Week 9: August 26th
Nouveau Poem's late summer return, Lola Kingsley's first solo exhibition, de Gaspe's cultural season opener, and more.
Welcome to Community Service, a biweekly newsletter featuring a curated selection of art and design events in Montreal. The list is getting longer now that the sun is setting earlier and everyone is slowly making their way back into the city. This edition covers events happening during the last week August and the first of September.
Reading: Nouveau Poem 3
August 28th (8pm) - Bar Wills
Again again! Emilie Lafleur, Pamela Beyer and Kate Nugent are back with the third edition of their reading series, Nouveau Poem. This late-summer edition will be held at bar Wills (Community Service’s favourite venue, allegedly), and will include new writing by Frankie Barnet, Jack Daniel Christie, Willow Cioppa, Catherine Fatima, Adam Halun, and A. Khurshid. There will also be a selection of Pome’s Books as part of the evening’s offering.
Vernissage: Goodbye, This is… by Lola Kingsley
August 29th (6-11pm) - Studio Giovanelli
Very excited for this one!! Goodbye, This is... by Lola Kingsley encapsulates a visual diary documenting the artist’s reflections from recent years, exploring the romanticized concept of “coming of age” and the fleeting nature of youth. This body of work offers a contemporary sociological perspective on how street culture, cityscapes, and the post-adolescent generation exist in direct cohesion with one another. Through its ephemeral and intimate depiction of the self, the installation delves into themes of nostalgia and community. The work reveals the essence of a transformative period marked by constant change and uncertainty - symbolizing one’s farewell of innocence and the onset of early adulthood. Whether it is through personal interactions with these city characters or by focusing on cities as subjects, Kingsley engages with the subcultures that emerge from the interplay between the impermanence of youth and urban environments. The installation is both a tribute to her peers and an invitation for viewers to reflect on how the city influences youth and how youth shapes culture. Curated by Lola Kingsley and Sarah Mercho.
Vernissage: Les Étaux du Regard by Antoine Lussier
August 29th (6pm) - Carmine’s Room
Carmine’s Room’s second exhibition! This time, the space serves as the site of Antoine Lussier’s first solo show. Antoine explores the convergence between drawing, image and installation, producing poetic works where processes and their hazards coexist in order to generate new perspectives. Through the cyclical reuse of these mediums, the process and the unexpected shape Antoine's work, allowing physical and digital artifacts to slip in. The meeting of multiple mediums, prints, dust and scratches creates works where production accidents are juxtaposed. The exhibition is curated by Ally Rosilio and will be presented from August 29th to September 21st.
Capsule Collection Launch: The Sound of Nature by Mycoaudio x Ostrya
August 29th (7-11pm) - Ostrya Basecamp
A match made in Montreal heaven (you get to decide exactly where that is). Head to Ostrya (5842 Saint-Hubert) on August 29th for the exclusive new collaboration between Mycoaudio and Ostrya. To celebrate the launch of the capsule collection, DJs Sage Green, Audrey Belanger and Presidousa will play on unreleased mycoaudio 12i2 units, bringing people together through the connection of a natural approach to design and the outdoors.
Performance: Sonic Quantifier Volume 2
August 31st (7pm) - Fondation Guido Molinari
The Guido Molinari Foundation, in collaboration with Rhizome, is hosting its second evening of electroacoustic musical performances in the heart of their exhibition space. A special exhibition of the renowned Quantifiers by the late artist Guido Molinari, a music lover in his own lifetime, will be created for the occasion. Featuring sounds by duo Massecar d’Orion and Drainolith.
Vernissage: Argile du frêne
September 5th (6-8pm) - Centre Culturel George-Vanier
Argile du frêne brings together new photographic works by emerging visual artists Loïc Chauvin, Charlotte Ghomeshi, Claude Labrèche-Lemay and Clara Lacasse. Like syrphs, those yellow and black flies that resemble bees and wasps and thus elude their predators, the work they present entice, conceal and lure. Through poetic, instinctive and sometimes fortuitous associations, these artists combine and collate various photographic fragments, pointing to what lies beneath their surface: the body's capacity to adapt when faced with its own shortcomings, humanity's grip on its environment, the commodification of living things into natural resources, or the everyday as a space for dérive.
Vernissage: Purple Rain by Raúl Aguilar Canela
September 6th (5pm) - Galerie Diagonale
"Purple Rain" examines the elusive search for balance in a world driven by the relentless circulation and accumulation of goods, where technology and hyper-connectivity have eroded the fabric of social relations. Drawing on emotions that are both deeply personal and universally shared, Raúl Aguilar Canela continues his exploration of metanarratives of neoliberal capitalism, delving into sadness as a collective experience. The exhibition portrays the emotional landscape of Purple, a fictional manic-depressive character, through fabric painting, wood sculpture, and freestyle writing, capturing the complex nature of sorrow. (Excerpt from the exhibition text written by Carla Cruz).
Vernissage: Secrets by Jérôme Nadeau
September 6th (5pm) - Centre Clarke
Secrets explores a vision of architecture that transcends the materiality of structures: the often paradoxical dynamics between mechanized human actions and natural processes. Focusing on the narratives of progress and efficiency that scaffolded modernist thought, the works presented are thus built on a form of fabrication that is both brutally reductive and inclusive, and bear witness to the failed ideals of modernism.
Vernissage: Champs de Contraintes by Marie-France Brière
September 6th (5pm) - Centre Clarke
In the 1980s, Marie-France Brière traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy, a city of medieval origin in Tuscany known as the capital of working artistically with many materials, including marble. There, she learns to “read and write” a material that has been used for thousands of years.
In her studio, Brière experiments with—or interprets—her marble like the blank pages of an unexpectedly pliable palimpsest. Champ de Contraintes converges at this propensity for vernacular language; one that is both immemorial and immutable.
Vernissage: Inside-out Poems by Karen Trask and David Jhave Johnston
September 6th (5pm) - Centre Clarke
It began with Karen emailing a poem to Jhave who had suggested acting as a witness to her process. He replied with a poem that echoed and inverted the words, sense and rhythm. This began a daily exchange that was spontaneous. Currently, there are over 200 poems exchanged. Karen is the lead, Jhave is the echo.
If you have an art or design-related event you would like to include in future editions of the newsletter, you can send us a DM or email communityservmag@gmail.com
See you around.