Week 10: September 9th
Happy 10 issues of Community Service Mag to all who celebrate! The Belgo's cultural season opener, a solo show by Simon Petepiece, an exhibition invisible to the untrained eye, and more.
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. There’s a lot of things happening south of the border this weekend, so I’m writing this to you in the car on the way to New York. Lucky for us, there’s also a lot going on in our city. This edition covers events happening during the middle of September.
Vernissage: Hors Champs
September 12th (5-8pm) - Le Livart
Curated by Erika Del Vecchio, Hors Champs is a group show that invites us to dwell on details, chance and the experience of reality. Focusing on the subtleties revealed to those who pay attention, the works presented oscillate between light and darkness. Hors Champs opens the way to a conscious world where everything is revealed to those who know how to look.
Vernissage: Jaw by Rebecca Storm
September 12th - Duran Mashaal Gallery
Furthering the artist’s exploration of the somatic relationship to conscious and subconscious memory, the works in “Jaw” contemplate the forces that inform our experience of personal agency. Am I driven by fear, or am I driven by desire? Which one, if either, leads to self-betrayal? Rendered in a painterly, realist visual language that at times verges on expressionism, the works interrogate the psychic landscape of choice—through themes of shame, fear, desire, trust, anxiety—and how we respectively navigate this experience. Jaws function to physically invite things inside of us, a process which serves here as a figurative framework for the spiritual relationship to self.
Vernissage: Playing with Fire by Nadine Faraj
September 12th (5-10pm) - McBride Contemporary
In Playing with Fire, Faraj continues her extraordinary delving into an exuberant and emancipatory kind of visionary imagery, exploring themes such as mortality and renewal, our primal human incandescence. Her colour palette retains and expands its repertoire of mesmerizing accents and effects, in particular giving warmth and breath to her celebration of Queer people, femininity and inclusive feminism, and the strength and resilience of marginalized peoples, in all times and places.
**This vernissage is part of the cultural season opener at the Belgo, so there’s a lot to discover.
Vernissage: Jean-Francois Lauda
September 13th (5-9pm) - Galerie Eli Kerr
This solo exhibition at Eli Kerr will unveil new works by Jean-Francois Lauda. For those of you who were in New York this past weekend, you probably got a sneak peak at The Armory Show. More details to come!
Vernissage: Clearing Corridor Chamber Cave by Simon Petepiece
September 13th (6-8pm) - Galerie Nicolas Robert
Using a combination of drawing, painting and sculpture, this new body of work explores the idea of the cloister as both an architectural space and an insular way of existence. Drawing from the rich historical lexicon of devotional iconography and ornamentation, the show imagines a monastic compound through a series of renderings and architectural objects.
Vernissage: Coup de Chaleur
September 13th (6-8pm) - Galerie Nicolas Robert
"Coup de chaleur" was born through a series of conversations between Frances Adair McKenzie, Alexia Laferté Coutu, and Jérôme Nadeau, which highlighted the conceptual framing and intersections between their current practices and research. Although distinct, the practices of these three artists intertwine in dynamics of transfer and transformation. Their works arise from a process of continuous reconfiguration, where each element becomes both an imprint and a mutation, both surface and depth. Their approaches can be seen as archaeologies of the present, excavations of the visible that do not seek to unearth a fixed past but to expose layers of a temporality in motion. The past infiltrates the present, constantly recomposing itself in a flow of material and symbolic interactions.
Vernissage: Projection by Justin Weiler
September 13th (6-8pm) - Galerie Nicolas Robert
Projection provides a meeting point between two locations: Fonderie Darling, where Justin Weiler recently completed an artist residency, and Galerie Nicolas Robert. It is a mental projection of the interior architecture of both buildings. The sensation of the spaces is translated onto glass in a gradient of colors that reflects the colorimetry generated by the transparency of the windows at the Fonderie Darling.
Vernissage: En Attendant le Martien by Ève K. Tremblay
September 14th (2-5pm) - Hangar 7826
Tremblay’s experiences and encounters in the Adirondacks and along the shores of Lake Champlain, where she lived during the pandemic, are transformed into ceramics, photographs, and paintings in this show for Hangar 7826. The works evoke transitional states and the layers of our fluctuating personal and collective histories. The exhibition speaks to a quest for transcendence, a sense of anticipation in our perception of the universe, and our connections with nature and the unknown.
Vernissage: Ne’er Be Gone
September 14th (3-10pm) - Alley behind 1434 avenue Jeanne-d’arc
I love the DIY scene of Montreal. This is the third edition of the apartment exhibition Ne’er Be Gone, this time in the backyard. The exhibition mixes sculpture, painting, linocut, drawing, photography, sound and music. For full details of their program, head to their instagram page.
Collection Launch: Zap Studio
September 15th (3-11pm) - Lemay Architect
This is Zap studio’s official debut! Held in the lobby of Lemay Architect (3500 Saint-Jacques), the launch will feature thirty new and unique ceramic objects, as well as an unveiling of Zap’s new website. More details to come.
Vernissage: Présence et débordement by Pascale Girardin
September 18th - Projet Casa
Curated by Jézabel Plamondon, PRÉSENCE ET DÉBORDEMENTS is a solo exhibit featuring recent ceramic works by Pascale Girardin.
If you have an art or design-related event you would like to include in future editions of the newsletter, you can send us a DM or email communityservmag@gmail.com
See you around.