Category Archives: All Dressed

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

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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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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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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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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This Continuous Spectrum: in conversation with Jessica Moss

On 20 July 2024, the violinist Jessica Moss was set to perform an intimate gig at Hotel2Tango, the storied recording studio in Montreal’s Mile End district. It was a glorious summer’s day as I walked westward from the Rosemont Metro station. A short burst of afternoon rain gave way to an evening sunset which bathed the iconic 1 Van Horne building in a brilliant golden light.

I was early, so I stopped at the public gardens installed along the south side of the Van Horne overpass. Busy bees pollinated the wildflowers and a gentle stream of traffic flowed over the bridge. I turned around and was suddenly struck by a vivid double rainbow that spanned the entire horizon.

The rainbow, in addition to adorning flags symbolizing diversity and inclusivity, is also a symbol of God’s promise to mankind to never again attempt to destroy us.

“I do set my bow in the cloud,” it is written in Genesis 9:13, “and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” What an auspicious sign, I thought, to observe in advance of a musician whose instrument resounds, literally, by drawing a bow against its strings.

“In my mind, I don’t play an acoustic instrument,” Moss informs me 15 months later as we chat over the phone one recent morning. “I play violin and pedals. The combination is the instrument.” Behold, to adapt a phrase from R. Murray Schafer, the new orchestra.

Moss has called me from her studio in the Atlas Building on Jean Talon, a collaborative loft called Error 403 which she shares with a community of artists and musicians. Her portion of the space is crammed to the rafters with trinkets and collected curios: plastic horses and ceramic birds and doll heads and kitschy dioramas. A Mason jar-full of piano tuning pegs. A heavy glass ashtray with an array of lambs lying on their sides. Everything in Moss’s environment possesses some double meaning, it seems, an overabundance of semiotic import.

“I don’t see another way to engage with the world than the one that I do,” Moss tells me, speaking characteristically cryptically. “It’s kind of like a raw wound. But that’s how I roll.”

“I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

I have requested an audience with Moss ostensibly to learn more about her newest LP, an album entitled Unfolding, released via Constellation Records in mid-October. But our conversation meanders organically in a patchwork manner that mimics Moss’s overlapping compositions, melodic and melancholic strands of interlaced string-and-electronics arrangements that glide through your ears until they weave themselves subtly into your soul.

Jessica Moss is one of Montreal’s great collaborators, playing with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and the Klezmer-influenced Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing as a guest player on albums by Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late Vic Chesnutt, among many others. Yet, over the past decade, Moss has found her footing as an uncompromising solo performer, releasing six sturdy full-length records since 2015.

“The very first time I recorded solo,” Moss explains, “I went to New York and into the basement of Guy Picciotto, who is a dear friend, and we made the cassette, Under Plastic Island, which is technically my first release. I wanted to tour but I didn’t understand that you can’t tour without making a record. So, I said, ‘fine, I’ll just record the stuff that I’m doing.’ Even from that very first moment, I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way. It’s a process that I’ve used all my life, making things. It’s the artistic mode that I operate in.”

Unfolding was recorded using Moss’s distinctive montage process, starting with demos captured on her iPhone and culminating in layered strata of sounds that the engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed into its final form.

“For me, I have various grooves,” Moss tells me. “My album-making process, even though it has evolved over the years, has kind of remained the same from the very beginning. I only go into the jam space with the intention of recording once I know that I’m in the clear to work on music for the next while, that I have time to make a record. When that happens, I get very, very into it very quickly because usually by then the concept has been boiling in my head for a long time. So, my process is improvising with a theme in mind and slowly picking apart what I’ve done and slowly creating the skeleton of what will end up being the record. All of those feel like being extreme flow states for me. Once that is done and everything is in front of me in ProTools, the pulling things together is one of my favourite things in the world, even though it is also extremely difficult and takes so long. I feel very alive doing that.”

Appropriately, Unfolding is scheduled for a month long run at Habitat Sonore, the immersive Dolby Atmos-outfitted listening room in the basement of Centre PHI. “It’s pretty exciting, that place,” Moss beams. “I just spent a week doing the Dolby Atmos mix. It’s a very special thing for me.”

Moss was raised in Toronto before relocating permanently to Montreal in her late teens. “My grandparents lived here in Montreal and my parents grew up in Montreal,” she explains. “My mother decided even before I was born that I would be having music lessons and that they would be a serious part of my life. My dad played in bands in the Communist Jewish community. There was a lot of singing and a lot of music-sharing circles. We spent summers and winters in Montreal and I knew from an early age that when I could move here I would. And I’ve never looked back. The grown-up me grew up in Montreal.”

Childhood for Moss was filled with Classical music, Jazz, and old-school Blues, until she developed her own individual tastes. “The very first obsession with music that I had was the Grateful Dead. I fucking loved the Grateful Dead. That was my first real passion.”

The earliest album she remembers buying of her own volition was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. “I listened to it a few years ago,” Moss recalls, “and the lyrics are fucking heinously disgusting,” punctuating this disdainful appraisal by elongating her syllables. “It was one of the many eye-opening moments of realizing as a young girl-type person the kind of misogyny that was rampant in the stuff that I listened to. Musically, you can’t go wrong. Lyrically, it’s better to not listen to the words at all.”

Quickly, Moss discovered and was influenced by the more experimental side of Grunge Rock emerging in the early 1990s. “I was in high school when Kurt Cobain died,” she says. “I remember the very day. Sonic Youth was a gateway. The Pixies were a gateway. Fugazi. The classics.”

When she absconded to Montreal in the late ‘90s, Moss found herself on the ground floor of the nascent Constellation Records scene, a cornerstone of this city’s mythology as a nucleus for underground insurgent music.

“One of my first best friends in Montreal was Ian Ilavsky,” Moss remembers. “We played in bands together. We hung out all the time. He and his mystery friend Don Wilkie from Toronto, who was planning to move to Montreal, wanted to start a venue-slash-record label. They wanted it to be called The Constellation Room. So, Don moved here, and then they were confronted with the incredibly Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Montreal with doing anything dealing with the public. They couldn’t get a venue permit no matter what they did. So, they just rented a loft and started the label and started hosting a small concert series in Old Montreal in their first location. And that experience became Constellation Records. Their first release was Ian’s band Sofa, who I was a huge fan of at the time, and I had seen every show of. That was pre-history. I was around for the whole dawn — the Don dawn,” she laughs.

In the ensuing decades, Montreal has undergone seismic political and economic shifts which have translated into a fluctuating cultural landscape.

“For a long time, it felt like Montreal was immune to the global Western world shift towards gentrification,” says Moss. “But in the last few years, what I thought could never happen here has happened here. You’ve seen it. We’re experiencing what everyone else is experiencing of being priced out, if you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of stable living conditions. Particularly because of the rapid rise of rents here which have not matched the rise in income, what’s happening here is very violent in that way.”

“Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

Moss possesses a strong sense of social responsibility, leading by example in an abstract but tangible fashion. She is a founder member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine and has co-organized a number of local fundraising events for the cause.

“I don’t think that I’m under any naïve illusions that there is any one thing that can affect change,” she admits. “Definitely music as a general term is too broad. But it’s one of the many tools that a community can have that can offer a space to bring like minded people together, or near-like minded people together, and have it be a situation where a group of people can leave more aligned than they entered. Or they can have this experience of sharing the energy of seeing music performed. To me, that can be a genuinely transformative experience. Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing. It’s not just entertainment. It’s a dedication to creating those spaces in the best possible way that I know, to facilitate that type of communion.”

There is an air of urgency, profundity, and gravitas to Moss’s life and work — from collecting obscure ornaments to condensing a multitude of tracks into glimmering sonic jewels that both trouble and delight. Watching Moss in her element is a masterclass in ritual reciprocity, an unforgettable experience for anyone fortunate enough to have encountered her delicate indomitability.

“I feel very committed to it being a reciprocal relationship,” she divulges. “It’s 100 percent the motivation that keeps me like a moth flying at the light.”◼︎

Jessica Moss performs 18 October 2025 at Centre PHI, 407 Rue Saint-Pierre.

Cover image by Audrey Cantwell.

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All Dressed

Forever Young: in conversation with Marianne Perron

I am sitting in an otherwise unremarkable office, except for the majestic Heintzman & Company grand piano, a Canadian-made symbol of the melodious nature of operations herein and a testament to our symphony’s commitment to preserving local heritage.

Today, I have been granted rare backstage access at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal to learn about the forthcoming season with Artistic Director Marianne Perron, who for more than a quarter century — spanning the careers of three conductors — has helped helm the programming priorities of Montreal’s oldest and most venerable orchestra. And while Rafael Payare is the Symphony’s newest public face, it is really Perron who pulls the strings.

Ironically, a broken violin sits on her desk.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she laughs, “and maybe one day I’ll get it fixed. But I never considered a career as a professional musician,” Perron tells me as she recalls her early life as a violinist. “I started lessons at age six. My mother conceived of it as just another part of getting an education. But I stopped at around 20. I love music, but it was not what I wanted to do. Honestly, I hate playing in front of an audience.”

Perron appropriately prefers to remain behind the scenes. Nonetheless, she is one of Montreal’s most inspiring women leaders, securing a coveted spot on the Women We Admire list, among other well-deserved honours.

Perron started with the OSM in 1999 as head of Education and Contemporary Music and continued climbing to her current role as Senior Director of the Symphony’s artistic sector, overseeing programming, community education, operations, production, and musician personnel. “Now, I am the head of all five of these departments,” she says with a smile. “So, voilà.”

The trick to success is making one’s job look easy — which it never is. And clearly, Perron is no stranger to hard work. She attended the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, studying and advocating for contemporary music from Quebec and Canada, and later obtained a master’s degree in Musicology from the Université de Montréal, plus an MBA from the HEC with a specialization in cultural enterprises. So, her chops are impeccable from both the musical and management angles.

“There are many things I understand about balancing dynamics,” she explains. “It is always a question of balance.”

From left: Marianne Perron, Rafael Payare, and Philippe-Audrey Larrue-St-Jacques. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Music, too, is about balance, and patterns, and cycles, and Perron inherently understands that the OSM is faced with balancing tradition and progress, the Classical repertoire and more contemporary works, and Montreal’s cultural specificity with that of the wider global stage.

“True, the OSM is not primarily a contemporary music orchestra,” says Perron. “But all the same, it is an orchestra that programs the works of new composers. Not all conductors believe that contemporary music is important. But for our new conductor, Rafael Payare, it is extremely important. It is really at the heart of his practice. At the Virée Classique and the outdoor concert at the Olympic Stadium, we have contemporary Canadian music. We are now programming more Latin American works as a tribute to our new conductor. And we also have an orchestra that is capable of playing Bach regularly. We are an orchestra that really plays 400 years’ worth of music.”

That historical range is integral to the life of the OSM. For Perron, it is perennially a challenge to program a season with an ear toward both history and the future.

“There are lots of things to consider,” Perron tells me. “We think about how to develop the sound of the orchestra. There are so many great things about Rafael Payare — his artistic sensibility, his talent. But also, his ambition for the orchestra. Rafael Payare has a sonic vision which is in sync with the OSM. We are not going to totally transform but just search for those existing elements to develop. Rafael has a particular interest in Post-Romantic Germanic works. So, we think of those things, as well as the elements we want to develop with the orchestra. We have lots of conversations. I think it’s wonderful that Rafael wants to perform, for example, Bruckner. And then someone says, ‘wait a minute, before we play Bruckner, we should play this and this.’ And that will take Bruckner to another level.”

Perron grew up in a Montreal household where Classical music was regularly part of the sonic backdrop.

“We went to a lot of concerts when I was a kid,” Perron recalls. “They had a series at the Piano Nobile at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier which was called Musique & Brioche. They were short concerts aimed at families, and they had muffins and croissants. I loved those. My family subscribed to the OSM. I was seven when my father took me to the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. And that became my favourite piece when I was seven or eight years old. And ten years later, my father returned to Place des arts to hear the very same piece. But this time, I was in the Orchestre de Conservatoire as a musician. That was a great milestone.”

To reach out to younger audiences, the OSM is experimenting nowadays with the form of symphonic performance, coupling the orchestra with cinema, for instance, as they did previously with Jaws and The Red Violin, and will be doing again this season with Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The role of the music in that movie is so special,” Perron says. “It’s interesting because there are lots of moments where there is no sound, there is no music. The orchestra wants to play all the time, but silence is really where the ‘wow’ moments are in that film.”

“There is a suppleness that I think represents us here.” Marianne Perron and Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And yet, hardly a silent moment passes in our conversation. There is plenty to look forward to in the OSM’s 2025-’26 season, and Perron is excited about all of it: the return of Barbara Hannigan; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; A German Requiem by Brahms with Kent Nagano; The Rite of Spring with pianist Bruce Liu; Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony paired with Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the OSM’s Composer-in-Residence, to celebrate Black History Month.

The OSM has chosen to launch its season with The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a bold and symbolic choice that gestures toward the spiritual bargains of our age, and their potential perils.

“We always try to draw a link between the pieces we are programming or commissioning and current events,” Perron reveals. “Is there an exchange? Is there an echo?”

In an era of increasing divisiveness, Montreal is arguably North America’s most progressive metropolis, and a municipal model for achieving linguistic and cultural harmony.

“It’s really about the richness of the whole community together,” Perron notes. “Montreal is very fluid. It’s a very safe place. There is a lot of pride here, but it’s not pretentious. There’s a lot of curiosity and creativity, too. I feel like it’s a city that is open to the world. And I think that reflects in the Orchestra. There is a suppleness that I think represents us here. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal is a mirror image of that.”◼︎

The OSM’s 2025-’26 season opens with The Damnation of Faust, 17 September 2025 at Maison Symphonique.

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The Atrocity Exhibition: in conversation with Tomas Dessureault

In a darkened front bedroom is an improbable assemblage of paint brushes, canisters, photographs, various tools and trinkets, a jumble of vintage clothing, stacks of books, empty drinking vessels, prop rubber limbs, and hundreds if not more works of art on paper in various states of composition and decomposition. At the centre of this maelstrom is the artist Tomas Dessureault, 24, who has invited me round to his new garden-level apartment in the Village to document his process in preparation for a forthcoming solo exhibition entitled Peace Please which will open at Galerie POPOP in early September.

Dessureault continues offering me one ostensibly random item from his collection after another for inspection. “Look at these, I found these in the garbage,” Dessureault tells me, handing over two black scrapbooks-full of carefully curated pornographic imagery cut out of late-20th century print magazines. The photographs are catalogued according to some curious and perverse logical system: hair colour, body position, explicit sexual act.

“Someone put a lot of work into making these,” he says dispassionately. Everything in the room including these binders seems to hold equivalent significance — objects of sociological fascination more than aesthetic appeal, items stripped of sense and consequence.

Dessureault manifests at the door with braced teeth, In Utero-era plum-coloured hair, and an oversize t-shirt clinging to a lanky frame. His energy is positive and spirited and he is sincerely pleased to welcome visitors into his creative space. A majestic, panelled painting hangs in the hallway of the entrance and artworks are strewn in every nook and cranny, a residence into which he recently moved and shares with three roommates. One of them, a photographer called Japhy, busily snaps pictures with a film camera. There is a manic vitality to this household that suggests production over capacity.

Dessureault appears to possess many of the characteristics of a promising young artist: a deep passion for art; an articulate mind; and most of all, a furious ethic that drives him to churn out work constantly. “My art practice is,” he hesitates, “I don’t have a practice. There is no moment when I am not doing art.”

Arriving in Montreal four years ago from Val-d’Or, Dessureault first attended university for medicine, then transferred into philosophy, and is currently midway through a visual arts degree at Concordia. “I think I might drop out,” he confesses. “I have a problem with scholarships. I owe a lot of money.”

Dessureault demonstrates the youthful idealism that typifies recent transplants to Montreal, especially art students. He has the air of a dog with his head hanging out of a pickup truck’s side window, careening down the highway, tongue wagging, taking in the passing landscape with wonder and delight. I feel self-consciously like Christopher Walken’s journalist character in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, Basquiat, wishing not to disturb this exuberance with talk of the wicked world that we all will inevitably encounter. But there is an additionally wise-beyond-his-years quality to Dessureault that tells me I won’t. We are here to talk about art, which is to say, about any and every aspect of life itself.

“I hope for the future that I can just sell enough to work.” Tomas Dessureault photographed by Japhy Saretsky.

“The way I make art is very intuitive,” he explains. “I am not thinking at all. I’m trying to not think. To stop thinking.” Dessureault sips from a mug. “I drink ten coffees a day and way more Monster Energy and Red Bull. It’s very intense. You don’t have time to think. The body has to express something. Something is going out of me.”

This intensity is reflected in everything I see — brush strokes and inscriptions and expressionist gestures that scream and dance and imply authentic reckless abandon. “I feel that this work I’m doing, on one canvas, one object, can contain a very intense sentiment and also some kind of tenderness and peace. When the canvas resists them living together in the same area,” he says, “then it’s a fucking good work.”

Dessureault leads me through the apartment and down into a basement, rare for Montreal, with a crawlspace not quite high enough to stand upright. In this underground world is his studio proper, containing even more ephemera, a veritable accumulated mess of activity. In one corner, a dislocated car door rests against the wall. “Oh that? My friend was using it as a purse,” Dessureault deadpans.

I notice coincidentally that Howard Shore’s score for David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash is playing from Dessureault’s phone. “I saw it twice,” he recalls, “and I was sleeping. You can imagine with Crash, there’s this shadow, it’s very dreamy. I get my inspiration from things around me. Rap artists are more inspirational for me than any painters: Playboi Cardi; Kendrick; Gezo, the French rapper. But I enjoy listening to Crash. This music got into my head.”

Collision is an apt metaphor for Dessureault’s work — its speed, its unpredictability, its violence and chaos. He picks up a sketchbook from the floor and hands it to me. “I drew this,” he informs me. “I was at my previous apartment on the Plateau, on Laurier. It was like 4am. I could feel the presence of death. This is the evil presence over my shoulder. It was saying to me, ‘At some point, I will take your life.’ I knew this. I knew what I was drawing when I did it,” he divulges, pointing to the loose parchment. “I think I have a demon inside of me.”

Tomas Dessureault, Death Over My Shoulder, Watercolour and grease pencil on paper. Image provided by the artist.

We talk at length about what constitutes excellence in art, and Dessureault outlines a sophisticated set of criteria. “The first layer,” he explains, “is the work has to be good in its composition, the placement, the structure, the texture, the relation of depth. Then, it has to be very honest and say something about you. Then, it has to speak to our age. And then, if there is a fourth layer, it’s magic and you don’t understand what’s happening. Then, probably it’s a very powerful work.”

I ask Dessureault about Peace Please, the title of the upcoming exhibition. “John Lennon got killed by a fan,” he says, “by someone that loved him so much. In peace, there is also so much violence. It’s more a prayer. But I’m interested in selling work. Because I’m spending so much money, buying paint, buying books, buying clothes. There are probably things I don’t want to sell because they are enigmatic to me, and I need access to them.”

Nonetheless, Dessureault recognizes that artists, too, need to live in the world, that he is emerging into a hyper capitalist system in which a fickle art market is constructed speculatively, predominantly by what someone is willing to pay for something.

Undisputedly masterful works accrue like strata of sediment on a dried up river bed, while bananas duct taped to walls fetch multiple millions. “This is not even art,” Dessureault says. “I hope for the future that I can just sell enough to work,” he submits. “This apartment is a dream place for me. Before, I was living with mice, with mouse shit everywhere. If I can live like this, I will be happy. Even if I’m in debt, I don’t care. If I owe money to the bank, what does that mean? I just don’t care. I’m trusting it.”

With this, he grabs another sheet of inked paper. “This is everything,” he says, stabbing the surface with an index finger. “The true, very important thing for me is this. The work itself cannot lie to you. If I’m honest with it, people will see when there’s actually something there. Or not. People are smart.”◼︎

Peace Please runs 9-14 September 2025 at Galerie POPOP, Suite 442, 372 Sainte-Catherine Street West.

Cover image: Tomas Dessureault photographed by Miguel Carcacia-Gauthier.

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