Community Service is back and we’re celebrating 2025 with our longest issue ever (!!). For those of you who joined over the holidays: welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal.
This edition covers events happening in Montreal during the middle of January.
Vernissage: The Monumental Collection
January 15th (5-9pm) - 6909 rue Marconi Montreal
Created by Zeynep Boyan, The Monumental Collection is a lighting series created during her artist residency with Luminaire Authentik. Inspired by ancient civilizations and the rich cultural heritage of pre-modern Turkey, the collection combines elements of Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Anatolian design with modern, handcrafted lighting. Each fixture features a hand-sculpted knob made from stoneware clay, completed with Luminaire Authentik’s custom components.
Vernissage: Que restera-t-il?
January 16th (5pm) - Le Livart
Curated by Dounia Bouzidi and Joseph Rozenkopf, "Que restera-t-il?" questions both the temporality of creation, the appropriation of materials, and the traces left by artists. With works by Awa, Sophia Borowska, Charlotte Caron, Fanny-Jane, Poline Harbali, Sam Meech, Marwan Sekkat, Valentine Sbriglio, this exhibition aims to establish a dialogue between the anxieties that traverse their beings and the proposition of new imaginaries. The trace, the imprint, the mark, and the memory left behind are the central ideas of this show.
Vernissage: Scatter like Seeds
January 16th (5-8pm) - McBride Contemporain
Scatter like Seeds is a duo exhibition bringing together the works of David Hanes and Alice Zerini-Le Reste. This show highlights artworks that bear the imprints of traveled landscapes, evoking the intangible relationships between past and present. On one hand, Hanes sketches fleeting moments in nature, later transforming them into vivid paintings reimagined through distance and memory. Alternatively, Zerini-Le Reste gathers materials for her ceramics from the landscapes she traverses or gives a second life to discarded firing plates. The works in this exhibition reveal the multiple transformations that have shaped them, opening paths to unsuspected narratives.
Vernissage: Diasporic Affections
January 16th (5:30pm) - SBC Galerie d’art contemporain
Bringing together the works of artists Hamza Abouelouafaa, Gem Chang-Kue, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Poline Harbali, and Laïla Mestari, Diasporic Affections presents diasporic narratives as micro-stories in motion. This curatorial project, the result of a collaboration between writer Nicholas Dawson and the Phorie collective, invites us to think of diasporas as spaces that generate affective experiences—shifting, unstable constellations that transform both migrant subjects and their cultures, resulting in processes of “diasporization.”
Album Release: MSP by Maya Stewart Pathak
January 16th (6-9pm) - Système
When I first started Community Service, I told myself I wasn’t going to include music. But Maya Stewart Pathak’s ethereal voice saying the words “Miuccia Prada Blush” has been echoing in my head ever since I first heard her song Clout back in October. Needless to say when she messaged me to include her album listening party in this edition I immediately accepted (and may have squealed).
Publication Launch: The Page Issue 4
January 17th (6-9pm) - Espace Maurice
The crossover episode we all knew we needed. The Page is a free, one-page, innovatively sentimental print publication that showcases writing and art from Montreal and beyond. We’re all heading to beloved Espace Maurice for the launch of their fourth edition, where it has been #confirmed that their published writers will be mingling with the crowd. In addition to the launch, the gallery is hosting a two day exhibition of new works by Phil Tremble, Fiona Ruth, and Jeremy Richer-Légaré.
Winter Cultural Opener: de Gaspé
January 17th (5-10pm) - 5445-5455 avenue de Gaspé
I had originally planned to put each of the openings held at the winter cultural opener in the newsletter individually, but to avoid this being a 45 minute read I’ve decided to group them together. Besides, once you’re in there it’s basically impossible not to browse through all of the artists spaces and galleries de Gaspé has to offer.
Vernissage: Claire Milbrath and Garret Lockhart solo exhibitions
January 18th - Pangée
More details to come.
Vernissage: When I can’t get to sleep, I dismantle my world
January 23rd (6pm) - Galerie Eli Kerr
Bringing the work of American artist Audrey Gair and the Danish artist Allan Rand into dialog, the exhibition marks the first occasion for each artist to show their work in Canada.
Vernissage: La Grande Corail by Bonny Ramirez and Horizons
January 23rd - Bradley Ertaskiran
More details to come.
Finissage: Art Mattered, Art Matters: A 25 Year Retrospective
January 23rd (6-9pm) - VAV Gallery
Art Mattered, Art Matters chronicles the Art Matters festival from its inception to today. Since 2001, hundreds of participants have contributed to the festival’s reimagining of programming that reflects and pushes the boundaries of the Faculty of Fine Arts undergraduate student body.
Curated by Elena Martin, the show welcomes you to touch, flip, read, watch, listen, see, and experience your way through two and a half decades of collected artworks and material. In the spirit of Art Matters’ playful nature, journey through time to see Art Matters as it is: a celebration of all that is thoughtful, messy, experimental, and inspired.
Vernissage: Lookbook by August Klintberg
January 25th (3-5:30pm) - Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
Lookbook (2024) is a series of photocopied collages on archival acid-free Japanese kozo paper, embellished with hand-cut aluminum sequins and presented in Plexiglas boxes. In this work, August Klintberg explores how mass-printing cultures, such as Thrasher, Victoria, and the International Male catalog, provide tools for shaping and studying queerness.
Vernissage: The Gloaming by Aaron McIntosh
January 25th (3-5:30pm) - Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
In this new body of quilts and collages, McIntosh addresses this moment of cultural and political darkening for 2SLGBTQ+ rights. The gloaming—the twilight moment, when the veil of night blurs the distinctions between figure and landscape—is a powerful moment of uncertainty, danger, and carnal possibility. Images of vulnerable queer men, drawn from personal and public erotic archives, are hidden in dark, leafy environments and sheltered by the shadows of protective queer grasses, designating forests, gardens, and parks as both a protective refuge from the increasingly public homophobic assaults we are witnessing, and as uninhibited sites of cruising and community pleasure.
Vernissage: Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes) by Conny Karlsson Lundgren
January 25th (3-5:30pm) - Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
A collection of journal excerpts from 1977, written by four young gay men from the Göteborg area in Sweden, forms the starting point for the installation Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes). The group was part of the socialist association Röda Bögar [Red Faggots], and the journal describes their stay at an international gay liberation camp in the south of France.
More than 40 years later, Conny Karlsson Lundgren visited the farm where the camp had been and filmed the empty buildings, as well as the surrounding garden and landscape. The artist created a montage of still images shot on-site, accompanied by archival photographs, saturated summer sounds, and recordings of fragments from the journal describing the camp's community art. We meet the activists during a few intense weeks, as they reflect on relationships, sexuality, politics, and the possibility of using drag and coded expressions of femininity as a playful weapon against patriarchy.
Finissage: home/base by Ally Rosilio and Olivia Vidmar
January 25th - Galerie La Centrale
Created by Ally Rosilio (of Carmine’s Room) and Olivia Vidmar (of my heart <3) during their six month residency with Galerie La Centrale, home/base explores the geography of the gallery over five decades. The installation’s scenography alludes to the adaptability of the centre as it has resisted fixity. Exhibition posters, invitations, leases, meeting minutes and internal documents—along with other pieces of ephemera–reveal La Centrale’s ongoing dialogue with the geography of the city and its membership.
If you have an art or design-related event you would like to include in future editions of the newsletter, you can send us an email at communityservmag@gmail.com
See you around.