Week 21: March 10th
Everything happens on Thursdays.
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. We’re back with a stacked list for the next two weeks as the days get longer and it doesn’t hurt to go outside anymore. This edition covers events happening during the middle of March.
Vernissage: Hidden in Plain Sight by Yves Tessier
March 13th (5-8pm) - McBride Contemporain
In this new body of work, Tessier uncovers the subtle beauty and hidden complexity of everyday scenes and still life compositions. Renowned for his mastery of casein paint, he creates these works on aluminium or wood panels, a technique that requires an in-depth knowledge of pigments and gives each work a unique brilliance and luminosity.
Vernissage: lie down with holograms by David Armstrong Six
March 13th (5-8pm) - Bradley Ertaskiran
More details to come.
Vernissage: Public House by Margaux Williamson
March 13th (5-8pm) - Bradley Ertaskiran
More details to come.
Vernissage: Water Shed Twinkle by Cindy Phenix
March 13th (5-8pm) - Galerie Hugues Charbonneau
In the background, a muffled noise. It’s the sound of water, flowing beneath the large oil paintings that surround the fountain made of glass, wood, and ceramic at the heart of the gallery. Like a melodic undercurrent, this wave seems to inspire the figures in the canvases to join in the movement, musical instruments in hand or booms and microphones lying in wait. Cindy Phenix asks herself, “What would be the last sound heard on Earth?”. Water Shed Twinkle celebrates Phenix’s first decade of art production with a new body of work that plays with the title’s words and implied meanings.
Vernissage: Chasser les fantômes
March 13th (5:30pm) - Le Livart
The exhibition Chasser les fantômes brings together a body of work by artist duo Diane Marissal and Jérémie Leblanc-Barbedienne. Through a combination of paintings and paper cut-outs, the artists invite us to explore the intricacies of perception and memory. The title of the exhibition evokes this delicate quest: to capture the elusive, to pursue the traces of what escapes us, the images or memories that haunt our imagination.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: There’d Better Be A Mirrorball
March 13th (6-9pm) - Sawa House
There’d Better Be A Mirrorball is an exhibition designed to feel like a night out in the streets of Montreal. Urban, young, and provocative, this showcase portrays the transformative phase of our late teens and early twenties—a time when we seek to define ourselves. How do you shape your identity? Sometimes the answer is simple: by celebrating.
Featuring six art students, There’d Better Be A Mirrorball will take you around the city’s parks, beaches, discotheques, and even horror house parties through diverse artwork. From intimate bed sculptures to photography at a strip club, this exhibition explores both the loud and quiet aspects of young social life, while analyzing the roles we play.
Vernissage: Chez soi
March 13th (6-9pm) - Holt Renfrew Ogilvy
Created by Blouin Division and Le Centerpiece, Chez soi brings together contemporary art and modernist design to reimagine the 5th floor space at Holt Renfrew Ogilvy. With a focus on Pierre Dorion's architectural paintings, Julia Johnson (Le Centerpiece) and Erika Del Vecchio (Blouin Division) curate the space with immersive moments that invite visitors to envision themselves living within it.
Vernissage: Chromatopia
March 13th (6pm) - Fondation Guido Molinari
The result of the research-creation residency of Jean-Maxime Dufresne and Virginie Laganière, this project is founded on the conviction that knowledge emerges from contact with plural realities. The exploration of Molinari’s work and archives act as an incubator to create a laboratory of ideas on chromatic perception. Faced with the ambivalence of colours and the difficulty of assigning them a precise meaning, the artists examine their psychic, cultural, neurological, social, biological and political dimensions, through the prism of artistic creation and disciplinary transversality. By bringing together installation, photography, video and sound, attention is paid to visibility and chromatic dissonance within our material culture and our urban, natural and technological environments.
Screening: Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) 1960
March 13th (8-11pm) - Toteme House
Hosted by The Opium Den, this intimate screening of crime thriller Plein Soleil (1960) presents viewers with a truly exquisite visual delight. As guests settle onto cozy cushions and blankets, the evening begins with fresh popcorn and a detailed introduction to the film. The night concludes with an open-format discussion offering a deeper exploration of the film, its references and subsequent cultural impact. Head to The Opium Den website for tickets.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: written/unwritten
March 14th (6-9pm) - Ada X
written/unwritten is a group show that explores the poetic in its myriad forms. Presented alongside or woven throughout the works of nine artists, poetry serves to expose vulnerable states of existence between grief, care, longing, and growth.
Vernissage: Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos
March 20th (5-10pm) - Fonderie Darling
Simile Aria is a melodramatic and enigmatic installation exploring the inner workings of human testimony. Using elements such as an organ animated by air compressors, photographs of singers and children, and sunlight that sets these images ablaze, the artist questions the boundary between the unspeakable and the visible, embodied by sunlight, while interrogating the intensity of human cry and suffering.
Vernissage: Absoluité by Numa Amun
March 20th (5-10pm) - Fonderie Darling
Numa Amun's practice focuses on the representation of the invisible and transcendental experiences. Through a series of hyperrealistic paintings and a subtle manipulation of colors and textures, Absoluité highlights the artist's recent experiments with astral projection and altered states of consciousness, inviting the viewer to contemplate the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: Anchor
March 20th (6-9pm) - VAV Gallery
Anchor explores how individuals find footholds amidst turbulence—through cultural heritage, human connections, resilience, and artistic expression.
This collection invites viewers to reflect on their own anchors and the ways art can illuminate paths to stability and hope. By highlighting resilience and the search for meaning, the works remind us that being grounded is not static but a dynamic process—a testament to the human spirit’s ability to adapt and thrive.
Vernissage: Somewhere within time’s spiral by KanikaXx
March 20th (6pm) - Centre Clark
KanikaXx is an Afro-Caribbean artist and storyteller engaging in memory work. With the body acting as a reservoir of ancestral knowledge she explores her works as sites of transmission; revealing worlds through immersions that encompass visual, auditory, and written dimensions. Through transcending linear time, she employs Indigenous technology as a methodology to bring forth sustainable collective futures.
Vernissage: A long black bough by Rebecca Ramsey
March 20th (6pm) - Centre Clark
Using ceramics, Rebecca Ramsey’s work reflects on overlaps between the circulatory systems of bodies and architecture.
Art Matters Festival - Vernissage: Home for All
March 21st (6-9pm) - Galerie POPOP (Belgo Building)
Which artworks have a place in the gallery or any other institution? In a day where duct-taped bananas posed under conceptual ingenuity sit side by side with perfect oil paintings of old white men, how do we properly critique art in this day and age? What artistic agendas do institutions carry that bias specific techniques and materiality?
This exhibition questions what artwork does have a gallery home, and it does it by bringing the “home” into the gallery. Using craft, mementos, and personal narratives as a practice framework, six artists create a nurturing environment that pursues the joy of making.
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.