of communion – with the spirit, with music, with each other.

This all feels a bit vague until you hit the central rooms where the juxtapositions of work are so visually strong that the themes they are serving quickly crystallize. There is a much more evocative Goodwin work: Carbon, a charcoal and pastel drawing on aluminum with her signature images of bodies twisting and hurting. It meets another kind of quiet sorrow or menace in the robotic jackets fashioned by Montreal designer Ying Gao from hundreds of straight pins and electronics. They are programmed to respond to the human voice and, rather creepily, if you speak loudly to them, the pins will gently wave, as though they were the hairs in the ear canal hugely enlarged.

The next room features three impressive works suggesting power relations in communications, arranged in an installation that stresses their formal grace. The Indian artist Shilpa Gupta has cast a gunmetal book for each of 100 poets who have been jailed by a regime and touchingly arranged these small sculptures on a long horizontal tabletop. Hannah Claus has placed straight pins in

rows on red wool blankets to represent 17th-century covenants between the Haudenosaunee and the British – and their betrayal. And Irene Whittome has taken pages of a student’s art history notes, marked, obscured and papered over passages, and then mounted them in a grid, a beautifully mysterious wall of eclipsed text.

The show ends as resolutely as it began with a special loan from sound artist Janet Cardiff of Forty-part Motet, in which the visitor can hear each separate voice in a choir by drawing close to one of 40 speakers. It’s a crowd-pleasing work, accessible yet lyrical, and in this context sends a crystalline message about the power of the voice multiplied by community. KATE TAYLOR

How Long Does It Take For One Voice To Reach Another? continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to Feb. 13, 2022.