Tag Archives: Blouin | Division

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Trick Rider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still, some traces remain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dead Cities

Poolgirl with Shunk, G String, and Niivi, Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025

Poolgirl performs at Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In December 2006, Ben’s De Luxe Delicatessen, a landmark restaurant serving Smoked Meat sandwiches and French Fries in an historic Art Deco building at the corner of Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve, permanently closed its doors.

Ben’s had been a Montreal staple for 98 years. Scenes from the classic 1965 National Film Board documentary Ladies Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen were filmed there. Celebrities like Liberace and Bette Midler had been welcomed as guests. Pierre Trudeau was a regular, as was Jacques Parizeau. It was a place where federalism and separatism fell away, where the two solitudes could put aside their differences and come together over a Cherry Coke.

The staff at Ben’s, many of whom had worked at the deli for over 50 years, joined the CSN union federation in 1995, and went on strike for what would be the last time in the summer of 2006, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The strike drew on through autumn, and as winter fell, the restaurant’s owner and manager, Jean Kravitz, took the decision to sell the building to SIDEV Realty Corporation.

Following a number of efforts to declare it an historic edifice, Ben’s was demolished in November 2008, and the developer constructed a 16-storey hotel on the site. The restaurant in Le St-Martin Hotel Particulier has been closed for more than a decade.

A Musical Journey with Tawadros and Beethoven, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 5 November 2025

Joseph Tawadros performs with the OSM, 5 November 2025. Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Strikes are effective only when they affect everyone equally. If nurses strike, access to healthcare is restricted for all. If teachers strike, education across the board is denied.

When public transportation employees strike, however, it is only those reliant upon public transportation who suffer. Moreover, those who take public transportation are not in any position to deliver on striking workers’ demands. Rather, through direct and indirect means, Opus cards and taxes, we are the ones who pay the costs for public transportation — costs that have been steadily increasing for services that are in rapid decline.

Metros are constantly delayed or go out of service altogether. Refuse and graffiti litter stations. And at most of them, security seems nonexistent. Violent crime in the Montreal metro system increased 80 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Three men this week were charged in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old victim at Place St. Henri. And a woman was allegedly assaulted inside a metro car in October.

STM Board Chairman Éric Alan Caldwell earlier this year lamented the lack of provincial funding for Montreal’s public transit authority, sentiments echoed by then-mayor Valérie Plante. The STM received $258 million less than expected in the CAQ’s most recent budget.

However, Quebec Transport Minister, Geneviève Guilbault, doesn’t rely upon — and consequently isn’t required to care about — Montreal’s public transportation system. If anything, Quebec City politicians privately rejoice when Montreal’s bus and metro-riding population is distressed.

Quebec conceives of Montreal as its economic engine. Perhaps that’s why the province is more intent upon building highways out of it than maintaining trains within it.

If the unions representing bus drivers and maintenance workers want their job actions to be effective, they should interfere with policymakers’ ability to do theirs.

Quatuor Molinari, Musique à voir, Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025

Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is one silver lining to the transit strike — or of an event like the wave of flight reductions at U.S. airports — it is that it necessarily enforces a slower pace upon modern life.

Traffic is the impeding power to the futurist ideal of speed, the unrestrained id. Cities are regulated by a circulatory rhythm that accelerates, slows down, and fluctuates at various intervals, depending upon the flows of traffic — on foot, in cars, in transit, in flight.

The transfer of one form of traffic into another upsets the metropolitan temporal equilibrium and imposes a different timetable upon urban space. Time thickens when we are forced to throttle our maximum velocity.

Angela Grauerholz, La femme 100 têtes, Blouin|Division, 8 November 2025

Patrons gather for the launch of La Femme 100 têtes by Angela Grauerholz, 8 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Labour unions so far have failed to anticipate or reorient themselves towards the real threat to workers: automation. It cannot be long before city bus and metro drivers will become entirely unnecessary, as driverless alternatives exceed human beings in efficiency and reliability.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company that Google developed, has doubled in size in the past year, and delivered more than 200,000 paid rides per week in 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Autonomous taxis have other advantages. You don’t have to tip or make small talk with the driver. They are not prone to road rage and will never harass a passenger. And robots don’t go on strike. The degeneration of human behaviour is the biggest argument for the embrace of artificial intelligence.

David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM, 6 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Gallery view of David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM. Photographed for NicheMTL.

It is possible that human beings, in our arrogance, will drastically reduce our own usefulness, if not strike ourselves out of existence. We have operated, for the past century at least, under the assumption that the future, benefited by the acceleration of technological advancement, would be indisputably better, and have been disappointed and despondent when it hasn’t. The question, however, is, for whom should the future improve?

If it is for human beings, then me might do well to recalibrate our expectations and ameliorate some of our manners, towards ourselves and one another. This could mean resisting the capitalist impulse to maximize exploitation; to accept less-than-peak profit and speed; to reallocate and share rather than colonize and contest our limited spaces.

The seemingly likelier and more deserving beneficiary of a better future, though, is non-human. Flora and fauna warrant superior living conditions far more than unionized workers of any occupation. Organic matter merits the right to prosperity in excess of the new class of corporate tech bros.

We will be judged by our treatment of wilder things.◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Joseph Tawadros photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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The Part You Throw Away

Alicia Clara, Blame it on the Moon, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains — a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It seems at times that there is no refuge from life’s trials and tribulations, no vacation from the constant barrage of work and domestic labour that doesn’t get done unless you do it, and no respite from the onslaught of information and incessant media — most of it utterly inconsequential — that assaults us on a daily basis.

Summer is supposed to be the season to relax and recharge, and many of us remember holidays taken at this time of year, a break from school or a pause from work, endless idle and expendable expanses of indefinite duration unspooling like rolls of toilet paper launched mischievously into a neighbour’s tree.

There is no time to do nothing these days, every waking moment filled with a sense of urgency and purpose, each day regardless of its calendrical station beckoning us to make something of it, as if everything unproductive was necessarily a waste, a casualty of capitalist ideology. Throwaway days are a thing of the past.

Time waits for no one. There is no escape within time or without it.

T. Gowdy with Nennen, Ky Brooks & Mat Ball, and Elizabeth Anka Vajagic & Steve Bates, Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025

Tim Gowdy performs with the Suoni per il Popolo festival at Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

In troubled moments, I return over and over again to the thinkers who influenced me most. And re-reading them — certain Biblical passages and scholars thereof, William S. Burroughs, Mark Fisher — never fails to reveal something new, something that clarifies and distills their ideas.

This process provides some comfort, some sense of stability in an increasingly destabilized world, a world in which natural cycles have been broken, natural progressions interrupted, natural continuity ruptured, and progress apparently set in reverse.

I am amazed, for instance at Fisher’s crystalline thought processes in defining the subtle distinction between the weird and the eerie. Everyone has an understanding and an experience of these two designations, and on the surface of it, they don’t seem particularly dissimilar or necessary to distinguish. But still, Fisher forges on churning the cream into butter by describing weirdness as the presence of something that shouldn’t be present, and eeriness as the absence of something that should.

And in an instant, those definitions seem foregone and essential. A disembodied voice is eerie. Whereas, say, a renaissance instrument in electronic music invokes the weird.

As most of the forces that exert agency in the world remain mysterious to us, we live in predominantly eerie times.

Nonetheless, it is weird that there is a clown holding the office of the United States presidency, or that there exists widespread plague, war, famine, and death in an age in which technology, diplomacy, and prosperity should have diminished all of these things.

Tautologically, weirdness is a condition upon which the eerie persists. The survival of that which should be absent produces a failure of absence.

Renée Condo, One Who Shatters Particles, One Who Smells Flowers, Blouin|Division, 26 June – 23 August 2025

Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We tend to believe that humans bring order into the world. We attribute organization to the Anthropocene. But ours is an era of manufactured chaos.

Nature is the law. Humanity is lawless.

Kara-Lis Coverdale with Noam Bierstone & Daniel Áñez, and Beast, Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025

Kara-Lis Coverdale performs with the Suoni per il popolo festival at Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
—Proverbs 18:17

We live in a spiritless society. Idols of worship have been replaced not by other gods or even people, but by lifestyles that ultimately rely upon accumulation and waste, exploitation and submission, complicity and silence, labour and leisure in appropriate measure, status and celebrity, a hierarchy of comments and likes that makes the Angelic order look as simple as a game of snakes and ladders.

The question of morality — the matter of a universal right and wrong — is so repressed as to be inverted: the absence of a moral code is itself the new morality; nothing is true, everything is permitted.

But the basic truths of bygone moralities hold true: karma is real, and she’s a bitch. What we do to others we also do to ourselves. And what we do not do for others, we also cannot expect in kind.

In an ironic twist, not stopping ourselves from amoral acts is what constitutes damnation under late capitalism. We desperately need to start speaking again in terms of what is universally right and what is unequivocally wrong.

For instance, violence is wrong. Genocide is wrong. Upsetting our planet’s delicate balance and making it uninhabitable for future generations is absolutely, undeniably, definitely wrong.

God doesn’t require us to believe in a god. Or even to worship a god. Whether or not “god” exists is independent of human faith or lack thereof. But a religious education and a sense of doctrine are invaluable to reconstructing the kinds of morality that will be necessary to solve the earth’s mounting existential crises.

We must become shepherds, our brothers’ keepers, leading by example, bringing light to the darkest corners of consciousness, gently walking on.

no cosmos, Pub Molson, 2 July 2025

no cosmos perform at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 2 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The thing you long for summons you away from the self.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I’d rather have a line than a point.

A point only takes one second to make. Or conversely, you could be stuck making the same point for years. Points are easy to miss. Points mean stasis and death, whereas lines mean movement and change and life.

Don’t have a point. Draw a line and defend it.◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Instrumentalization of Others

Eric Chenaux Trio with Markus Floats Ensemble, La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025

Eric Chenaux performs at La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Now is the time to be famous or fortunate.” —Mark Carney, Value(s)

“The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive.” —Byung-Chul Han, Why Revolution is Impossible Today.

Power under capitalism is identified as the fulfillment of desire, the abatement of want, wanting and subsequently having. Yet, unless fulfillment can somehow be observed, it is not genuine power.

Here, desire must be distinguished from need. We need food, water, air, clothing, shelter, rest. Beyond those needs are non-essential desires. We desire gourmet food, bottled water, designer garments, sprawling mansions, lavish vacations. (One key difference between those with power under capitalism and those without it is that they enjoy better versions of the things we need.)

Still, power is displayed ostentatiously through the satiation of more and more frivolous wants, the invention of novel dreams conceived solely for the purpose of realizing them. Nowhere is this more evident than 21st century libidinal desire. There are many more than 50 shades of gray today.

Doubtless, we all crave physical intimacy. But sexual desires have multiplied and proliferated, bloomed and blossomed into evermore niche categories and satisfying them has become a symbol of the utmost form of power. More often than not, sex these days is transactional.

Take for instance the Canadian case of the woman known as E.M. and the five former World Junior hockey players she has accused of assault.

A six-way erotic encounter is beyond what might be considered a reasonable intimate requirement. However, fulfilling that desire is a symbol of extreme power than only professional athletes or rap music moguls — or current U.S. presidents, probably — can accomplish. And capitalizing upon that desire is a uniquely post-modern specimen of seduction.

A perverse merger of humiliation and pride emerges when the satisfaction of aberrant desire is publicised — in the news, say, or in court. And the surplus byproduct of this publicity is pure power for everyone involved, the acute focus of extrovert energy. The more witnesses to libidinal depravity, the better.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no evidence of a group chat at trial, did it really fall?

La Bohème, Opera de Montreal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 13 May 2025

The cast of La Bohème take a bow at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 12 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“That which Wisdom made into a crown for its head, these evil men made into sandals for their soles!” —Israel ben Benjamin of Bełżyce

In the first month of 1941, just on the cusp of America entering in earnest into World War II, then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address to Americans that the rest of the world has come to call “The Four Freedoms Speech.”

In it, Roosevelt outlined the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy as the freedom of expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. The artist and Saturday Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell depicted these freedoms in a series of famous paintings that adorned four consecutive covers of the publication in early 1943.

Each iteration is striking in its symbolism and characterization — and becomes naturally more so in light of the accumulation of the historical weight of subsequent global events.

I find the final image, Freedom from Fear, particularly fascinating. Rockwell depicts a nuclear family scene at bedtime, a typical Anglo-Saxon mother and father tucking in what appear to be sleeping twin boys. (The twins to me have come to represent the World Trade Center and the destruction of the doubling of the sign, although this is certainly an irrational and impossible interpretation.)

On the floor of the twins’ bedroom are two ragdolls (not 30, as there might have been had the painting been created in 2025). And in the hand of the patriarch — who remarkably resembles Sterling Hayden, who made his film debut that year opposite Fred MacMurray in a picture called Virginia, the name originally given in the late 16th century to the entire colonial coastal region, from Maine to Bermuda — is a folded-up newspaper.

The visible portion of its half-obscured headline reveals the words “Bombings” and “Horror.” The peaceful scene that Rockwell conjures is ostensibly in ironic contrast to the new war raging in Europe at that time and furthermore echoes the attack on Pearl Harbour which would draw America into global conflict for a second time during the 20th century’s first half.

There is undeniably a melancholic character to the image, what we might call “a vibe” that resonates deeply within the North American consciousness.

Schubert’s Famous “Trout” Quintet, Musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025

Musicians of the OSM receive a standing ovation at Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. —Job 10:19

The common refrain of the past century has declared that there has never been a modern war on our soil. Of course, this ignores the genocidal annihilation of Indigenous populations as well as the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that soaked the land in blood during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Nennen with Everly Lux and Boar God, La Toscadura, 16 May 2025

Boar God perform at La Toscadura, 16 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” —James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty

We generally conceive of capitalism as the economic system proper to democracy. And from democracy we extrapolate a transcendentalist conclusion of moral goodness, as if the majority always demonstrates that which is wise, right, and true.

But both capitalism and democracy are pervious to subversion which manifests in profound contemporary Western melancholia.

This sorrow is treated with the consumption of consumer goods and the collection of distracting experiences, tempered by a false sense of relief for the privilege of living in a precarious absence of violence.

All the while in the 21st century, fear constantly stalks freedom.

Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division, 10 May – 21 June 2025

Nicolas Baier, Moderne, 2025, Inkjet print on aluminum, 106 x 142 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

That’s the way the pan flashes
That’s the way the market crashes
That’s the way the whip lashes
That’s the way the teeth gnashes
—William S. Burroughs & Tom Waits, “That’s The Way.”

The most dependable way to induce a Dark Age is to manufacture amnesia. Broadly speaking, there are two methods of accomplishing this.

The first is the brute method. Destroy archives. Eviscerate institutions of higher learning. Cut lines of communication and links to history.

The second method is more subtle and insidious. It involves the constant eradication and reproduction of states of normalcy, ideally to such an extent that the only constant is instability. No one remembers yesterday because they are too worried about what might happen tomorrow.

Two recent books — Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs and Henry A. Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting — forewarn of these strategies.

I know I have previously read them both but scarcely remember what they describe.◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Gallery view of Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Always Forever Now

Shunk with Born at Midnite and Flleur, La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025

Shunk perform at La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.”
—Mark Fisher, “Accept like a curse an unlucky deal.”

“The damage today
They fall on today
They beat on the outside
And I’ll stand by you
Now”
—David Bowie, “Outside.”

“These guys would have been really popular in, like, 1980 or ‘81,” my friend Oliver who checks coats at La Sala Rossa, world-weary with arms folded, asides to me at the album launch on Wednesday night at La Sotterenea for Shunk’s hyper-retro, longer-than-extended but shorter-than-long-player, Shunkland.

It is true.

Oliver says this neither ironically nor with derision; rather, matter-of-factly, with reverence and astute observance that retromania has not ceased, more than 15 years after Simon Reynolds diagnosed and devoted a book-length study to this particularly 21st century condition, to be an operative mode proper to postmodern cultural production.

More than nostalgia, more than cyclical fashion, time itself seems to have collapsed in on itself, every historical era occurring and recurring simultaneously in the present, flattening the entirety of existence into the always-already now.

Myriam Dion, Timelines, Blouin | Division, 15 February – 5 April 2025

Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Forward momentum is a thing of the past.

It is possible that futurity was always illusory, that memory was rare and in short enough supply to create the impression that each season was fundamentally different — the length, width, and hem of pant legs; KitchenAid’s colour of the year (it’s butter, by the way) — when time has never been anything more nor less than a flat circle.

But today, memory is cheap, if not free — you can’t even give it away — and forgetfulness is a sentimental luxury, like Polaroid film, heritage hipsterism, and paying with cash.

Pretending not to remember is a new form of conspicuous consumption, with half-recalled experience in place of a disposable product.

Two Readers and Music V, featuring Tara McGowan-Ross, Gwen Aube, and Aistis, 6 March 2025

Aistis performs at yolk’s Two Readers and Music, 6 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If there is no now, then there is no then, and no will be.

More accurately, there are eight billion nows, in an age of siloed politics and niche media, protectionism and regional nationalism. And so, the future will ultimately be all the more fragmented and multifaceted. If cultural memory defies consensus, then so does cultural imagination.

However, contrary to the assumption that variety stimulates autonomy, increasingly granular diversity threatens collective solidarity and remains vulnerable to more totalizing control systems. Functioning society relies upon constructive group psychology. Deteriorating society conversely flourishes within an environment of its destructive inverse.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the failure of leftist political satire. The imperviousness to both ridicule and scorn that the right enjoys right now is a symptom of disintegrating unanimity owing to the “splinternet.”

In his book Post-Comedy, author Alfie Bown observes under technocratic hyper-capitalism “the creation of a closed circuit of didactic humour in which only those designed to experience it do, leaving its potential as a political tool for activism almost redundant.”

For people to find certain attitudes abhorrent or funny, there must exist a kind of ideological consensus. When none does, insults and sarcasm simply keep people and ideas current in consciousness, which paradoxically strengthens their dominance, if only due to renewed visibility.

It accomplishes nothing to skewer Elon Musk on his own social network. Making fun of the orange Cheeto doesn’t change any minds and rather strengthens his brand.

One of the more terrifying realizations circulating lately is that the billionaire class pulling the government’s strings will still be in power long after today’s or even tomorrow’s politicians.

Democracy is fragile now, but capital can resist forever.

For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock, dirs. Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines, 3-7 March 2025

The cast of For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock takes a bow on opening night, 3 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

As a child, my first word was “clock.”

It wasn’t “mommy” or “daddy” — you can ask them. As the story goes, I pointed in my infancy at the time-keeping device on the wall and distinctly articulated the word, “clock,” shocking and likely disappointing my parents. Because time was clearly already of the essence. I don’t remember my mindset, obviously, but I may have had an early inkling of the lengthy life sentence to which I’d been condemned.

At times, it seems that time is tight. At others, minutes appear to stretch into hours. It is always when we are aware of time — when we’re late; or when we’re waiting — that it behaves antithetically to our desires.

Back to the Future was one of my favourite movies as a kid. I was eight in 1985 when the film was released and was just beginning to understand the nature of time as infinite and our experience inside time as limited. I knew what death was. So, I understood that everything everyone does in one’s lifetime must somehow fit within time’s puzzle.

When you’re a child, time yawns out before you like a red carpet unfurling into the world. But as time marches on, you can see that roll getting smaller and smaller, and it becomes ever more apparent that the rug will eventually, inevitably, be pulled from beneath your feet.

This is both frightening and reassuring. Who would want to live forever? But also, who wouldn’t want another day when their time comes?

Duality, Persons, Ascension (Personal Records)

Haunting is one way to cheat time. Besides a supernatural extension, there are other methods to haunt the present. Chiefly among them is to make art. Or something of art’s ilk, that endures beyond death.

If as I am you’re obsessed with history, you’re bound to live amid ghosts. Some of them point to lines of flight. Others drag us down. Even the living can have a haunting effect.

Communing with ghosts is where we find ourselves.◼︎

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

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

Cover images: Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion, Galerie Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

The Conspiracy of Art: in conversation with Dominique Toutant

The phone is ringing.

With apologies, Dominique Toutant implores, “Can we please stop for 10 minutes?”

It is one day before the opening of a new exhibition at Blouin | Division, the distinguished contemporary art gallery housed on the second floor of an enormous, converted warehouse perched at the edge of the Lachine Canal in St. Henri, and its director’s mobile phone is buzzing.

Like money, art never sleeps. Or, more to the point, art today is money, a perpetual motion machine.

Contemporary art is value, power, currency, desire. Art in its most modern incarnation is omnipresent, simultaneous history and destiny.

Above all, art is a form, a timeless cultural logic, a way of existing in the world, and of manifesting existence.

As a trained artist and art historian, Toutant understands this more than many of his gallerist peers. He recognizes that his function at Blouin | Division is akin to a barometer, measuring the pressure of the surrounding cultural scenes and forecasting their atmospheric movement.

“It’s my job to help the public to find their way into the work,” Toutant tells me. “It’s my job to look around and see what’s up.”

Earlier, amidst the sound of power drills, hammers, and the ubiquitous ringtones, Toutant had given me a tour of the pair of exhibitions being installed just in time for a vernissage the following day — an assemblage of whimsical Papier-mâché sculptures by Serge Murphy, and the photographer Angela Grauerholz’s latest collection of images, entitled Ellipses.

Toutant speaks excitedly about the works and their creators, towing me from room to room, pointing out recurring themes and revealing minute details about each with a keen artist’s eye.

“This one was taken in a restaurant in Mumbai,” he says of one of Grauerholz’s photos.

“That’s steam in the window. Almost all of these portraits are slightly off, slightly uneven, taken at an angle, with a reflection, a lot of fuzziness. She’s really known for that foggy effect.”

Angela Grauerholz, Restaurant Kitchen Window (Mumbai), 2022. Ed. 1/5. Inkjet prints. 40” x 60” (unframed). Courtesy of Blouin | Division.

Toutant talks with a great deal of affection for the artists under the gallery’s aegis. “To be an art dealer, you need to love the artists you’re going to be with. You need to be excited to listen to them. You need to be, at the same time, an art historian, a coach, a psychiatrist, a friend, their agent. There’s so many aspects to it.”

Coming of age in Quebec City, Toutant always wanted to pursue art as a full-time vocation. “My background was to be an artist, and I was for a long time. I was represented by Joyce Yahouda Gallery,” he recalls. “For a day job, I was also working in the art world. In my 30s, that’s when I got here, and things changed.”

Toutant completed a master’s degree in art history at UQAM, producing a thesis titled “Art History as Material.”

“My project was around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” Toutant explains, “The postmodern era, the end of art history, the end of the studio at large. I was very happy in this, and I just loved art. So, to make art was an homage to art. As a gallerist now, I feel like I’m somehow inside of the production of the art with the artist. It’s at that moment that I feel privileged to witness this.”

Toutant defers significantly to his artists to take an active role in the exhibition of their works at Blouin | Division, preferring, as he says, not to “over-curate.”

“Not to say that curators are not important,” he elaborates. “But the artist works on their thing for so long that they pretty much know what they want to do. I know my space, I know my gallery, I know my lights, I know my walls, and I know how people will receive things. So, there’s an exchange with the artist. But as an art dealer, I think it’s important that the voice of the artist comes out most. The art isn’t done until they put it on the wall and put a light on it.”

When choosing which artists to represent within the gallery, Toutant is attentive to how they think of themselves in relation to art history’s overall trajectory.

“If you are interested to be a part of the evolution of an aesthetic,” he notes, “if you are part of that desire to basically put another stone in that story, another brick in that wall, then I’m interested to follow you. For me, I think it’s important for an artist to feel that they are part of a continuum of art history.”

Installation view, Serge Murphy. Courtesy of Blouin | Division.

Toutant sees no problem placing a monetary value upon the works of art that he sells. “It’s actually super easy,” he confides, describing the process much like a formula based upon the age of the artist, their costs of production, demand for their oeuvre, the rate of exchange, their potential for distribution, and even the size of the works.

“It’s important to create a price range for every artist,” says Toutant, “But there’s so much art that has been sold in the world that you just compare.”

Still, it’s not merely about slinging art like any other product.

“If I woke up one morning and said I would like to make five artists that I can sell, knowing the market, frankly, I could totally do it,” Toutant scoffs. “But if I do this, I’m cheating. And frankly I think the artists themselves would know pretty quickly that they are being cheated, too. If art history is made because there’s something to sell, well, I’m sorry but this is not art history.”

Toutant believes that Montreal in particular is a singular city well-positioned to lead the avant-garde in an increasingly globalized art market. “People here are just very happy to be touched by talent,” he observes. “It’s that overall acceptance that is Montreal. There is that energy that, yes, art is important. You don’t have to say that to people. They just get it.”

Though, the role of artists in society has changed significantly in the era of digital reproduction, with anyone, anywhere, able to disseminate images through social media, producing novel kinds of networks that exist beyond geographic boundaries and outside of traditional exhibition spaces.

“It’s less the white cube era now,” Toutant admits. “I think it’s moving out of the gallery a bit lately because of Instagram. Suddenly, the context can be a bit absurd.”

Nonetheless, galleries will always be important venues for the discovery and experience of new artforms, and Toutant takes extra care in curating a space with Blouin | Division that is both challenging and enlightening for audiences.

“I strongly believe that art history is my only guidance.”

Just then, his phone rings again.

Toutant rises from the black leather sofa in his back office and motions to me with an index finger.

“I’m sorry, this one I really need to take.”◼︎

Blouin | Division is located at 2020 William Street.

Cover image: Dominique Toutant photographed for NicheMTL

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Our Side Has to Win

Joyce Joumaa, A Temporary Loss of Consciousness, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 19 August 2024

Joyce Joumaa, Solar Panel Screen Installation, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

50 or so species of ants have been known to practice various forms of what we might consider slavery.

Aphids, the minuscule insects that suck sap from plants and flower petals, produce honeydew as waste matter. So, farmer ants collect colonies of these sugar-making aphids and mine them for their sweet excess nectar.

Scientists call this a “symbiotic” or “mutualistic” relationship because the farmer ants exhibit a protective kind of behaviour, often moving their aphid populations to new and more fertile ground and shielding them from other predators.

But farmer ants also act violently to keep their aphid populations under strict control, deliberately clipping their wings so they can’t escape, and secreting a tranquilizing chemical from their feet which makes them docile, continuously producing sap for their Formicidae masters.

The Polyergus genus of ants go one step further, enslaving other ant species to perform virtually every aspect of work life for them — from cleaning their nests to taking care of their young and even feeding them. Polyergus are so reliant upon slave populations that they no longer do anything autonomously; they exist solely to raid, entrap, and subjugate other ants.

Even though they should be capable of overcoming their attackers in sheer number and physical force, researchers discovered that Polyergus discharge a compound called a “Propaganda pheromone” that confuses their prey, disorganizing and preventing them from mounting an effective defence. The Polyergus then steal their pupae and larvae to raise them on their own as slaves, consuming some of them along the way as they travel in columns back to their colonies.

Ants have yet to develop a governing moral character that, for instance, regulates the media, or prohibits chemical warfare and kidnapping, or condemns slavery, cannibalism, and colonialism.

Nature’s dystopian brutality unfolds for ants with quotidian banality.

Yuki Isami, Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024

Yuki Isami performs at Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only time I was ever in prison was to visit and interview the author and famous Canadian bank robber, the late Stephen Reid. I somehow knew or at least suspected that he smoked cigarettes, so I brought a few packs of American Spirits as a gift. Even if he didn’t smoke, I thought, he could at least trade them for something else he was addicted to.

Of course he wanted them, and over four of the most interesting hours of my life, the two of us chain-smoked one after another after another in the yard of the William Head Institution on the south-westernmost coast of Vancouver Island. “Doing time is easy,” Reid wrote in his 2012 book A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, “quitting cigarettes is hard.”

One of the most surprising things Reid told me was that he wasn’t unhappy in jail. He rather preferred its routine to the chaos of civilian life.

The Persian-born autodidact Doris Lessing observes in her Massey Lecture, broadcast on the CBC in 1985, “We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in.” Some forms of brainwashing are benign, while others can manifest in innocent people confessing to crimes they never committed, and even killing in the name of cult, country, or king.

“The best we can hope for,” says Lessing, “is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

Angela Grauerholz, Ellipses, Blouin | Division, Until 31 August 2024

“The blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It’s a little bit of a thing that I have,” the photographer Angela Grauerholz tells me behind the scenes at her exhibition’s vernissage.

“Doors and windows, the scrim or screen that sometimes happens, the blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that. I do like putting some kind of device between the viewer and the actual image, to just give a moment of arrest.”

Joep Beving, Le Gesù, 30 June 2024

Joep Beving signs an autograph for a fan. Photographed by Darragh Kilkenny-Mondoux for NicheMTL.

In the third episode of the classic British series The Prisoner entitled “A, B, and C,” the character known as Number Six, a former spy-turned-inmate, is administered three doses of a powerful drug that allows his controller, Number Two, to view and manipulate his dreams on a TV screen.

For three consecutive nights, Number Six dreams of attending a garden party where he encounters three of his former colleagues, each of them a potentially suspect collaborator, while Number Two seeks “information” on the reason behind Number Six’s resignation.

A doctor called Number 14 delivers this experimental truth serum via injections to Number Six’s wrist, which he eventually discovers, replacing the purple drug with water on the third attempt, finally thwarting the mind-control experiment.

In each episode of the psychedelic drama, which plays out something like Gilligan’s Island on acid, Number Six attempts to discover who is ultimately in control of the island-prison, called “The Village.”

He repeatedly asks Number Two, a character played by a different actor in each episode: “Who is Number One?” And over and over, the answer he receives is a cryptic non-sequitur: “You are Number Six.”

In the end, just a slight change of inflection, a strategically placed comma, reveals a clue to the riddle’s solution.

Biennale Elektra — Illusion, Arsenal, Until 21 July 2024

Still image from Slow Track by Timothy Thomasson. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. —Psalm 124:5-7

Amidst this year’s assemblage of ultra-contemporary, technologically assisted, and artificially intelligent art, which gives a cumulative affective impression approaching Homer Simpson’s website, is a thoughtfully produced and quietly executed video entitled Slow Track by the young artist Timothy Thomasson, an infinite scene which recedes deliberately and hypnotically through familiar-feeling tableaux representing, as the accompanying text aptly describes, “nowhere in particular.”

This gently profound work is a welcome exodus from the hyperactive and overstimulating tendencies characterizing digital art today.◼︎

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

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

Cover image: Angela Grauerholz, La Compteuse 2/5, 2018, Inkjet prints, 45 1/4 x 65 1/4 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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