Category Archives: All Dressed

NicheMTL’s style and fashion column from Montreal and beyond.

All Dressed

Throwing Shapes: in conversation with Mathieu Arsenault

“’In the beginning was the Word …’ provokes one to ask, where was the image?”
—Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning”

The typically tedious visual experience of attending an electronic music performance produces a perennial problem for audiences: what to do with one’s eyes.

For some reason, we find guitarists and drummers, keyboardists and vocalists striking poses and pulling faces more interesting to look at than producers and DJs twiddling knobs and riding faders.

Various contemporary artists have attempted to address this problem more or less spectacularly. Amon Tobin plays from within a three-dimensional cityscape. Tim Hecker disappears into a cloud of fluorescent fog. Autechre turn the lights off entirely. Most pedestrian musicians usually just project some sort of screensaver-like images to distract spectators from the fact that the cake is already baked in the proverbial oven.

But not Seulement. The pseudonym of the Montreal-based Mathieu Arsenault, Seulement embellishes his live modular synthesizer sets by cutting shapes — quite literally.

While Arsenault is busy behind a bank of machines, doing whatever it is that he does, hypnotic geometric patterns pulse and flicker away on a large screen, assailing his audience’s retinas with abstract, rapid-fire, stop-motion animation that simultaneously casts him in a glowing and dramatic silhouette. The solution is seizure-inducing and unsettling and ultimately satisfying.

“The strobing effect is not digital,” Arsenault explains to me over coffee on a recent Thursday afternoon. “It’s made by hand. So, let’s say I move a triangle. I move an actual cardboard cutout triangle on a light tablet. And then I use that animation as a guide to make the same thing but with another triangle shaped hole, the same size. And then I alternate them. So, the positive/negative flickering effect is made by hand.”

I am fascinated to learn about Arsenault’s handcrafted process in producing these captivating images, having been impressed by his audiovisual show, entitled Bricolage Architecture, presented in late March at one of Ateliers Belleville’s renowned ECHOS nights.

Young stars are born in explosions of light. And there was a collective sense that evening that we were all witnessing some extraordinary interstellar supernova.

Seulement performs at Ateliers Belleville 27 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In person, Arsenault, 42, has an unassuming, unpretentious vibe, shy and polite amongst the caffeinated braggadocio of Caffè Italia’s regular crowd. Still, he adopts a proper Rockstar stance on stage, to the approval of his growing legion of admirers.

It may be that his homespun visuals relieve the pressure of being publicly scrutinized. Nonetheless, Arsenault projects a measured conviction in his ideas and work both as a musician and visual artist, neither under- nor overconfident, but refreshingly commensurate with his manifold talents.

“I’m really happy about this show,” he beams. “It’s a new direction for me. It’s the first time I use video for a show. It’s also the first time I don’t sing on stage. The previous show I toured (for the album EX PO) instead was synchronized with lights and had more vocal performance elements. But the more instrumental music of Bricolage Architecture is going to be on my next record. It’s the new chapter. I’m really excited about it. If it’s more exciting for me, it’s more exciting for the people listening.”

The music side of Arsenault’s routine consists of syncopated analogue synthesizer oscillations constructed with a Pop compositional sensibility. “They are definitely songs,” says Arsenault.

“For this project, I wanted to explore electronic music without having to rely on my voice as the main focus. It was a challenge for me because all I ever did was write songs. Even though I don’t sing on top of it, they’re still songs. That’s how I structure music in my head.”

Person sitting on stone steps wearing a red denim jacket and black leggings, looking thoughtfully to the side, with a storefront in the background.
“We project perfection on machine-made things. And in opposition, we consider the body imperfect.” Mathieu Arsenault photographed for NicheMTL.

Arsenault grew up on Montreal’s South Shore, drawing comics and listening predominantly to metal before drifting in his late teens towards electronic music. He played in a band called Technical Kidman which combined live and preprogrammed elements that provide an early clue to his solo work.

“It was kind of a weird name for the band,” he tells me, “because it sounds funny, but the music was so not funny. It’s hard to perform electronic music. It’s not ready out-of-the-box. With that band, we always wanted to avoid using a click. We had a very elastic feel.”

The “extra-dimensional” Montreal record label Mothland booked Technical Kidman for their first Distorsion Festival, and Arsenault has been associated with that collective ever since. He cites three other pivotal moments that guided him on his current trajectory.

“I saw Radiohead when they performed the Kid A / Amnesiac tour,” he recalls. “And that’s when I realized that maybe I didn’t want to make metal music. And after that, it’s when I listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I bought Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. I was 18 or 19 years old and I was like, ‘oh, I didn’t know you could make music like that.’ I had never heard anything like that. And then a bit later I saw Ryoji Ikeda perform at Elektra. At that moment, my band was making music and touring a bit. But when I saw that, I remember telling myself, ‘Right now, I’m not doing this kind of stuff. But one day, I want to do these kinds of audiovisual performances.’”

Arsenault’s act will please fans of Tony Conrad and Alessandro Cortini, Paul Sharits and Caterina Barbieri. The rub is that interesting imagery doesn’t need music, and interesting music doesn’t need imagery.

Audiovisual pieces can sometimes come off a bit like an everything sandwich where more is not necessarily better. But Seulement is more like a marriage of two equivalent and complementary artforms that could easily stand on their own but strengthen each other by virtue of their merger.

If there appears to be an academic angle to Arsenault’s work, that is because he is currently enrolled in the doctoral programme in Digital Music at Université de Montréal. “Bricolage Architecture is actually my master’s thesis,” he confesses.

“To me, the theory always comes as I make the work. The work rarely comes from a theoretical or conceptual place. Even though I really like conceptual work, it’s not what I do. The conceptual aspect of the work will always reveal itself. But I come from a more Rock music background. I make music in a very intuitive way. I always try to make something that makes me feel something. That’s the only guideline I have.”

Analogous to Arsenault’s craftwork cutout animation, he encourages and embraces defects and blemishes in his sonic production. “It’s bodily induced noise,” he explains.

“Instead of using oscillators as the basic material of the music I make, I use loops of my voice. And loops of flute — recorder flute. I’m not a good flute player. So, it’s very irregular. Even though I try my best to sing perfectly or play flute perfectly, it will never be as regular as oscillators.”

The post-digital tendencies in Arsenault’s output hint at glitch aesthetics and the fallibility of machines in an era when we expect functional seamlessness from our interfaces.

“I’ve performed the work in different parts of the world, and some people are touched by it,” Arsenault muses, “and they’re surprised that they’re touched by it. If you think about it on paper, it doesn’t seem like something very touching. It’s geometric shapes that flicker with synthy music. But I think because it’s all assembled by hand, it shows a certain vulnerable aspect. The fact that I try my best to emulate what the machine can do, and fail, is something that is very tragic. To me, it speaks to the search for perfection. I strive for — and a lot of people are trying to be — perfect. And this project is a way to cope that I cannot make a perfect work.”

What constitutes perfection for you, I ask?

“That’s a good question,” Arsenault replies. “I don’t know. Perhaps imperfection is perfection.”◼︎

Seulement performs Bricolage Architecture 17 April 2026 at CIRMMT’s Multimedia Room, 2nd floor, Elizabeth Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke O.

Cover image: Mathieu Arsenault photographed for NicheMTL.

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Mysterious Skin: in conversation with Genève-Florence

“The mask is the face.” —Susan Sontag, “On Style”

“Taste is constant; style varies from season to season.” —Bill Cunningham, “On Taste”

Fashion implies an accelerated mode of temporality.

Microtrends dominate social media nowadays — and even the media themselves are subject to fashion’s fickle whims. What is hot now seems to cool all the more rapidly as a result of the timeline’s impetuous, algorithmic turnover. Today, tomorrow more quickly becomes yesterday.

“Time keeps going, keeps going,” says the designer and textile artist Genève-Florence. “You try to catch up to it.”

A person dressed in a dark outfit is organizing or retrieving items from a wooden crate in a creative workspace, surrounded by cardboard boxes and a bulletin board with sketches and fabric samples.
Genève-Florence photographed for NicheMTL.

Florence is giving me a guided tour, circling a third-floor studio space in the Chabanel district that serves as the production and design headquarters for their eponymous fashion label, showing me a series of garments and objects that at once designate this specific cultural moment and appear timeless. Florence’s creations embrace a post-modern gothic look in intricately rendered clothing that is both rugged and delicate, rough and refined.

Material is strewn everywhere in assemblages categorized by composition. A wall of thread. A rusty metallic chain. Wooden shoe formers. Tools arranged by size and purpose. And fabric — lots of fabric.

Among Florence’s most preferred fabrics is leather, bolts and patches of which are rolled up and collected in several banker’s boxes on the floor. “When they kill the animal, there are often scars and discoloration,” Florence says, handing me samples of various shades of hides. “But these, they just keep the skin whole. The cows are very well treated. They don’t have a lot of scars from bugs and scratching.”

Spools of various colored sewing thread arranged on a wooden rack.
“People might not consider me an artist.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I was introduced to Florence’s work through the artist Tomas Dessureault and was instantly enamoured with its techniques and textures. Pleated folds and braided laces embellish skirts, blouses, handbags, notebooks, and other articles that are more-or-less wearable or functional, but also formally appealing as pieces that would look equally at home in an art gallery.

“People might not consider me an artist,” Florence admits, preferring the title “craftsperson.” “Maybe it’s just me thinking that. But I want to just do a proper vernissage one day. I love spending time around people who are artists and passionate about what they’re doing, passionate about craft. What I’m doing is less about fashion and more about craftsmanship. I like to do everything. But I’m trying not to exhaust myself. You can’t do everything. I’m trying to figure out what to give, what to take, what I’m willing to give up, or what to not give away.”

A gray leather shoulder bag hanging on a clothing rack with several black garments and wooden hangers in the background.
“I grew up around a lot of clothes, but not in a glamorous fashion designer way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Florence, 23, is a rare breed, Franco-Albertan, born and raised speaking French in the Bonnie Doon neighbourhood of Edmonton, one of Canada’s unlikeliest bastions for Francophone culture. “My grandmother is from Brittany in the north of France and my grandfather is Quebecois,” Florence informs me. “On my dad’s side, my grandfather is Italian and my grandmother is French Albertan. People are always surprised when I tell them I’m French-Canadian but from Alberta. People don’t even know we exist.”

Florence’s interest in fashion manifested in drawings of clothing at around eight years of age and flourished after attending a community youth sewing camp. “After that, I was obsessed,” says Florence.

“My mom bought me a super-cheap $50 Brother sewing machine — basically, a toy from Walmart. I would go thrifting with my grandmother. I would buy clothes and bedsheets and make stuff with that for myself and my friends. Outside of school, that’s all I would do. My great-grandmother was a talented seamstress and embroidery and textile maker. I grew up around a lot of clothes, but not in a glamorous fashion designer way. It was purely about making stuff and being around objects that carried a lot of value for the people around me. Seeing that value,” Florence recalls, “it was important to preserve that.”

There is an impression of weighty history to each object that emerges from Florence’s workshop. Although they are pieces of high fashion, they betray a sense of slow time, often involving significantly more labour than their prices reflect. Still, exchange value is not the point.

“The connection of the hands to something greater than yourself.” Photographs for NicheMTL.

“I always had a very busy mind,” Florence reveals. “But whenever I would make things with my hands, it would be like peace. It would calm me down. I felt like there was purpose. Even if it took a long time to make something, the time you spend with the objects, you create a bond with them. I do like making ready-to-wear clothing. I like the process of making it. But it’s not my end goal. It’s just for the experience of making it. Becoming. That’s the purpose of it.”

During our visit, I gradually grow aware of the music Florence is listening to and inquire what it is. “It’s Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou,” she says, an Ethiopian mystic who died in 2023 at the age of 99. Florence, raised in a strict Catholic tradition, finds inspiration in the divine qualities of music, and specifically in Emahoy’s compositions, she says.

“It’s very spiritual music,” Florence explains, “and when I’m working, it feels very spiritual to me. The act of making with my hands, all my work is based on ritual and repetition. The connection of the hands to something greater than yourself. All the pleating I do is stuff that is repetitive and very monotonous. But when you’re doing repetitive things, you lose yourself in it. I’m not religious by nature. But things are not always based on reason. I believe in human emotion and the greater knowledge of ancestral history and the weight of everything around you. Everything has a place.” Florence pauses for a moment, examining the room. “I also like silence. I work in pure silence sometimes, with no distractions.”

The pieces that Florence creates each possess a soul, almost as if they were living manifestations, ritual magic made flesh. I ask about a blistered chair that commands attention in the center of the room.

A vintage chair with a textured burgundy seat and backrest, supported by a sleek chrome frame, positioned on a decorative rug.
Genève-Florence, The Flood. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I call this chair ‘The Flood,’” Florence laughs. “It’s chemically treated. It’s a chemical reaction that disintegrates the leather and makes it shrink and dehydrate itself, the parts that are big and bubbly. To me, this chair is the opposite of control. I splatter the liquid and then it does what it wants. The thing with craft that I love so much is that it’s very human. It’s the most human. That’s how we evolved to where we are, using tools, and using what’s around us to build things and create a world around us. That’s what feels spiritual to me.”

Spirituality, focus, and devotion clearly characterize Florence’s designs and represent more than fashion, style, or taste. They represent the subjective experience of passing time — time in an age in which time itself feels unmoored. Florence speaks to the human condition and expresses an ageless wisdom that is surprising for such a young artist, and unheard of in the fashion world that is predominantly preoccupied with precisely defining trendiness.

“All my friends call me grandfather,” Florence says. “I always love old things, and I love being around older people. I like peace and quiet and when things are slow. I like to take time.”◼︎

Cover image: Detail of handbag designed by Genève-Florence. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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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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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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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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All Dressed

Tool For Love: in conversation with Alain Lefèvre

The function of an object varies depending upon the intention of its user.

Love letters and hate mail are written on the same brand of laptop. We can harness a nuclear reaction to generate abundant electricity or destroy an entire city.

Pianos are complex devices designed to resound delightfully, to produce harmonies that please their listeners. Still, it takes the right kind of skill — enlightened hands — to accomplish this. A piano without a player is like a lightbulb without a socket. It can’t shine on its own.

Pianos belong to a special category of machine. Neither tools nor toys, pianos simultaneously exhibit characteristics of both. When a piano key is played, a hammer strikes a string. And hammers are certainly considered tools. But we do not say that a pianist works the piano. Rather, we say that musicians play their instruments. Hammering out a tune suggests the jouissance of amusement.

Great artists tend to give the impression of effortlessness. Concealing the immense labour necessary to create outstanding works of art is part of the artist’s job. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the Montreal-based pianist Alain Lefèvre enjoys his work — and takes playing very seriously.

“I need to create because it helps me to go through all I see,” Lefèvre tells me.

Lefèvre has called from Greece where he has just completed a tour and will remain throughout the winter to map out a new recording. A gifted raconteur as well as a virtuoso musician, he cycles through stories that always suggest some moral lesson, some higher meaning to be learned. “I believe,” he insists, “that consolation is something that we all need.”

Lefèvre is referring at once to music as a conciliatory force and to the title of his most recent album, Consolation, his eighth collection of original compositions released earlier in the year via the Warner Classics imprint. Arriving amidst a resurgence of interest in Post-Classical pianists, fuelled locally by the likes of Alexandra Stréliski and Jean-Michel Blais, and in a moment of unprecedented political and economic uncertainty, it couldn’t have come at a better time. “I feel like I need to be consoled myself,” Lefèvre laughs.

Yet, every joke contains a kernel of truth. This album of melancholy and widescreen cinematic solo piano pieces reveals a musician offering a gift to his audience that he secretly needs himself.

“After the pandemic, all of us thought that the nightmare was finished,” Lefèvre explains. “But we woke up and saw all this war, all this hatred. And one day, I came back from Quebec City, and I saw all those tents along Notre-Dame and all the homelessness. I imagined the suffering. I do remember, this was an inspiration. Consolation was born out of that.”

Lefèvre is one of Montreal’s most accomplished musicians, having worked with prestigious labels like Koch, Analekta, and now Warner Classics. He is the recipient of numerous honours including the Order of Canada, the Order of Quebec, a Juno, an Opus, and ten Felix awards recognizing his immense contribution to performing arts in the province. But he exhibits a humility that betrays an artist only now becoming comfortable with his successes.

“When you spend your entire life working back to Chopin, to Brahms, to Rameau, the vision you have of your own composition, unless you’re a megalomaniac, is very cruel because you cannot say to yourself, ‘wow, I’m a great composer.’ I never gave myself an inch,” he discloses.

Lefévre’s family immigrated to Montreal from Poitiers in 1967. “My parents were dreamers,” he says. “They were French people who thought Quebec was something very new, very fantastic.”

His first piano recital was at the age of five, where he won the top prize that included a recording of Glenn Gould playing Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto. “I would say that after listening to this recording, I was even more sure that this is what I wanted to do, to become a pianist,” Lefèvre explains. “I think that when I listened to this concerto, I was starting to have music in my head that was not Beethoven, that was my own composition. So, I was starting to compose already at seven or eight years old.”

Lefèvre has lived in Montreal ever since, touring in more than 50 countries and playing concerts in hundreds of cities worldwide. “To be honest, I don’t like winter. But I do not like Florida either. So, I spend a couple of months every winter in Greece. But I am a proud taxpayer in Quebec.”

I became aware of Lefèvre’s work by way of his classic 1999 album entitled Cadenza, a litany of Romantic piano hits including Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” Erik Satie’s “Première Gymnopédie,” and Beethoven’s “Sonata no 8, opus 13,” which has become the definitive Canadian recording of these pieces.

However, as Lefèvre tells me, the album almost didn’t happen.

“Cadenza was done with a lot of respect,” he recalls, “for the compositions, for the tempi. I didn’t want to do a corny recording. So, the deal was, you find someone to produce you. And the CBC produced the Cadenza recording. And after, you send the master tape to your label, which was Koch, and Koch prints it. That was the deal. And I sent the master tape to Koch and got no news from them. So finally, I called and I said, ‘hello, how are you? Did you receive the master tape?’ And then I hear this bonk. And the artistic director said to me, ‘you know what that noise is?’ And I said, ‘no.’ And she said, ‘it’s me putting your master tape in the garbage.’ And to be honest, I hung up the phone and I started to cry. Because I’m stupid. I’m too sensitive. And I thought and I thought, and I came back to CBC and told them that Koch doesn’t want to put out the CD, and they immediately said, ‘we’ll take it, we’ll make it.’ And since, Cadenza has become quite a big success. But Koch disappeared. We always believe that the drama is what we’re going through at the moment. We never see the big picture.”

“Artists have a voice. But our voice needs to be a tool for love.” © Simon Fowler / Warner Classics

Lefèvre possesses a strong sense of social responsibility and understands the inherent affective power of music. “It’s about humanity. It’s about love. It’s about forgiveness. It’s about tolerance. All of those things are the most important,” he claims. “We saw before the last U.S. election all those artists coming against the president. This is not the way for me. In our society today, the disease is hatred. Artists have a voice. But our voice needs to be a tool for love.”

Nevertheless, Lefèvre has strong words for what he sees is the deplorable state of this city. Specifically, the Old Brewery Mission in Old Montreal, for which he is planning a Gala benefit concert in 2027, is a cause near and dear to Lefèvre’s heart.

“I’m not pessimistic,” he tells me. “But I’m not optimistic. There’s something wrong somewhere. There is no way I could accept to see the poverty I see in Montreal. There is no excuse. This is not the Montreal I know. This is not the Montreal we fought for. This is not the dream we had. When you are in the street, and I saw what I saw. I’ve worked in prisons. I know misery. But what I’ve seen for the last few years, it’s disgusting. Finally, the administration of Montreal, the government, they don’t care. They say they have programmes. They say they have solutions. But where is the result? This is why I put my energy into music. In a city like ours, to see what we see, it doesn’t make sense. We should do better. Especially us Canadians, we have been raised thinking that democracy is forever, that we will never lose it. And it’s a false conception. Democracy is very fragile and we can lose it easily.”

Despite these harsh indictments, Lefèvre seems to have faith in the resilient potential of this city, itself a complex machine capable of darkness and light.

“I’m still in love with Montreal,” he admits.

“I still believe that this city could be a major light. Montreal has a conception of tolerance that is quite amazing. But politicians are so afraid of making decisions. And I hope that we will have people who love Montreal who make decisions. Something is special about Montreal for me.”◼︎

Consolation is out now via Warner Classics.

Cover image: © Caroline Bergeron

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All Dressed

Last City Standing: in conversation with Natalia Yanchak

At times it appears unclear whether Montreal is under constant construction or endless demolition. Were an extraterrestrial to visit from some faraway galaxy, they might be forgiven for thinking that municipal powers are purposely hastening Montreal’s destruction, cobblestone by cobblestone. There are only three things to be sure of in this city: death, taxes, and orange cones.

As I speak over speakerphone with the musician and core member of The Dears, Natalia Yanchak, infernal beeping and pounding from some kind of heavy machinery resounds just outside my apartment window. I feel obliged to apologize for the noise.

“What? Construction in Montreal?” Yanchak exclaims, dripping with ironic wit.

It is immediately apparent that we are from the same planet.

13 months ago, I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc for a POP Montreal-affiliated double bill that The Dears played with fellow Indie Rock royalty, Stars.

Commemorating the double-digit anniversary of No Cities Left, Yanchak, life partner and songwriter Murray Lightburn, and the rest of the band in an extended form performed their most recognizable album in a way that transcended reminiscence and vaulted the gig into mythical territory. It was simultaneous haunting and exorcism.

Now, The Dears have returned with their ninth studio album, Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! — a title borrowed from a spontaneous moment onstage last September when Lightburn and company encouraged the crowd to chant those words along with them. Say it thrice and make it so.

I don’t generally go in for audience participation. But my voice was among the chorus that night, if only because it can’t possibly hurt to utter something true, in unison, when asked politely. It wasn’t compulsory. But it nonetheless felt necessary.

“It was really a beautiful moment,” Yanchak recalls. “For us, we were very grateful to do that, to be able to be there with our friends, and fans, and family, and it just became kind of a mantra: Life is beautiful, life is beautiful, life is beautiful.”

It is precisely this sort of earnestness that has over the years attracted listeners to The Dears and sparked some sneering criticism. The hipster taste-making website Pitchfork in 2003 called them “likeably pretentious;” The Guardian defined their vibe as a “pathological quest for drama;” and NME said they could be “wincingly sentimental.”

Today, though, with nothing left to prove, and having outlasted a generation of detractors, the band is finally allowed to own their endearing sensitivity — with song names like “Babe, We’ll Find a Way” and “This Is How We Make our Dreams Come True.” Emotional maturity simply doesn’t get more unabashed than that. Yanchak is acutely aware of the tropes.

“Everyone has ups and downs,” she muses. “Life is always changing. Everything is always changing. The people around you are changing. You are changing. You are getting older. The people around you are getting older. Or they’re passing away. Or they’re never talking to you again. Or there’s new people coming into your life. It never stops. I think there is a very strong theme on this album, definitely, of that. But also, of inviting people to acknowledge that, to look at their own lives. Great things are going to happen, and terrible things are going to happen. But at the end of the day, your life is valuable. It’s challenging, but that’s part of being a human in modern society.”

A band poses for a promotional photo, showcasing five members with diverse styles, sitting and standing in a brightly lit room with a blue door.
“It’s important to be grounded in the now.” The Dears photographed by Richmond Lam.

Born in Toronto, Yanchak relocated to Montreal in the mid-1990s to attend Concordia University, and to get serious about musicmaking. She played in bands in high school, she says, and “messed around” as a teenager. “I did take some piano lessons,” Yanchak concedes. “But I was never very good at anything. And I still feel very humbled when I’m onstage with my bandmates. I can play. But I’m probably the worst musician on the stage.”

Yanchak’s early musical tastes were steeped in disparate genres and reflect diverse influences. “My dad when we were in the car would either have the radio on the Country & Western station or the Oldies station. And my mom listened to this artist called Ottmar Liebert. He’s German, although it’s like Spanish-style acoustic guitar. Extremely ‘90s. That, and also that Enya album.”

We talk at some length about the 1990s as a high watermark when musical silos started to fall and scenes began to cross-pollinate. “At that time,” Yanchak remembers, “I really got into Björk. I was a Björk superfan. I needed to know everything about Björk. So, I bought that Sugarcubes album, Life’s Too Good. When she released her first solo album, there were a lot of dudes making music. And then Björk came on the scene. How could she not be this influential kind of goddess? That was so huge at that time.”

While Lightburn remains the band’s principal composer, all of these ingredients have filtered into Yanchak’s contribution constructing The Dears’ catalogue. “We’re influenced by a lot of super random things ranging from Neoclassical to Jazz to Soul to Glam Rock — so many things,” she says.

Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! captures shades of Shoegaze and Electro but remains reassuringly close to the melancholic Britpop DNA that defined the band throughout their career. It is not, however, overly saccharine or nostalgic.

“Philosophically, memory is important,” Yanchak explains, “but regret is not important. Oftentimes, nostalgia can be coupled with emotions of triumph or regret. ‘What if I had done things differently, or what if things had happened this way, or that way?’ For me, nostalgia is superfluous in a way. Nostalgia is just a point of reference. It’s important to be grounded in the now.”

A live performance featuring a band on stage, with a female musician playing a keyboard and two male musicians, one singing and playing tambourine while the other plays guitar, illuminated by blue stage lighting.
“Great things are going to happen, and terrible things are going to happen. But at the end of the day, your life is valuable.” The Dears photographed for NicheMTL.

On both micro and macro levels, the world is a very different place now than it was when Yanchak embarked upon her journey as an artist. North America is like another republic. Montreal is an alien metropolis that has caught up with the capitalistic impulses of other international cities.

“I don’t know if anywhere is a viable place to be an artist anymore. But I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else in Canada,” Yanchak concedes, as the jackhammers echo outside.

She and Lightburn, romantic as well as creative partners, have managed to navigate their relationship in a climate that seems to demand accelerated turnover, perpetual novelty, the archetypal rise-and-fall narrative. The Dears may have faltered, but they have resisted annihilation.

“I think artists do feel a responsibility to help and to guide people,” says Yanchak. “Art inspires people by its very nature. And it compels people to be emotionally connected. That emotional connection can mean so many different things. It’s not religious. It’s not organized religion. But it’s spiritual in its own way. And I think that that responsibility is just implied within creative people. Art, if it is successful, will speak to people in all kinds of different ways. It’s an inherent awareness. Especially after being an artist for 20-plus years, there’s an awareness that there is a power there — a power to communicate with people and connect with people.”

“What,” she asks rhetorically, “do you want to do with that power?”◼︎

Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! is released 7 November 2025 via Outside Music.

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