Author Archives: Ryan Alexander Diduck

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Elegantly Wasted: in conversation with Dexter Barker-Glenn

In his essay “Spectacles of Waste,” the urban scholar William Straw highlights the method of “rhythmanalysis,” a field of study that the sociologist Henri Lefebvre outlined to focus attention upon the vitality of cultural forms and their passage through time.

The urban environment is a space for stasis and perpetual motion, oscillating constantly between immovability and change. Infrastructure is the most visible example of an urban characteristic that evolves extremely slowly, whereas the traffic that flows within infrastructures represents a comparatively faster rhythmic and circulatory phenomenon. Cities forge specific relationships to temporality in which objects persist or pass away.

“The rapid turnover of things and ideas and the concomitant erasure of historical sensibility have long been diagnosed as defining features of urban life,” Straw writes. Put simply, cities tend to accelerate cultural rhythms.

Measuring the vitality of metropolitan life is concurrently one of contemporary art’s tasks. The nowness of artworks determines their currency amidst ever changing communities that assign monetary value and cultural heft to them. Yet, in their material immutability, enduring long after the ideas that they convey or the traditions within which they belong fall out of fashion, artworks often irritate the impetus to define the immediacy of the urban moment.

The work of the young artist Dexter Barker-Glenn exemplifies this tension between slowness and speed, urban rhythms and artistic revolutions.

“I’m interested in the weathering of objects.” Dexter Barker-Glenn.

“I feel really light and alive when I’m working with material that has a history,” says Barker-Glenn, offering me a tour of his latest exhibition, First Water, installed in the second room at Centre Clark.

“I’m interested in the weathering of objects. It’s the most interesting part of them, and I’m just drawing attention to that, in a way. I hope that it makes people excited about the world around them and that it’s inspiring to see. I think that the real art is the objects. Like these banners,” he says, gesturing toward a sun-faded commercial sign depicting a blue diamond that he has appropriated, perforated, and stretched like a cinema screen in the middle of the room.

“There’s a condensing that’s happening in this piece. I am doing something to these objects when I make them an art piece and put them into a gallery.”

In this exhibition, too, is a striking mosaic composed exclusively of dead flies glued to the wall in a sunburst pattern. The flies form a gradient of colour, fading from black to white as they approach the center of the configuration. A replica of a dead deer stitched from remnants of the diamond banner sits lifeless on the floor beneath the fly arrangement, an oblique reference to Iphigenia, who in Greek mythology was sacrificed to atone for her father Agamemnon’s ill-conceived hunting expedition.

“There’s this desire that capitalism has to keep on growing and accumulate energy.” Gallery views of Dexter Barker-Glenn’s First Water photographed for NicheMTL

What Barker-Glenn is doing is at once naïve and brilliant: transforming trash into treasure; elevating waste within this reverential space; taking readymade objects and redesignating them as works of art; and using the commodity that the central image signifies — a diamond — to comment upon capital, extravagance, and the deep-temporal vitality of material life cycles.

“This image of a diamond is trying to be permanent,” Barker-Glenn muses. “The image of the diamond is pretending to be a diamond. It’s serving a certain job as an image. But its materiality fails at that goal.”

I first met Barker-Glenn in 2024 at Ateliers Belleville where he occupied a small studio space and was working at that time on a series of 3D-sculpted friezes constructed from layers upon layers of spent lottery scratchcards. The hyper-specificity of this project intrigued me, as did its singular aesthetic qualities. “There’s this desire that capitalism has to keep on growing and accumulate energy,” believes Barker-Glenn.

It was imperative to him that he source each used lottery scratchcard through a process of bartering, with local depanneurs eventually offering boxes of them to him for free when he told them what they would be used for. “It was quite easy to get them to give them to me,” he recalls. “Often they were forgotten.”

He also acquired the diamond banner by agreeing to hand-paint a new sign for the shop’s proprietor. “I had them for a while in my studio and was quite intimidated by them,” he tells me. “But I was confident that they were important images.”

The more I consider them, the more meaning these objects accrue. The random value of any individual scratchcard, or banner, whether it is successful or a failure, stands in for an entire ecosystem of paper money in which one bill is absurdly worth more or less than another.

Ultimately, belief is what undergirds this system, an agreement to act as if stacks of paper have intrinsic significance. Yet, we have progressively been moving through an era where disbelief and disagreement characterize post-capitalist aspiration, in which chance dictates fortunes as much as traditional measures of value — like labour, or quantity, or quality, or demand.

A person with curly hair stands in front of a large artwork featuring a stylized diamond design in shades of purple and white.
“I’m interested in these places where these seemingly non-material systems are material and have waste.” Dexter Barker-Glenn photographed for NicheMTL.

Barker-Glenn relocated to Montreal from Toronto in 2017 at the age of 17 to study studio arts with a minor in computer science at Concordia University. “I kind of had thought that computer science would be a good career choice,” he says, “to learn about coding. But I’ve never done a coding job. A lot of it now is pretty redundant. A.I. stuff has taken over.”

Barker-Glenn’s work, shuttling restlessly among the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and process art, appears least like anything that Artificial Intelligence could reproduce. “My next project is actually kind of about A.I.,” he reveals. “It’s about data centres and the environmental impact that is hidden away from us. A.I. seems free to use. I’m interested in these places where these seemingly non-material systems are material and have waste.”

Barker-Glenn’s diamond banner similarly fluctuates between useful and useless, functional and junk. Indeed, art-writ-large is identified now more than ever as non-functional production, labour divorced from use value, matter void of purpose.

A person with medium-length hair is holding a coffee cup and looking surprised while sitting at a wooden table in a modern indoor setting.
“I don’t think of my art as functional.” Dexter Barker-Glenn photographed for NicheMTL.

“Art often serves an economy,” explains Barker-Glenn. “But something is art when it’s not functional anymore. It’s like a tumor of wealth or something. Some form of art always serves a purpose in an economic system. But I don’t think of my art as functional. When it’s art, it becomes an object that’s thought of as holding currency, and when it’s waste, it’s thought of as damage to the environment. It becomes a waste product. It’s interesting to think about materials in this way.”

The political theorist Jane Bennett recasts agency as a network comprised of human and non-human material in her 2010 book, Vibrant Matter. “It seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective,” Bennett argues, “but the (ontologically heterogenous) ‘public’ coalescing around a problem.” That problem today, as it has been since the emergence of authority, is power and its arbitrary rhythms.

A philosophical undercurrent runs beneath Barker-Glenn’s work, one that ultimately unites Bennett’s and Straw’s political economy. “I’m very fascinated with how waste connects economic systems with ecological systems,” he tells me.

“There’s lots of ways that technology is used to make it seem like we’ve moved forward, politically,” Barker-Glenn observes. “But it’s all threats of violence that are obscured through these systems. There’s a threat of violence that’s maintaining it all.”◼︎

First Water by Dexter Barker-Glenn continues through 28 February 2026 at Centre Clark, 5455 Av. de Gaspé #114.

Cover image: Dexter Barker-Glenn at Centre Clark photographed for NicheMTL.

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About Face

Orchestre Classique de Montréal with Marie-Josée Lord and conductor Kalena Bovell, Salle Pierre-Mercure, 5 February 2026

Marie-Josée Lord and Kalena Bovell with the OCM at Salle Pierre-Mercure. Photographed for NicheMTL.

What began anecdotally as suspicion about facial bias on social media was confirmed in 2021 when Bogdan Kulynych, a Ukrainian graduate student studying at EFPL University in Switzerland, proved a preference for lighter skinned faces in (the company formerly known as) Twitter’s cropping algorithm. Twitter’s photo-sharing system also seemed to like younger, slimmer faces more than older and wider ones, with those faces left out more regularly from image-based tweets. Women’s faces, too, enjoyed preferential treatment, appearing more frequently in Twitter’s new recommendation-based feeds.

Kulynych noted that these facial biases were not accidental but rather designed to maximize engagement and thus profit for the company. Twitter paid Kulynych a $3,500 reward for discovering the bias and apologized in a statement, claiming, “…we’ve got more analysis to do.” On 25 April 2022, before they could undertake that analysis, Twitter’s Board unanimously accepted Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid for $44 billion.

Less than four years later, Musk has changed the name of the company to X — no relation whatsoever to the rating — and developed a subscription-based A.I. service that when prompted to do so creates sexualized deepfake images of real people without their consent.

Bibi Club with Fionavair, Pub Pit Caribou, 13 February 2026

Bibi Club perform at Pub Pit Caribou for Taverne Tour, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Faces are the most instantly recognizable physical features humans have. A number of studies demonstrate that infants show a visual preference for their mother’s faces within hours after birth, effectively making babies the first and most reliable facial recognition software.

The subtlest facial movements can indicate avalanches of emotion, and we intuitively recognize, interpret, and act upon these behavioural cues. More than any other nonverbal signs, we build bonds and trust people based upon their faces and what they communicate to us.

During the coronavirus pandemic, witnesses were asked to testify in court trials wearing face masks, and criminologists questioned whether these masks would affect the credibility of their testimony. A group of American and Canadian researchers, including Vincent Denault from the Université de Montréal and host of the podcast Beyond Lie Cues, published an experiment designed to isolate masks as a specific variable affecting the believability of a witness’s testimony. To their surprise, they found that the difference was negligible.

As important as faces are for identification, it is not imperative to see a face to believe a story. Masks appear to conceal neither lies nor the truth.

No Hay Banda with Karen Ng and Ida Toninato & Jennifer Thiessen, La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026

Jennifer Thiessen and Ida Toninato perform for No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa, 9 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Guitar face” is the phenomenon of involuntary and often hilarious facial expressions that guitarists pull when performing on their instruments. But it can also be applied to other musicians, too, and even extended to non-musical pursuits. We’ve all seen someone sticking out their tongue or biting their lower lip when they’re involved in a complex task.

“Laptop face” is the increasingly common occurrence of a laptop musician expressing facial acrobatics whilst manipulating a trackpad or keyboard. Of course, there is also “saxophone face,” the extreme inflation of the cheeks which saxophonists cannot avoid. Among the rarer instrument faces is “viola d’amore” face, another level of spontaneous expression akin to a plate spinner adding heroic complexity to an already demanding feat.

Nights in Fairyland by Will Straw, Milieux Resource Room, 13 February 2026

Will Straw holds a copy of his book, Nights in Fairyland, 13 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

When we become attracted to another person, we are usually attracted first and foremost to their face. There can be other physical attributes that one considers striking, many of which are well-known and need not be relisted here. But the face is the interface beneath which the operating system functions, so to speak, giving an indication to its innerworkings and alternately concealing and revealing our true character.

“Gaydar” is the term generally applied to a person’s visual ability to accurately discern sexual orientation in women and men. Nicholas O. Rule and Ravin Alaei in the Department of Psychology at University of Toronto published a study in 2016 that suggests that the general population is able to predict sexual orientation at a rate better than chance, indicating that there are certain facial features more frequently attributed to gay people.

Urban Dictionary entries are instructive and reflect how real people variously define and use language. At the time of writing, there are several more or less sensational definitions of the term “gayface.”

One definition indicates that gayface is an almost obligatory “look that gay men have that enables other gay men to quickly identify them as ‘family.’” This definition suggests that gay people have better gaydar than straight folks. Another less anticipated entry defines gayface as a variant of blackface, in which a person problematically dons a particular genre of facial expression for derogatory effect. Still, another entry simply states: “Anyone that goes by the name of Joseph.”

Richard Avedon: Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 10 February – 9 August 2026

Jacob Israel Avedon (detail), Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The notion that time is art fascinates me. Age changes all things, and the ways in which age manifests materially could be considered instinctive creativity, nature as artist. This is why antiques are more valuable with their patina preserved.

Art restoration is its own artform and needs to be practiced sparingly and only when necessary to not lose the work of art to history in its entirety. A subset of art restoration is film preservation, for which students can study to earn a degree, most notably at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, or Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.

Film, though, is a different medium than digital image reproduction and indicates an age even if it is entirely contemporaneous. 35-millimeter photographs taken today somehow convey a deeper sense of history than iPhone photos do.

Perhaps that is because they fix moments specifically in time, whereas digital images are infinitely manipulable. One can endlessly Photoshop a jpeg. But prints begin to show their age the second they’re struck, forever decaying.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: William S. Burroughs by Richard Avedon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL

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999 Words

Crazy Clown Time: notes on the weird visions of Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović

“…no frame is secure, all attempts at embedding fail.”
—Mark Fisher, “Curtains and Holes: David Lynch”

At the age of 65, the American filmmaker provocateur David Lynch in 2011 announced his debut solo recording, Crazy Clown Time. Upon its release, the album confounded listeners and critics in large part because traditional analytic criteria could not effectively be applied to it. Was Crazy Clown Time “good?” The answer seemingly necessitated a revaluation of goodness.

Crazy Clown Time was music made by an artist predominantly known for visual arts and the moving image. It was deliberately difficult to generically categorize, encompassing elements of surf rock, spoken word, electronic music, and blues. It was undoubtedly skillful, sonically speaking. But it was impossible to assign a value judgement to these purely arbitrary qualities.

Crazy Clown Time was weird. And Lynch had cultivated a reputation throughout his cultlike career for producing weird artworks. So, it was good at being that. But was weird good?

A similar question faces us when considering a spate of recent weird works including those of the visual artist Beth Frey and the composer Ana Sokolović. Frey’s exhibition, Autoeffigies, and Sokolović’s new operatic oeuvre, Clown(s), both offer representations of self-conscious weirdness that defy typical critique and precipitate a new rubric for analysis. They also beg observers to consider this moment and why now is the appropriate time for these jester-like gestures.

Beth Frey’s work hinges upon the aesthetics of malfunctioning Artificial Intelligence, her viral Instagram account @sentientmuppetfactory receiving exponential attention in the wake of contemporary conversations around the use of A.I. in fine art. One of the more consequential topics in those conversations is what constitutes noteworthiness in this era of art’s artificially intelligent reproduction. With A.I.’s assistance, it has never been simpler to prompt the production of clownish farce.

“It’s very easy to make an interesting image now,” Frey tells CBC arts journalist Chris Hampton, “so I think my conception of interestingness has changed.” For Frey, the facility of generating weird images using technological tools means setting a higher bar for expressing the weird.

Sokolović’s Clown(s) expands the formal elements of conventional opera to achieve an impression of weirdness, for example, beginning the performance with the house lights still up, and warping the customary canned announcement imploring patrons to turn off their electronic devices.

Throughout the following 115 minutes, Sokolović proceeds to draw upon other artistic traditions, like puppetry and acrobatics, to deform the audience’s notions of normalcy. Using clowns as her subject becomes a more peripheral choice that punctuates rather than constitutes the work’s predominant themes. Clown(s) is not weird. It is, instead, about weirdness.

The cast of Clown(s) onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 3 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Mark Fisher was our generation’s most astute cultural observer to precisely define and acutely examine the weird. “A weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist,” wrote Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, “or at least it should not exist here.”

And yet the persistence of a weird thing, here and now, upsets the legitimacy of the categories with which we have up until the present applied to define and make sense of the world. And so, we are tasked with the choice to begrudgingly accept the troubling and uncanny nature of whatever strikes us as weird, or to redefine our structural categories and reorder the irreconcilable.

The recurrence of clowns is apt. They are undeniably weird. Clowns characterize a complex impetus in human activity. Ostensibly, they intend to amuse and entertain us. But clowns’ antics more often provoke a sense of anxiety and fear in their audiences, especially the innocent. There is always something sinister lurking beneath the explicit attempt to elicit delight.

The problem today is not weirdness itself but its overabundance, a deluge of delusion. 15 years after Lynch’s magnum opus, there is no more befitting a description for this historical moment than Crazy Clown Time. Ours is an age of insane clown posses — ICE, IDF, GRU — assembled within the confines of the greatest national superpowers for the purposes of performing absurdity spectacularly.

Although it may not be enough just to say that our leaders are clowns turning reality into a circus. What they are effectively doing is forcing us to tolerate and hyper-normalize increasingly intolerable and hyper-abnormal circumstances, with the other option being resistance in a system into which a certain level of resistance is acceptable — indeed beneficial — to perpetuating that system.

The third alternative is resistance so disruptive that it threatens to destabilize not just the clown show but the entire circus. The possibility of leaning into instability politically may be manifesting in our works of art first as a form of dress rehearsal for real revolution. It is under the jurisdiction of art, after all, where we can conceive weird disruptions with fewer consequences — and perfect them through habituation and practice. A sane reaction to externally imposed insanity is to induce it internally, under controlled conditions, observe the results, and adapt accordingly.

Throughout his lifetime, David Lynch encouraged audiences to confront what was wrong about weirdness, and in doing so, redefine what is right about order, what is necessary about radical sensemaking, and the inevitability of the conundrums that force positive change. Presumably in 2011, Lynch could have done whatever he wanted, including doing absolutely nothing. What he did do, however, was to position a text entitled Crazy Clown Time before a captive public that would seriously consider it, classify and categorize it, placing it within a grander context.

It is significant that both Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović are producing their crazy, carnivalesque output in the context of a time and place that presents ever-fewer options for immediate survival. This is not only interesting but also important work that serves to reevaluate the political valence of art. Faced with their own versions of infinite choice, these artists elect to gerrymander the map of weirdsville and bring more of us together under its big top.◼︎

Cover image: Detail, Beth Frey’s Autoeffigies, McBride Contemporain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Trick Rider

Sonya Derviz, Hover, Bradley Ertaskiran, 22 January – 7 March 2026

Sonia Derviz, Near, 2025. Oil and Charcoal on Linen, 200 x 240 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
—I Peter 5:8

Ghosts don’t have to be dead to haunt us.

The OED’s earliest definitions of the verb “to haunt” have nothing to do with unseen or immaterial forces. The first listed Middle English meanings, dating from around 1230 to 1588, simply denote: “To practice habitually, familiarly, or frequently; to use or employ habitually or frequently.”

Consequently, our habits haunt us. The things we use, consume, ingest, imbibe, and inhale haunt us. Haunting is a variation of recognition and frequency that helps us navigate the world.

Especially breath is associated with ghosts. One of ghost’s many synonyms, the word “Spirit,” is defined primarily as, “the animating or vital principle in humans and animals; that which gives life to the body, in contrast to its purely material being; the life force, the breath of life.”

Ghosts are merely traces, either material or immaterial, that evoke some living presence. Any persevering impression can be ghostly. A hair in the sink. The smell lingering on a pillowcase. A shadow. An echo. A tendril of smoke hovering in thin air. That which is irresolute and unresolved; that which is sensed but cannot be grasped; that which is stubbornly persistent; that which is more than nothing, but barely; that which is discerned and cannot be ignored.

Ghosts frequent and use and practice haunting in order to cheat death and endure.

Betty Pomerleau, Half Hitch, Pangée, 29 January – 7 March 2026

Betty Pomerleau, gallery view, Pangée. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or — and this can sometimes amount to the same thing — the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”
—Mark Fisher, “Not Giving Up the Ghost”

A possible future sliding out of view is an example of a living ghost. A broken promise. A missed opportunity. Unused potential. Unrealized immanence. We mourn some and celebrate others.

Because there are infinite lost futures, we live constantly amongst their ghosts. Frayed strands and knotted threads, they accumulate like clusters of dust and periodically must be swept away.

But still, some traces remain.

Totem Électrique XIX, Salle Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026

Jean-François Laporte performs at Totem Électrique, Espace Bleue | Edifice Wilder, 29 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This rhythm is your world. It is the world as you contract it, almost in the sense in which you contract a condition, and exactly in the sense you contract a habit.”
—Brian Massumi, “Tell Me Where Your Pain Is”

The oscillations of resemblance and change that our world undergo constitute our experience of time. Think of the alternating periods of power of opposing political parties in the United States.

The modern neoliberal era began with Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House, followed by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the first Trump tenure. Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden provided a contrapuntal sense of forward momentum otherwise known as progress to these Republicans’ periodic backward-facing impulses.

Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, is the most explicit appeal to a regressive cultural impetus, promising amelioration through reversal, better living through resurrection, the ultimate haunting. The problem is that the past cannot be reintroduced into the future without fundamentally rupturing both past and future.

Similarly in Quebec, the spectre of sovereignty in 2026 summons a noxious rhythmic nostalgia to 1980 and 1995, punctuated by gestures to Réné Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Lucien Bouchard. I claim that Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s suggestions of a third referendum are less about making Quebec independent and more about resuscitating a mythic history that never came to pass, moving into the future by rewriting the past.

That these oscillations are decreasing in frequency in Quebec and increasing in the United States suggests an arrythmia in the heart of global progress.

Matthew Feyld, Blouin | Division, 30 January – 21 March 2026

Matthew Feyld, Untitled, CP-04-26, 2025/2026, Acrylic and pigment on linen over panel, 20.3 x 20.3 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Yet here’s a spot.”
—Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth

I once lived in a hundred-year-old house whose interior must have been repainted every ten or so years. In various places on the stairs, cracks and layers in the paint became visible. For instance, a pale pink gave way to whitewashed teal, and on top, a chocolate brown. Every decade was represented by a radically different choice in colour. My experience of time swelled whilst living in this house because I was constantly made aware of its history.

The house is gone now, demolished during Covid. And yet, I recall the thickness and specific order of these layers of coloured paint.

The Orchestra According to Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026

Hankyeol Yoon conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 22 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“And if you’re on a horse trick riding in the mud and rain,
Can’t expect me to watch or ask me to explain.”
—Gord Downie, “Trick Rider”

It is no secret that I was once an unrepentant drinker of alcohol and drug user. These habits I imagined constituted fundamental facets of my personality. I used alcohol and drugs to assert my selfhood in opposition to the status quo. Normal, I thought, was boring. My experience of reality unfolded parallel to the experiences and realities of sober people. These substances were undoubtedly spirits that haunted me, although it is debatable whether I was the ghost or its nightly host.

Whenever I contemplated giving up drugs and drink, I feared that I would at once lose my singular sense of character, that I would suddenly become less interesting, more uniform, less unique. ‘How will I ever be able to socialize / be creative / stand out from the crowd without intoxicants?’ I wondered to myself.

Now that some distance exists between me and those habits, I ask myself the opposite question: How was I ever able to socialize / be creative / stand out with them?◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: From left: Megan Bradley, Tiffany Le, and Jean-Michael Seminaro documenting Sonya Derviz’s Hover at Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January 2026.

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All Dressed

Infinity of Primes: in conversation with Andrea Szilasi

“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”
―Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Nature speaks in equations.”
―Charles Seife, Zero

The world appears to us as a complex system oscillating between meaning and noise, order and chaos, zero and infinity.

The field of quantum mechanics deploys numbers and language to describe the behaviour of matter at the smallest possible scale. Interestingly, the smaller the scale, the less predictable the behaviour. And yet, meaning emerges. Matter organizes into order. Existence divides and multiplies. Numbers and language render the abstract concrete.

It is these most fundamental building blocks that the artist Andrea Szilasi takes as her raw material to refashion a new vocabulary of images. I meet Szilasi at McBride Contemporain in the Belgo Building to discuss her latest exhibition, entitled Réfléchir, a collection of recent works that blur the lines between photography and collage, writing and cut-ups, science and art.

“I like that game where you say a word over and over again until you don’t recognize it anymore,” Szilasi explains. “I feel like I’m doing that with language and digits and space. I really see the letters and numbers loosening up the meaning of the images.”

Comprised of black-and-white architectural photographs from the 1960s and ‘70s, upon which Szilasi applies broken fragments of vinyl lettering and digits, Réfléchir reflects both backwards in time and projects forwards through space, in doing so, inviting a radical reinterpretation of conventional representational forms.

Gallery views of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

“There are many ways to be in the world,” Szilasi muses. “But obviously language and numbers are pretty basic. There’s a natural sense of order. The sun rises and sets every day and there’s seasons, and we time seconds and minutes and hours and years. ‘Cycles’ is a good word. Raw life is very orderly. And then, of course, it is completely chaotic. People do things to each other that don’t make sense.”

Explanation, however, is not explicitly Szilasi’s intention, preferring to let intuition guide her practice. While she is rigorous, Szilasi is not buttonholed by any traditional doctrines.

“I embrace accidents and chance,” she declares. “When I’m actually making art, nothing is conscious at all. But I consciously do that. I don’t see it in an egotistical way — that it’s my creativity. We all need this complete trust in our intuition. I see it as an active decision to follow intuition. I love dealing with positive and negative space. I think about it a lot. It’s not the most obvious thing. It’s subtle and hidden. Looking at images, they are visual configurations of lights and darks, shapes and colours, regardless of what they’re representing.”

Gallery view of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

Born and raised in Montreal, Szilasi studied French Language and Literature and Film Studies at the University of Toronto and returned to this city to pursue a degree in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. “I loved Eisenstein’s high-contrast images,” she recalls. “And I had a course on Dada and Surrealism in Cinema. It was in me when I was making my early collages — the importance of stream of consciousness as opposed to realism.”

Szilasi had her first solo exhibition in 1994 at Centre Clark. “They were collages,” she remembers, “hand-made using found images from scientific magazines.”

Szilasi got her start in the Montreal arts community as an integral part of artist-run galleries and on various local committees. “I was on the board of Articule,” she tells me. “I think Montreal is a great city for artists. But it’s getting so much more expensive for studios. People used to have huge loft spaces on the Plateau. That was super fun. I knew a lot of painters who had lofts who would ride their bikes to go to the bathroom. That seems like the past.”

In addition to her own noteworthy career, Szilasi shoulders the responsibility of a significant creative legacy. Her father, Gabor, remains among the most recognized and beloved documentary photographers in the province, working from 1959 to 1971 at the Office du film du Québec. Szilasi recalls using her dad’s contact sheets to make collages and greeting cards as a child.

“It’s a really big deal, and it’s a huge, huge influence,” Szilasi acknowledges. “I admire my father’s work, so this is a way of embracing it. I love photography. I’m just using it and physically embracing it, always, in every way. But I would never say I’m a photographer. To be considered a photographer, you need an ability to use the material, the medium, to say what you want to.”

Gallery view of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

McBride Contemporain’s Director Soad Carrier helps to frame Szilasi’s practice from a gallerist’s perspective. “She’s always been interested in wanting to go through the photograph, or under the surface,” says Carrier. “This exhibition taps into that. Even with the title, Réfléchir, there’s a direct reference to the surface of things, and light, and the way it’s refracted and moving.”

Carrier regularly visited Szilasi in her studio over the past year-and-a-half, carefully selecting works to include in the show. “You can see the interaction of the pieces together as they’re being produced,” she says. “It’s really exciting.”

Szilasi’s reluctance to be categorized, rather than conceding to her father’s fame, exposes to me a comfort in interdisciplinarity and a confidence in ambiguity. She walks us over to a series of manipulated Polaroid photographs that figure prominently into her exhibition, images that draw the viewer in with their diminutive size and surprisingly quotidian hyperrealism.

“These are from when I was in art school,” Szilasi tells me. “The actual Polaroids are from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But this past year, I made them into collages. I have other Polaroids that are finished works. But I applied some vinyl letters to these — and there’s also Letraset. I’ve been making photos more over the last few years.”

I ask Szilasi if she ever considered another profession. “No,” she says without hesitation. “But I remember thinking that before going into studio arts, it’s good to have another background in more historical, academic things. So that’s what I did.”

Gallery views of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

A sense of place manifests less in Szilasi’s visual images than it did in her father’s. She says, “I try to get beneath geography and politics.” Nonetheless, the risks she takes as an artist are indicative of an ecosystem that encourages us to measure the arts’ value differently. It is not just a game of numbers.

“Art is the first thing that gets cut in budgets,” Szilasi laments.

“I think art is so essential for people being able to notice subtleties and just listen to each other and all those things that we don’t see in politicians, or in the media. Indirectly, art does affect politics because it has to do with value systems. Even in really concrete ways, when people do drawings, you forget what you’re looking at. It gives an openness. That’s the role of art. I used to take it for granted. But now it’s something that has to be defended, politically. Art is about values. But there’s less value in the arts. Art is an outlet for everything. It builds empathy. I think about that all the time.”◼︎

Réfléchir runs through 21 February 2026 at McBride Contemporain, 372 Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Suite 414.

Cover image for NicheMTL courtesy of McBride Contemporain and the artist.

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Play Recent

King of the ‘Z’s

Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK Room 2, 16 January – 28 February 2026

Patrons visit the vernissage of Dexter Barker-Glenn’s First Water at Centre CLARK, 16 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It is all the more necessary to talk about art now that there is nothing to say about it.”
—Jean Baudrillard, “Art… Contemporary of Itself.” (2003)

In the 2016 BBC documentary film HyperNormalization, director Adam Curtis profiles the businessman and performance artist Vladislav Surkov, who between 2013 and 2020 acted as something of a mafia consigliere to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Curtis notes that Surkov’s tactics were designed to deceive and inveigle western leaders and even Russian citizens into questioning their veracity.

Surkov “will fuel conspiracy theories,” suggests Curtis in an interview with The Guardian, “but that’s not new. His particular genius has been to let people know that is what he is doing. So, whatever you see in the news: you just don’t know if it is ‘true’ or not.”

In an era characterized by an insatiable appetite for information, it is important to underline that information and truth are not commensurate.

The cynical endgame of Surkov’s strategy was to sow the seeds of confusion and engender a feeling of fragility both abroad and at home. A populace that doesn’t know what their government is doing, the logic goes, still possesses more agency than a population that does but doesn’t understand how or why. Disorientation as state policy is a more effective social control mechanism than repression by force.

Emanuel Ax Plays Beethoven, Maison Symphonique, 15 January 2025

Emanuel Ax performs with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 January 2026. ©️ Robert Torres for the OSM.

« Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible »
—Attributed to Bernard Cousin, 1968.

When François Legault this week announced his resignation as leader of the political party he founded, observers quickly pointed out that the timing of the move, but not the move itself, was the surprise. With approval ratings hovering below 25 percent — less than half of Justin Trudeau’s when he resigned as Canadian Prime Minster — Legault was widely expected to concede the race before October’s Provincial elections. But as recently as 10 January, four days before he abdicated the throne, The Montreal Gazette’s Robert Libman reported that Legault insisted that he planned to remain.

It may be a stretch to envision Legault taking a page from Surkov’s playbook. Likely it was more Legault himself and not the general public of Quebec that was unsure of his next moves. But the results are the same. Saying one thing and doing the exact opposite disorients us and undermines public trust in our leaders and institutions. It also allows Legault himself to spin the narrative around his legacy in his favour.

Rather than accept a democratic loss, Legault has engineered a despotic sacrifice, falling on his proverbial sword, a victim rather than the perpetrator of circumstance. History favours the winners. But it also looks more generously upon those who didn’t lose.

Paul Nadeau, Like You, 5455 av. De Gaspé, 16-18 January 2026

Gallery view of Paul Nadeau’s Like You at 5455 av. De Gaspé. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It is precisely when nature philosophy becomes politically useful that it ceases to be itself.”
—Brian Massumi, “Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism.”

The 1982 cult comedy short entitled King of the ‘Z’s, written and directed by NYU students Karl Tiedemann and Stephen Winer and starring Calvert “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” DeForest, who would all go on to work for the late night talk show host David Letterman, was a mockumentary predating Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap that depicted Vespucci Pictures, a fictious Hollywood movie studio that succeeded in making the best worst movies. In the tradition of The Producers, Vespucci turned a profit from making flops. Some of the film’s classic adages include, “Save a buck, make a buck,” and “Where money is king and art is no object.”

There is perverse virtue in setting a goal to fail and achieving it.

Quinton Barnes with Fiver, Casa del Popolo, 10 January 2026

Quinton Barnes performs at Casa del Pololo 10 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It matters less to powerful actors who is really in charge than to be reassured that power always is. Political leaders are like gun parts — interchangeable and infinitely replicable and deadly when assembled.

Not Conformed: Four Women Carving Time, SBC Gallery, 15 January – 7 March 2026

Gallery view of Antonietta Grassi’s Modulations at SBC Gallery, 15 January 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Nothing haunts this eternal instant, no ghosts rattle their chains.”
—Grafton Tanner, Foreverism

The mood of a post-modernity governed by machines is several orders beyond the dystopian sense that no alternative exists to the neoliberal socioeconomic order. Capitalist realism has given way to capitalist surrealism, capitalist horror, capitalist absurdity, capitalist tragedy, and paint-by-numbers-capitalism, among other subdivisions of genre.

The notion that collective control trumps individual intervention seems quaint in today’s world where we have acknowledged that Artificial Intelligence has assumed command of vast and sweeping decision-making processes. A sensation of powerlessness ensues as we witness the human agents to whom we have entrusted power handing what remains over to fad gadgets.

This has happened before. In 1940, IBM, an American company that ostensibly opposed the fascist rise taking place across Europe, established a subsidiary in Holland called Watson Bedrijfsmachine Maatschappij. In 1941, IBM in America sent Holland 132 million punch cards. In a Hollerith facility, those cards were punched and sorted, effectively condemning Dutch Jews to deportation, and ultimately, for extermination. The subsidiary’s expenditures, according to IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black, amounted to $522,709.03, nearly $11.5 million in today’s dollars, and was merged into the company’s New York ledger under the heading of “Other.”

The contemporary opening of A.I. to military applications reiterates this history and is the subject of a new book by Nick Srnicek called Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI. “Our period is characterized by competing hegemonic visions between a neoliberal globalization on the one hand and Manichean visions of the global order on the other hand,” writes Srnicek, “and we are in desperate need of alternatives.”

However, our imaginings of what those alternatives might look like have been systematically suppressed — not least by a retreat into immersive entertainment. It is easier to imagine the finnisage than the end of capitalism.

The bureaucratic banality of genocide obscures its shock value. But its rebranding as art aestheticizes it.◼︎

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Cover image: Gallery view, Dexter Barker-Glenn, First Water, Centre CLARK.

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All Dressed

Into The Abyss: in conversation with Andréanne Godin

Drying atop a desk in the artist Andréanne Godin’s studio on Rue Chabanel are three identical garden trowels, replicas fashioned in matte grey clay.

The original object, a utilitarian version with silver metallic blade and an orange and black handle, is placed nearby, apparently for comparison. These facsimiles of an everyday tool one uses to dig into the earth are indicative of Godin’s artistic process, one moored by a preoccupation with revealing what exists below the surface.

Dressed in dark Levis denims and a pair of grey sneakers, Godin has invited me round for a studio visit, and a candid and sprawling conversation. She has made us a pot of black tea which she serves with homemade candied ginger and spoonfuls of honey.

“I thought maybe, I understood maybe.”

Godin will spend the next two months as artist-in-residence at Fondation Molinari’s central gallery to create works intended to “resonate with those in the Foundation’s collections,” according to the press release, culminating in a springtime exhibition opening 12 March 2026.

“I thought maybe, I understood maybe,” Godin says hesitantly when I ask her what will come of the residency. “I want to create monochromes that will be big enough to occupy your whole vision when you stand at a certain distance from them. I don’t know if that’s what I’m going to be able to do. But that’s what I want to do.”

At a time when artists of all stripes appear obsessed with the concept of “immersion,” here is one that literally plunges headlong into her work. In the fall of 2024, Godin learned how to freedive and became interested in the ways that we perceive colour while submerged underwater.

Her most recent exhibition entitled 48.312403, -78.048948, presented late last year at Galerie Nicolas Robert, produced among other items a series of wild clay pastel sticks that Godin gathered while freediving at lakes within Quebec’s Abitibi region. She shows me several wooden pallets that were specially constructed to display the pastels, and a handmade chart of colour samples with meticulous marginal notes.

“I could just think that I was going to be surrounded by a colour that you won’t really be able to see.”

“I never really dove in a lake before with my eyes open,” Godin reveals. “It’s an experience that must be very close to meditation. I could just think that I was going to be surrounded by a colour that you won’t really be able to see. But you’re going to see something. I was thinking of certain pieces of Molinari, like Les Trapèze. They’re not stripes. But there’s something organized on the space.”

Godin exhaustively catalogued every detail of what she saw at various depths with microtonal shades of colour that she gleaned from those dives. She began by testing different ways of layering and saturating the colours on paper, creating a shimmering and vibrational optical effect.

“In red it works less,” she explains. “In yellow, I feel that it really works well.” Godin pulls out a large sketchpad and thumbs through it. “I’m going to start by filling these 30 pages with monochromes created out of different layers of all these different colours,” she tells me.

“I feel like everything’s up in the air.”

Godin, 41, grew up in Val-d’Or and moved to Montreal in 2007, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in Fibres at Concordia University. “The first time I went in an art museum, I was 17,” she says. “I was in CEGEP. But I had already decided that that’s what I wanted to do. I remember being a kid, being five, and wanting to be an artist. The only thing I liked to do was drawing.”

The prestigious Galerie Nicolas Robert has presented Godin’s work for more than a decade, and she has exhibited a number of times there, as well as at Axenéo7 in Gatineau, and Oboro in Montreal, among others. She has held local and international residencies previously, most notably at the Christoph Merian Foundation artist’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, in 2017, and at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, the previous year.

This past December, Godin was appointed Assistant Professor in the discipline of Image Experimentation at Université Laval, so throughout the next season, she will split her time between a new teaching job and her research-creation residency at Fondation Molinari. “I feel like you get back the energy you put out into the universe, and maybe I put out a little too much energy,” she laughs. “I feel like everything’s up in the air.”

We talk at length about her earliest transcendent encounters, those which started Godin on the path to her current artistic practice. “My youth was very related to enjoying nature,” she says. “I think that’s why now in my work it’s so related to outdoor experiences. Even for this project at Molinari, when I thought about my relationship to landscape, it’s always been the forest.”

Et là, nous marchâmes… | And there, we walked…, 2014-2015, (Detail), Porcelain, sculpted natural graphite, wall drawing, Variable dimensions. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Godin recalls vivid childhood memories of blueberry-picking excursions with her father — memories that translated into a sculptural installation called And There, We Walked…, which she exhibited at Nicolas Robert in 2015. The work consists of a porcelain basket filled with blueberries fashioned from natural graphite. The tiny graphite blueberry sculptures become tools in the exhibition to create immense, impressionistic wall drawings.

“I love sculpture,” says Godin, showing me the basket, still half-full of shiny black blueberries. “But I was just thinking, ‘man, I don’t know where to put these things.’ Whenever I make sculptures, they’re usually really small, because I don’t want to have to store them. I love that drawings don’t take up a lot of space, but also somehow take up space,” she says, unfurling a thick paper scroll containing one of the drawings. Her studio transforms into a makeshift art exhibition strewn with random examples from her vast oeuvre.

“I was always working in black and white and then I started to work with monochromes. So, for me, it was just an easy transition. One colour. It was the same thing as working in black and white, even if it was all blue or all red. When you teach it, you have to understand colour at another level. Trying to figure out ways of communicating colour, or impressions, or feelings that I had when I was diving, it’s a very humbling experience. It feels like being in the service of nature.”

Nature, I propose to Godin, is something like the opposite of art: objects self-organize naturally, in contrast to being organized with effort by an artist’s intelligence and intuition.

“I do think that nature organizes things in a way that somehow, if you’re sensitive, or if you stop for a second and look at how it organizes things, can teach you so much about how to organize things in a gallery. What is the relationship with your body as you approach this thing?”

“This idea of being surrounded and touched by colour is different than the idea of seeing it.”

In The World of Perception, the book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he writes that, “the things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation […] people’s tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours, or the places where they like to go for walks.”

Evidently, a sustained contemplation of perception colours every object that Godin makes — from sculpture, to drawing, to candied ginger. The ways that Godin senses and reflects and reorganizes the objects in her world reveal what is unseen beneath our own surfaces, just as the shades of clay she trowels from lake beds expose the earth’s intrinsic character. Nonetheless, it is the whimsical hue of experience that seems to motivate her most.

“I’ve always loved closing your eyes and being in the sun and seeing that red,” she muses. “Feeling that you’re embraced. And at night, seeing all of the sparkles when you close your eyes. That’s also fun. This idea of being surrounded and touched by colour is different than the idea of seeing it. It feels like you can touch it somehow.”◼︎

Andréanne Godin is Fondation Molinari’s 2026 Artist-in-Residence.

Cover image: 48.312403, -78.048948, Detail. All images photographed for NicheMTL.

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