Week 42: May 4th
Perception, reflection, and community (yay!)
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. Collaboration, collaboration, and more collaboration! If you’re seeking an immersive installation, community dialogue, or ways to think ‘outside-the-box’ inside a creative space, you’ll love what we’ve got in store for you. This edition covers events happening in Montreal during the beginning of May.
Vernissage: Annuel de Design
May 6th (6pm) - L’École de design de l’UQAM
For the 12th edition of the famous Annuel de Design, L’École de design de L’UQAM opens its doors to the public to exhibit the design projects of its graduating students, highlighting the talent of the next generation. Tickets are mandatory and available here. Try to get there early, we all know the line usually snakes around the block.
Vernissage: On a Human Scale
May 6th (6pm) - Ada X
On a Human Scale brings together five artistic proposals that explore interstitial zones – meeting points where memory, technology, ecology, and the body intersect.
The exhibition invites us to take a stand: to slow down in the face of the pressure to be productive. To inhabit the cracks rather than ready-made solutions, to imagine ways of perceiving and transmitting that are relational rather than extractivist, and plural rather than normative. The exhibition is thus conceived as a device of resistance, where art becomes a critical tool for thinking about and practicing other forms of coexistence in the era of AI and algorithmic capitalism. By Marion Schneider, Fili 周 Gibbons, Lee Wilkins, Hailey Guzik and Nada El-Omari.
Open Studio: Clara Jorisch and Verre d’Onge
May 6-7th (1-7pm) - 5524 St-Patrick, Porte C, Studio 365
As part of Montreal’s first Semaine de Design, Clara Jorisch and Verre d’Onge are opening up their studio; a space for fabrication, collaboration and exhibition, where artisan and designer practices intertwine and form a dialogue.
Vernissage: OFFCUTS
May 7th (4-7pm) - VAV Gallery
OFFCUTS is a collaborative exhibition between the Art Matters Festival and the Concordia University Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR) that celebrates sustainable art-making practices. The exhibition showcases artists who are resourceful and attentive to the environmental impact of their practices. Each work considers the full lifecycle of materials—whether by transforming items destined for landfill or creating pieces designed to naturally decompose. OFFCUTS foregrounds the care, intention and innovation involved in working with reclaimed materials.
Vernissage: Remembering the things I don’t know by Samuel Graveline
May 7th (5-9pm) - ELEKTRA
Remembering the things I don’t know is a reflection on the nature of analog images, specifically how they appear on the surface of films. Light plays a central role in these works, not only as a condition of visibility but also as an active agent of revelation. It never fully reveals the content of the image: it lets it emerge in segments, fleetingly.
The exhibition explores the persistence of images, what they leave behind, the way they unveil themselves, and the role of light in their perception. It questions the evocative potential of the partial image and proposes a visual experience based on an economy of attention.
Vernissage: La rencontre: observer comme façon de communiquer
May 7th (6-8pm) - Fais-moi l’art
This group exhibition unveils the many ways we might consider interacting with our environment. It’s a reflection on encounters with various aspects of life, such as relationships with objects, matter, and the passage of time. Carried by desires to unfold these often overlooked or undervalued things, the artists reveal a segment of reality and offer a new breath. The exhibition features work by Béatrice Ross, Fanny Pelletier, Justine Arsenault, Julianne Gaudreau, and Juliette Châteauvert.
Publication Launch: Bootlegger Magazine Issue 3.5
May 7th (6-11pm) - Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT)
Bootlegger Magazine Issue 3.5 launches at SAT with a public exhibition featuring sixteen emerging artists, all Concordia University students, alumni, and dropouts—working across visual art, design, writing, and experimental practices. Produced by an artist-led collective and printed in-house, the issue celebrates bold, underrepresented voices outside institutional and commercial frameworks.
Workshop: Untangle: A Day of Technology, Feelings, and Resistance
May 8th (12:30-6:30pm) - Eastern Bloc
In collaboration with Ada X, Eastern Bloc invites you for a day of reflection, discussions and demonstrations around feminist approaches to care, ethical technology, and digital autonomy. Featuring a presentation on Cursors of Care, artist Tricia Enns will explore how small creative gestures can infuse care and meaning into our everyday digital spaces through the creation of personalized pixelated cursors and icons. Following this there will be a workshop led by Techtechtech on their project To Weave a Web: the Poetics of Opting Out. They will invite reflection on ways to divest from tech giants and imagine ethical, sustainable, and community-centered tools. The day will close with an in-person gathering for those who can join on-site, with the opportunity to build your own mini server in a micro-workshop.
Workshop: Black Pudding by Aurélie Petit
May 11th (5-8pm) - Moving Image Research Lab
Black Pudding is a hands-on, in-person speculation workshop series designed to offer an accessible and collaborative entry point into the creative re-use of AI. As a point of departure this series uses a research-driven, AI-based project that revisits the lost pornographic animation film Black Pudding (1969) by Nancy Edell (1942-2005), a Canadian-American pioneer director in feminist animation.
The Black Pudding: Collaborative Speculation Workshop Series invites participants to collaborate on an AI-based short animation by contributing to a custom dataset of collages inspired by surviving textual materials written about the film. The workshop series introduces participants to different forms of AI filmmaking tools in a low-pressure and ecologically mindful setting, and asks: what might AI look like if we slowed it down, made it smaller, and used it to make art together?
Vernissage: Blueprint
May 12th (5-10pm) - Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT)
Blueprint is an immersive installation that explores how reality is perceived, measured, and mapped, from the intimate scale to satellite imagery. Through motorized blinds and surveillance cameras, the space is continuously captured, fragmented, and reassembled. The visitor occupies an unstable position, simultaneously observer and observed, traversed by streams of images that reconfigure what they believe they perceive. Through visual and digital means, the work reveals how a single reality can split, giving rise to parallel worlds from a shared territory.
Artist Talk: Spill with Trevor Kiernander and Gabor Bata
May 12th (7pm) - Pampa Social Club
Spill is a monthly artist talk, featuring two artists who present their work and discuss their process, followed by a Q&A with the audience. This month’s talk features two multidisciplinary artists, Trevor Kiernander—a painter, DJ, curator, educator, and community-builder—and Gabor Bata—an artist and painter influenced by his love of film, animation, comics and design.
After the talk, the evening continues with time to socialize—grab a drink, have a snack, and connect with other artists and attendees.
Vernissage: IGNITION 21
May 13th (4:30-7:30pm) - The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
IGNITION 21 features new work by students currently enrolled in the Studio Arts or Humanities graduate programs at Concordia University. In this edition, each work is paired with a set of instructions devised by the artists. The aim is not to explain, but to suggest a way of doing things: instructions, verbs, protocols. These texts do not describe the works; they enact the conditions under which they appear. What matters is not only what is produced, but what resists execution.
Nothing is entirely fixed. At certain moments defined by these instructions, the works can be activated, moved, or modified in the presence of the public, changing their location, form, or rhythm. The exhibition becomes a space in motion, where the works are no longer merely displayed but put into circulation.
This edition of Community Service was written by Lucie Hannah Miller. Lucie is coming up on eight years of living in Montreal and yet, has never dated a DJ or hosted a pop-up. She’s happy to be a part of the Community Service team and excited for all the events she’ll find herself at this summer!
If you have an art or design-related event you would like to include in future editions of the newsletter, please fill out this form. Submissions for events happening between May 18th and 31st are due no later than May 15th. We now charge $25 for late submissions.
See you around.