Week 20: February 24th
Art Matters Festival, Nouveau Poem at Star Bar, Nuit Blanche, and more.
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. This edition is quite special as it features both Nuit Blanche and the beginning of the Art Matters Festival; it covers events happening during the last week of February and the first week of March.
Vernissage: Summoning the Ineffable
February 27th (5-8pm) - Patel Brown Gallery
In Summoning the Ineffable, we are presented with a polyphonic expression of the stories that materials contain. All mediums are perpetually in relation to histories of production, consumption, extraction, and creation. The artists explore the affective dimensions of materials that have been passed through hands and across generations, a reminder that small gestures accumulate into expansive possibility.
Art Matter Festival - Roundtable:
Memories of Dreamed Places: A Public Discussion on Reclaiming Queer Space
February 27th (6-7:30pm) - Le Livart
Bringing together four emerging artists, Memories of Dreamed Places asks: how will we make space for queer bodies in a future where it is no longer available, accessible, or welcoming?
Using moving images, 3D visualization, video games, dance, and historical research, these artists reimagine the purpose of abandoned, hostile or lost places, remembering their potential to create better futures for marginalized communities. In a moment when erasures resulting from systemic oppression have left gaps in the histories available to queer people, they prompt us to rethink how the past can be a source of inspiration to imagine new queer spaces.
Reading: Nouveau Poem 5
February 27th (8pm) - Star Bar
Nouveau Poem is back with their fifth iteration of the reading series, featuring new work by Jessica Ward, Annah-Lauren Bloom, Fintan Calpin, Nicole Raziya Fong, and “Matteo Ciambella.” This time it’s all happening at Star Bar, so get ready for a beautiful evening of pizza, poetry, prose, and an infinity mirror worthy of a dissociative episode.
Nuit Blanche
NB Event: Blurring the Border - Art Matters Festival Opening Party
March 1st (8pm-1am) - Collectif
The Art Matters Festival opening party is an immersive celebration of six immigrant artists, exploring their unique journeys and multifaceted identities as they carve intimate spaces of belonging. These artists use a variety of elements—objects, the body, video, and textiles—to archive cultural memory and share personal and collective histories. As the venue slowly evolves into a vibrant dance floor, performers engage with the space and audience, arranging belongings or covering themselves in clay. These spontaneous acts blur the boundaries between artist, audience, and art, forging a space where resilience takes root amidst an uncertain future.
NB Event: L’humanité de nature
March 1st (6pm) - Fondation Giverny
Curated by Erika Del Vecchio and Cheryl Sim, L'humanité de nature brings together 20 artists whose selected works span from 1970 to the present day. The works demonstrate the richness and diversity of artistic practices on the national and international scene.
NB Event: POLARPOP by Jean-Claude Lussier
March 1st (5-10pm) - Belgo Building, suite 413
For this year’s edition of Nuit Blanche, photographer Jean-Claude Lussier opens the doors of his studio to present an exclusive series of pop photographs that showcase his vibrant vision of the '80s and '90s.
NB Event: Animals After Dark
March 1st (6pm) - Centre Vox
Plunge into the half-light of VOX to discover Animals After Dark, featuring Janis Rafa’s exhibition, Landscape Depressions; a selection of video installations that blend eroticism, feminism and criticism of the exploitation of animals by humans. Trigger Warning: this exhibition contains potentially disturbing imagery of animal exploitation and violence.
NB Event: 38%
March 1st (7pm) - The Canadian Center for Architecture
Perhaps more relevant now than ever, the CCA’s current exhibition To Build Law follows German architecture collective bplus, who are advocating to change laws in Europe to recognize the ecological, cultural, social, and economic value of the built environment. The event will feature tours of the exhibition as well as a poster-making workshop, and an experimental sound performance by artist Adam Basanta. With reused objects, Basanta invites us to meditate on the instability of sound production.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: Process Grounds
March 6th (6-9pm) - Galerie Erga
Process Grounds unites creative works that explore the potential for sustainable practices within ceramics, creating connections with physical spaces through the reuse of urban materials, investigating the connection between industrial and manual repetitive production processes, creolization and self-actualization through material accumulating and burying, everyday scenes of land and resource exploitation, and exploratory geovisualization and mapping techniques. While combining personal experiences with giving agency to materials, the artists explore how interdisciplinary approaches to creation can lead to profound discoveries in what it means to create.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: Filaments
March 7th (6-9pm) - Produit Rien
Filaments gathers archives of contact, whether physical, cultural, or ancestral. Through patched and coated canvas, recycled cardboard and paper pulps, felt, graphite, clay and stone, the works converge through their transformative and tactile qualities. These records of contact are found in imprints and marks left by kinetic interaction, archives of labor and material use, or investigations of family histories and documents. Memory serves as a connective thread as the artists question our pre-constructed value systems through commonplace objects that have been adapted and reformed.
As part of the exhibition, Marie Bilodeau and Elizabeth Ly will be performing their piece Dans le ventre des formes on Sunday, March 9th at 2pm.
Art Matters Festival - Workshop: Pulp and Ink
March 8th (1-4pm) - Atelier Retailles
This interactive workshop offers participants the opportunity to discover the artistic medium of papermaking with Sophie, founder of atelier retailles, Mile-End’s experimental paper studio. Explore ways to create painterly effects in freshly pulled sheets of paper: come create a vibrant canvas to convey texture and expression. The following weekend, return to atelier retailles to screen print on your own handmade paper with the Queer Print Club! (Second iteration of the event featured in the next edition of Community Service).
Vernissage: Three
March 8th (3-6pm) - Galerie Eli Kerr
Three is a group show featuring works by artists Geneviève Cadieux, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, and Liza Lacroix. More details to come!
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.