Week 43: May 18th
You’re booked and busy. Especially this Thursday.
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. Come for the art, stay for the conversations, dance floors, craft tables, collective dreaming, roundtables, and chance encounters. This edition covers events happening in Montreal during the end of May.
Roundtable/Performance: 5@tech: Building Cyberfeminist Networks, Here, Today
May 19th (5-9pm) - OROBORO
Opening with a performance by members of the LeParc Performing Arts Research Cluster, this participatory conversation brings together artists, community organizers, and technologists to explore how community infrastructure is built and sustained. Together, they’ll map the past and present cyberfeminist scene, share lessons from Cyber Love’s grassroots organizing since 2021, and discuss what has and hasn’t worked in community building. The session will conclude with a collective discussion on future pathways for solidarity, collaboration, and organizing; it will be followed by a networking cocktail. The talk aims to strengthen our sense of who we are, how we show up for one another, and how we can build resilient networks.
Vernissage: ANIMACHINA II.0, submission & oblivion
May 20th (5:30pm) - PHI
ANIMACHINA II.0 is a new series of six performances conceived through a collaboration between camille POLIQUIN (KROY) and Jonathon Anderson, in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Design + Technology Lab. The work explores a shifting dynamic in which the boundaries between student and teacher blur, as fascination with robotic entities gradually leads to a loss of control. The project continues the duo’s exploration of movement, fear, and obsession through live and recorded performances that observe and question the evolving relationship between humans and machines.
Artist Talk: Time Travel Has Always Been Possible
May 20th (6-8:30pm) - Ada-x
Since 2008, Ada X has developed Matricules: a visual and documentary record of its activities, now containing thousands of digital files 30 years after its 1996 founding. Ada X independently manages its data, uses open-source tools, and retains sovereignty over its digital memory, long before such practices became central to conversations about technology, ownership, and power. Time Travel transforms the archive into a poetic interface, opening portals into feminist media-arts history. Visitors explore non-linear narratives, cycles of learning and unlearning, and the evolution of artistic practices.
Artist Talk/Launch: Accessibility Day
May 21st (1-7pm) - FOFA Gallery
A full afternoon of programming centring accessibility and the launch of the Spring/Summer issue of Esse arts + opinions, 117 – Crip. The programming revolves around Deaf, blind, and low-vision audiences, with ASL and LSQ in the context of the exhibitions by Po B. K. Lomami, Abi Hodson, and Tina Lam. There will be guided visits with Sendy-Loo Emmanuel and a talk between artist Po B. K. Lomami and curator eunice bélidor.
Vernissage: Two things can be true by Walter Scott
May 21st (5-7pm) - Blouin Division
After his exhibition at the Fonderie Darling this past spring, Walter Scott reveals a new series of paintings. The seven works installed in the gallery space continue an ongoing inquiry in which Scott’s visual language merges text-based practices and abstraction. In Two Things Can Be True, certain codes drawn from comics are reactivated: borders and the laconic sequential markers “SO” and “THEN” are integrated into sparse, distilled compositions. The works at times depict austere liminal spaces, at others isolated objects. Post-it notes, echoing fragments of thought, recall scraps of paper found in the artist’s studio, bringing us toward a form of emotional interiority. Vases, wine glasses, pools of dark liquid, and other iconographic elements compose a set of speculative images, often devoid of human presence.
Vernissage: Paintings that begin with an X by Elaine Stocki
May 21st (5-7pm) - Blouin Division
The exhibition unfolds through Stocki’s materially driven practice and reflections on process, intuition, and transformation. Watercolour, velvet, linen and silk constitute an exploration of the tension between materials: the unpredictable effects of layered and poured paint, the saturated sheen of velvet, and the rigidity of linen. Colour, texture, and the historical associations attached to these textiles are meaningful. Velvet feels luxurious, but also kitsch, and the contrast between its richness and the muted surface of linen creates an almost photographic sense of depth: one material recedes while another pushes forward.
Vernissage: Radiance / Lumière by Wanda Koop
May 21st (5-7pm) - Blouin Division
This spring, amid global conflicts and growing uncertainty around AI, the space expedition Artemis II circled the moon, drawing it back into the public consciousness. For a brief news cycle, the world’s attention shifted outward, away from divisive politics and technological anxiety towards a more enlightened perspective. The crew snapped images of Earthset and captivated us with portraits of what our planet really is: a glistening disc of beautiful, improbable life.
Here, Koop’s paintings of red, green, and gold planets seem to foretell the Artemis voyage. They describe majestic levitations, swirls of ribbon-like atmosphere, and the cosmic equilibrium that governs our earthly lives. If her earlier paintings gazed moonward, these new works spacewalk. She has named them the Untethered series, and they spellbind with the weightlessness and immensity of planets in motion.
Vernissage: Clowning the Frets by Veronika Pausova
May 21st (5-8pm) - Bradley Ertaskiran
Veronika Pausova’s paintings begin by taking apart the simple stuff of everyday life as a way of getting closer to it. Fragments of the ordinary are unfurled with curiosity and care to tease out the messy complexities. Here, feeling trumps fact or likeness. Perfect arcs of breast milk rendered in rhythmic, tidy brushwork seek not to illustrate the actual act but to prompt a heightened sensitivity akin to the real experience. It is Pausova’s wide scope of visual vocabulary and singular experimentation with paint that allows her to probe the vulnerable and the uncontrollable. Clowning the Frets offers a cheeky mouthful of seemingly distinct actions and oddities, deliberately and delightfully tied together.
Vernissage: Elle by David Altmejd
May 21st (5-8pm) - Bradley Ertaskiran
Elle carries an irrefutable sense of momentum, of energy travelling and transforming. Centered on manifestations of feminine energy culled from the artist’s inner depths, this ambitious new body of work sees Altmejd manipulating and multiplying matter with renewed intensity, through new life-size figures, heads and bronze sculpture, and drawings. These creations insist, above all else, on their own vivid existence—a vitality born from the hands that formed them. The resulting lifeforms are both wild and exacting, mortal and cosmic, made and alive.
Finissage: QNHL Craft Night with Lucas Morneau
May 21st (5:30-8:30pm) - La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse
In the spirit of Lucas Morneau’s crochet creations, head to La Centrale for a night of crafts, creativity, and good conversation to bid adieu to this wondrous Queer Newfoundland Hockey League exhibition. Bring your own projects or pick up a new one! This is a member’s event that is open to the public.
Vernissage: Super Aunt by Ben Garbus
May 21st (6-9pm) - CARREFOUR
CARREFOUR is delighted to present New York-based artist Ben Garbus’s solo exhibition: Super Aunt. His hazy, silhouette-driven paintings unfold as dreamscapes of hovering, fragmented objects and figures, feeling at once open-ended and fated.
Vernissage: Mommy’s Driving by Frannie Marceline Williams
May 21st (6-9pm) - CARREFOUR
CARREFOUR is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Frannie Marceline Williams, with a new drawing series marking a debut in her practice. Through ink, Fran explores a frenzied multiverse of Girls and Dolls in works that are both narrative and open-ended.
Vernissage: MAUREEN XI
May 21st (6-11pm) - Parquette
MAUREEN XI, the 11th Concordia MFA annual group exhibition, is curated through a collaboration between the Concordia MFA Studio Arts Students Association and students from the inaugural Curatorial Studies and Practices Program. The exhibition represents a diverse range of artistic voices and mediums—from fibres and material practices, painting and drawing, intermedia, photography, sculpture and ceramics. Named after Maureen Kennedy, the beloved arts administrator extraordinaire, this year’s edition is also a send off for Maureen, who after 30+ years of dedication to the program has retired. It will be a dry celebration with snacks and (non-alcoholic) beverages available.
Vernissage: Assembler des douleurs pour en faire des peaux by Arnaud Denis-Longtin
May 22nd (6-11pm) - WIP
Assembler des douleurs pour en faire des peaux is Montreal artist Arnaud Denis-Longtin’s second solo exhibition, his most personal and accomplished to date. The exhibition invites viewers into the intimate world of the artist’s blankets for a cozy evening where his feelings and dispositions are laid bare through sharp truths, deep conversations, and tokens of hope. Like an opened wound, or like a quilt, the exhibition calls for this rupture to be meshed with mends, stitches and sutures. To begin a patchwork of listening and exchange, where vulnerability is obliged, so that together we can create a larger pattern. Liberating. One that learns from the past, but does not repeat it.
Vernissage: Characters
May 23rd (6-9pm) - Centre du Rat (entrance in the alley behind 4646 hutchison)
Characters is a sculpture show by Oliver Roberts, Juan Pablo Hernández Gutiérrez, Shahan Assadourian and Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand. The group of artists consists of individuals who have a high regard for character design, implied narratives, abstraction of nature, personification of animals and cartoonification of humans.
Workshop: Love! Scandal! Betrayal! by Lynda Gaudreau
May 23rd (2-4pm) - VOX
The photonovel and the giallo rely on a specific set of codes. A few words and images, book covers and movie posters promote these genres by drawing on the same conventions. Go interact with these codes using a selection of texts and images from Lynda Gaudreau’s installation with the artist guiding viewers though the creation of a visual collage.
Workshop: Sineh-be-sineh – Reimagining Oral Traditions with Nagmeh Sharifi
May 24th (1-5pm) - Articule
Sineh-be-Sineh: Reimagining Oral Traditions is a hands-on, bilingual workshop in which Nagmeh Sharifi invites participants to explore how memory, oral storytelling, and cultural heritage can be preserved and reimagined through accessible digital tools. The workshop is rooted in Sharifi’s recent multimedia project Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun), a contemporary reworking of an Iranian folktale narrated by her late grandmother, and it reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in intergenerational knowledge, feminist practices, and slow, intentional making using digital tools.
Finissage: Nids communs by Orise Jacques-Durocher
May 27th (5-9pm) - Les Impatients
Nids communs, presented by Projet commun and Les Impatients, questions artistic and curatorial practice as a performative framework. Can it become a space where the idea of collectivity is not only contemplated, but negotiated in real time and built from a sustainable perspective? Blurring the boundaries between contemporary art, outsider art, and relational art, the exhibition unfolds, at the pace of the clay coil-building process, as an open and constantly evolving creative workshop. In collaboration with ceramic artist Orise Jacques-Durocher, the participants of Les Impatients shape a monumental work composed of a multitude of gestures layered one upon another, while the material itself preserves the traces of these encounters.
Workshop: Envisioning Archival Futures with Cyanotype and Poetry
May 30th (1-5pm) - Ada-x
Explore the possibilities of cyanotype to find new futures within participants’ archives. Participants are welcome to bring objects, photo negatives, images printed on transparent mediums, fabrics/textiles, and more from their personal belongings to create prints using the sun. Using the sun to produce images and texts, the workshop resists oppressive structures that we collectively work under and probe for new possibilities within research and creation. Participants will recite and reclaim individual narratives within collective histories of resistance.
Vernissage: Rémanences / Loss as a gift
May 30th (3-5:30pm) - Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain
Rémanences / Loss as a Gift brings together the practices of James Lee Chiahan and Bryan Beyung around loss as a cycle of passage, engaging with grief and displacement. Through painting, the exhibition explores this in-between space where identities and memories are redefined. The works evoke moments of transition, allowing a living space to emerge where memory and becoming coexist.
This edition of Community Service was written by Laura Bertrand (she/her). Laura Bertrand is a maximalist enamoured with all things material: decorative arts, material theory, textiles. She believes there can always be more whimsy.
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 June 1st to June 14th are due no later than Friday May 29th. We now charge $25 for late submissions.
See you around.