Vincent Larouche, Le tympan, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 7 November 2026

“If even the smallest and most personal stirrings of the individual psyche — so insignificant in themselves — remain as unconscious and unrecognized as they have hitherto, they will go on accumulating and produce mass groupings and mass movements which cannot be subjected to reasonable control or manipulated to a good end.”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Dreams are only really coincidental to the dreamer. If you have ever tried to explain a dream to someone else, you will have inevitably encountered a facial expression that distinctly signifies a combination of bewilderment and disinterest in your listener. Nobody really cares about our dreams. And it is useless to attempt to relate what is meaningful about them to anyone other, perhaps, than a psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are certain threads that run through all of our dreams, archetypes that link us through themes like flying, panicking, falling, and other more common dream scenarios. The commonality of these themes is a reminder that we are not as unique as we would like to believe. Beneath each platform is the same basic operating system that is just as susceptible to malfunction as the next.

Fedor Rudin and Selim Mazari, Spotlight on Strings, Bourgie Hall, 2 October 2026

“A sound is symbolic when it stirs in us emotions or thoughts beyond its mechanical sensations or signaling function, when it has a numinosity or reverberation that rings through the deeper recesses of the psyche.”
—R. Murray Schafer, “Symbolism,” in The Soundscape: the tuning of the world

Every game sounds ridiculous when its rules are described to an unknowing or unsuspecting spectator. In the 1953 Andy Griffith routine, “What it was, was football,” the famed comedian and raconteur delivers an hilarious monologue as told through the eyes of a backwoods rube that makes one of America’s most popular sports seem absurd. The joke rests on the audience gradually recognizing what Griffith is describing as something ubiquitous in contemporaneous culture. But to today’s listener, Griffith’s monologue sounds positively alien.

F(R)ICTION, Art et jeux, ELEKTRA, Arsenal Art Contemporain, Until 15 November 2026

“Between command and control, as between the systems implanting and perpetuating them, there can be no mediation, only resonation and automatic readjustment.”
—Brian Massumi, “Requiem for our Prospective Dead”

Human beings devise complicated systems of rules in order to regulate behaviours that rarely conform to predictable outcomes.

In the seventeenth episode of the Sci-Fi T.V. series Star Trek’s second season, entitled “A Piece of the Action,” Captain Kirk and crew arrive at a planet called Sigma Iotia II which has fashioned its society after early 20^th century American mafia culture. Effectively, the planet’s inhabitants act like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in Angels with Dirty Faces, speaking in film noir-style dialogue and using violence as a mode of social control.

The only way for Kirk and the Starship Enterprise’s crew to escape Sigma Iotia II is to gamble at playing cards. And so, Kirk invents a game that he calls “Fizzbin,” making it up as he goes along. The rules become so arcane that the Iotians concede and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock assume power.

The rules of the game — how many cards each player receives, the weight of each card, and the end goal — are part of the symbolic order that structures and governs and the relationships of the game. The imaginary realm of Fizzbin is something akin to Poker, a game similar enough in form but different enough in outcome to constitute recognition. The Real realm of Fizzbin, however, is not only the players of the game, but also the authority that Captain Kirk asserts by inventing the rules to suit his own incentives.

You can’t lose in the symbolic or imaginary orders if you literally construct reality on the fly.

Turandot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 29 September 2026

“I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m the only healthy person. That’s pretty bad off, isn’t it?”
— Ted Bentley in Solar Lottery

Because of the recent conference dedicated to his incredible and prolific body of filmmaking, I have spent the past few months chasing Adam Curtis’s dragon, binge-watching documentaries that I had never seen and revisiting some that I have. In the 2007 BBC series entitled The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, Curtis spends a significant amount of time devoted to Game Theory and its vast implementation in British politics and economic policy throughout the mid-20^th century.

Game theory posits that individuals in modern society are always essentially “gaming” — strategizing social relations for incremental personal gain. One of the theory’s most influential proponents was an American mathematician called John Nash, who also suffered from debilitating schizophrenic paranoia and was convinced that his colleagues were constantly conspiring against him. People, Nash believed, acted in their own self-interest, and the fact that Nash’s schizophrenia reinforced this belief is a curious case of self-negating verification.

No expert in Game Theory could legitimately disprove Nash’s hypotheses; but no one in the psychiatric profession could prove his sanity.

Diane Borsato, A Clean Place to Swim, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta), Until 13 December 2026

“The transcendent is not the transcendental.”
—Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence, A life…”

Nature is supreme intelligence, the manifestation of the unknowable. The sublime that we experience in the presence of nature is a restorative sensation that resets us in both scale and time. The sheer magnitude of forests or mountains puts into perspective our physical size, and their geological formation over millennia reminds us of our insignificance in time. To be in the presence of mature matter, that which will still exist long after we have ceased to, is a reminder of our responsibilities to stop strategically gaming the earth, our relationships, and ourselves.

Separation from God is the definition of hell. Reconnecting with nature heals the wounds of separation and replaces us directly within God’s midst.◼︎

Come to NicheMTL’s Glitch Issue launch party October 1st 2026 at the SAT. Featuring live performances by Courant Zéro, HRT, and Seulement. Get tickets here.

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

_{Cover image: Installation view of Diane Borsato at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.}