Tag Archives: Bradley Ertaskiran

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Reasonable Hand-Drawn Facsimile  

Soft Focus, Bradley Ertaskiran, Until 7 September 2024

Manual Axel Strain. Dawn transforms into siya (saskatoon berry) (2023), Bradley Ertaskiran, 11 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In the early 1980s, there was nothing that I wanted more than a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Verily, I was the target market for this genius stroke of consumer product branding: I was a child in the early 1980s.

Every other 1980s child I knew had one, it seemed, and wanting to be like every other child, I hankered and desired and yearned for a Cabbage Patch Kid like no other item.

I wanted one like I wanted Christmas to come. I craved a Cabbage Patch Kid more than food. It was the first time I can recall developing something approaching an addictive impulse, needing that doll.

My dad didn’t want me to have one. He didn’t want me to play with dolls, I imagine, because he thought that in this world there were boy things and there were girl things, and decidedly, dolls were the latter. So, for a long time, I just quietly coveted other children’s Cabbage Patch Kids.

But my maternal grandmother, Margaret, knew how much I wanted this toy. And being a knitter, she took it upon herself to make me a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Out of a pair of thick old stockings, denim and yarn and buttons, she crafted for me a home-made version of this marketing phenomenon which approximated a Cabbage Patch Kid. As Cabbage Patch Kids all had names, Margaret gave my doll a name, too. His name was Flint.

I loved Flint, possibly more than I would have loved a Cabbage Patch Kid. Everyone else had a Cabbage Patch Kid, but no one else had Flint. Flint was even better than the real thing — singular, not mass-produced, in retrospect, more niche.

Looking back now, Flint is my Rosebud.

Good Sine, Cyber Love Hotel, 7 July 2024

From Left: Scott Bevins, Kevin O’Neil, Lisa Teichmann, and Luke Loseth perform at Cyber Love Hotel, 7 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

At a recent party, I had the good fortune to meet an actual practicing theoretical physicist. This man, whose name was James and was a spry 81 years old and in Montreal for an academic conference, appropriately gravitated towards my companion and me, lurking in the kitchen corner.

We struck up a conversation and I could immediately discern a higher level of intelligence and experience in James. His demeanour was calm and his sense of focus unsullied by the acceleratory pace of social media.

He spoke of concepts and ideas and told stories with gravitas and substance. He talked about Schrödinger and chaos and string theory and general relativity, fascinating us as a magician might with a coin trick.

I asked James if he believed that there were simultaneous, competing realities, and without hesitation, he said absolutely yes. He told us that the best answer that physics can offer to the nature of being is “probably.”

I shuddered and felt a tingle through my spine at that moment as I realized that I had probably stumbled into my own best possible competing reality.

Conflit Majeur, with Poor Girl, Shunk, and Puberty Well, Van Horne, 19 July 2024

Children dance while Shunk perform beneath the Van Horne overpass, 19 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on the 1992 novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, features a scene in which the film’s main character, Ordell Robbie, whom Samuel L. Jackson portrays, details his dreams for the future. Robbie plans on amassing a million dollars in Mexico from his trade in the sale of illegal firearms and, as he puts it, “spend the rest of my life spending.”

This is a common theme of heist films — to steal or otherwise stockpile enough wealth to live out the remainder of one’s days free from labour’s obligations. To escape the work world, even if that work is crime, is the ideal goal.

Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider reiterates this refrain.

In a scene where the film’s protagonists, Billy, played by Hopper, and Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, sit smoking marijuana around a campfire after selling an enormous stash of cocaine, Billy declares, “We’re rich, man. We’re retired in Florida now, mister.”

Wyatt replies, “No Billy, we blew it.”

“What?” Billy asks incredulously. “That’s what it’s all about, man, like, you know, you go for the big money, man, and then you’re free, you dig?”

Wyatt gazes into the flames and smirks and repeats, this time more forcefully, “We blew it.”

During an interview contained in the special edition DVD release of the film, Peter Fonda elaborates on this enigmatic response. He talks with genuine anger about people who aspire to retire. “I want to get right in their face and say fuck you man, there is so much work to do.”

Terra Flecta, SAT, 12 July 2024

Excerpt from videographer Emma Forgues and musicians Philippe Vandal and Joël Lavoie’s Terra Flecta. Captured for NicheMTL.

Thou shalt make thee no molten gods. —Exodus 34:17

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? —Matthew 6:26

The Torah speaks of a Jealous God who commands His disciples to worship no other deities but Him. The New Testament echoes this notion throughout, attributing false idol status primarily to money and pleasures of the flesh. True fearers of God must always be in the spirit rather than in the world.

This is a paradox — and, according to most faithful orders, the origin of suffering.

Humans are born with desire. As soon as we emerge from the womb, we cry, as if in anticipation of a lifetime of unrequited yearning. To want is to never be fulfilled. And yet we seem to need wanting.

This is The Place Where We Pray, Lara Kramer, Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2024

Lara Kramer performs in front of Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago, an ageing fisherman, catches a fish so big that he has to tie it to the side of his boat to bring it ashore. But on the way back, sharks and other scavenging predators feast on the fish so that all that Santiago is left with is the fish’s skeleton.

This story is typically interpreted as a metaphor for human aspiration. The more we accumulate, the more we are apt to lose.

But taken from the shark’s angle, The Old Man and the Sea could be a holy book about an otherworldly entity — a sort of deity — who arrives in an unidentified seafaring object and feeds the masses.

It’s all about perspective.◼︎

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Cover image: Sonya Derviz, Reclining, dreaming, (2024.) Charcoal and oil on linen, 160 x 200 x 2.5 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL

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All Dressed

Vital Materialism: in conversation with Megan Bradley and Antoine Ertaskiran

We recognize things as they appear to us. But the skin of any organism is merely its outermost structure. We see the superficial first, only considering the complex and permeable interplay of inside and out as an afterthought.

Doubtless, the restored brick edifice on rue Saint-Antoine that houses Bradley Ertaskiran, the au courant contemporary art gallery, with its lofty casement windows and heavyweight steel front door, looks and feels like a manufacturing hub. Which is coincidentally what it is — a nexus where inspiration and industry, creativity and commerce, converge.

Perched on the northern border of Montreal’s formerly working-class Saint-Henri district, Megan Bradley and Antoine Ertaskiran’s exhibition space now anchors a neighbourhood that has transitioned from a material to a more ephemeral type of labour. The tobacco and record factories and tanneries may be gone, new condos and tech start-ups replacing them. Yet the elbow grease ethos remains.

For four years, Bradley and Ertaskiran have helmed one of Montreal’s best-respected galleries, successfully piercing the skin between the commercial and the avant-garde, and unapologetically fashioning great art into a marketable product.

“There is a value to the work that is done by artists,” Ertaskiran explains, “and a value to the art gallery,” in response to the rhetorical question of how to put a price tag on something as simultaneously priceless and worthless as art. “It takes time for artists to get paid, in the sense that they might not sell right away. It could be years of dedication, in some cases.”

“In theory, it is very abstract,” Bradley elaborates, “but in practice, it is very possible. Once you understand how to evaluate an artist, there is a way to look at their peers, or some other examples, and set up a pricing structure. An artist toils away in their studio, alone most of the time, and pays for the studio, and pays for whatever they need to make their work. It’s relentless and challenging sometimes, but this capacity to work with no one around them and to make things that they believe in — they’d better get paid. I don’t find it weird. I don’t struggle with the idea that art should have a price attached to it. It does, and that’s just the way it is.”

Gallery views from Ben Tong’s “The Universe Tastes Like Blueberries.” Jean-Michel Seminaro for Bradley Ertaskiran.

Montreal’s art market has evolved rapidly and gained considerable global attention since Bradley and Ertaskiran first entered the fray, having been friends and competitors before joining forces in 2020.

Moving from New Brunswick in 2002 to attend Concordia’s Fine Arts programme, Bradley initially started her own modest space in the Mile-End, and from 2011, worked her way up to director of Parisian Laundry, founded in Bradley Ertaskiran’s current location in 2007.

Ertaskiran, the son of a Paris-based art dealer, studied Art History at Université de Montréal, and inaugurated Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in 2011 on Rue Payette in Griffintown.

“When I opened my first gallery,” Ertaskiran recalls, “people were saying, ‘there hasn’t been a new gallery in so long.’ To be honest, I never really paid attention. It was a very selfish thing; I opened the gallery for me. But it grew really fast and became something that was part of Montreal. At first, it was just for me to have a space to show art that I liked. But then it really clicked when I put on my first show, and people were like, ‘what’s coming up after this?’”

The works that the pair tend to be drawn to have a curiously intertwined vibe. Their gallery is divided in its architecture, with a bright and clean room on the main level, and the grittier “bunker” in the basement. And though there are two distinct areas, with two distinct co-directors, they have a synergy when speaking to their intermingling tastes.

“It’s something that’s just a feeling,” says Bradley. “It’s nothing that makes sense — for us, anyway. We’ve known each other for a while, so we know each other’s aesthetic, we know what we’re looking for, and it just kind of works in a weird way. It’s not so weird, though, because it comes from experience, too. A lot of trial and error, and developing your own ideas of what you like, and why. There are the prerequisites — like, the artist is serious, they take their work really seriously, and they’re totally dedicated. That kind of stuff is easy. But then there’s the feeling.”

Ertaskiran concurs. “Most of the time, we kind of agree. It’s very rare that we disagree. It’s very instinctive. It’s a whole package we’re looking for.”

The duo conceive of curation as its own form of artistic expression. But they don’t have any hard and fast formula to the artists they choose to represent.

“It’s almost like you’re curating a space based on a shared understanding of what you’re all trying to do together,” says Bradley. “It’s less about a specific aesthetic. Some galleries have a specific look toward very conceptual practices, or a minimalist aesthetic, or whatever. We don’t have that. We like a lot of tactility and a lot of material in the work that we show. There’s a lot of attention to what it’s made of. What is it about the material and the choices? But it’s not so easy to describe, specifically, our aesthetic. It’s more about shared goals.”

“Obviously, we look at the quality of the work,” says Ertaskiran, “but also the person. Megan and I usually look at different artists, and we debate. We talk about their practice. We learn more about the artist and their work. The way the artist talks about their work, how interesting the work is in the gallery context, the potential for a show, or a group show.”

Gallery views from Sharona Franklin’s “Crip Sweet Home.” Jean-Michel Seminaro for Bradley Ertaskiran.

Summer is Bradley Ertaskiran’s season of collaborative effort, a tradition which began in 2020, just as pandemic restrictions were tentatively lifting. Paradoxically, the coronavirus era was an auspicious time to launch a new art gallery.

“We were part of the first businesses that were officially allowed to open, because we are on the street,” says Ertaskiran. “All the malls and everything were closed, but you could have a business on the street. So, that summer, we did a big group show, and we invited 20-something artists.”

“And people came,” says Bradley. “It was something to do. It was a hard time in general. People had shows cancelled, and it was hard on artists. So, we had taken part of our revenue from the show and divided it between every artist that participated. It was good for us, too, being the new business that we were, because we got all this time to figure out what we were, and who we were, together.”

Since its inception, Bradley Ertaskiran has exhibited some of the most interesting new works coming out of Montreal and Canada, more broadly, from diverse artists such as Azza El Siddique, Janet Werner, and Jeremy Shaw — the latter of whom will have a solo exhibition occupying the entire gallery in September — and brought them to larger showcases, like Art Toronto, Felix Art Fair, and Art Basel Miami Beach.

Their current exhibitions feature Ben Tong, the Toronto-born and Los Angeles-based painter and photographer, and Sharona Franklin, another Canadian discovery who hasn’t yet seen many significant shows in privately owned galleries. But both Bradley and Ertaskiran have the keen ability to peer beneath Montreal’s surface, and to differentiate our unique vitality from pricier, more cut-throat cities.

“In New York,” says Ertaskiran, “you can be out all day, every day, every night, at art openings. There’s museums, there’s so much to see, and so many people to see, and I think it’s also part of why it’s such a great city, and why the scene is so vibrant. But we go to art fairs there, and we talk to artists and ask if we can come to their studio this or that day, and they’re like, ‘I’m busy.’”

“In Montreal, you don’t have to think so much about it in terms of a return,” Bradley observes. “For a long time, I thought that maybe it was a slightly negative thing that you could be an artist here without having that kind of pressure of production. But I do think that there are advantages. Having worked with artists who are really in the hustle, sometimes that hustle limits the time that you can think about the work that you’re making. There is a difference here where the pace can be a bit slower,” muses Bradley. “It allows more time for reflection.”◼︎

Bradley Ertaskiran is located at 3550 rue Saint-Antoine Ouest.

Cover image: Megan Bradley and Antoine Ertaskiran photographed by Gaëlle Leyorer.

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Glorious & Free

Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord pondereth the hearts. —Proverbs 21:2

Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, Thomas Ospital, Maison Symphonique, 23 March 2024

It is high time that we address the problem of certain immigrants to Quebec, as it appears that Mr. Trudeau seems powerless to do so.

I’m not talking about asylum-seekers or people displaced by war and conflict beyond their control. I’m talking about those who come here unwilling to adapt to our culture, to speak our language, who feel entitled to access our services, our schools, our hospitals, our courts, without so much as a thank you.

I’m talking about immigrants who expect Quebec to bend to their way of life, rather than the other way around, immigrants who refuse to integrate and get along. We should return these ill-informed, ignorant, ass-backward people forthwith and en masse by the busload to the shithole country they come from.

I’m talking, of course, about Americans.

Nadah El Shazly, with Saudade, Centre PHI, 21 March 2024

Nadah El Shazly performs with Sarah Pagé at Centre PHI. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Immigrants built Canada. Yet, it’s not the immigrants that we typically think of.

The English, the French, and the Dutch colonized Canada by robbing it from Indigenous folks. But the Irish, the Scottish, Italians, Chinese, Ukrainians, Poles, the diaspora of Jews, and Arabs did most of the heavy lifting.

We bought stolen land, and upon it, built a nation. We are the cultural mosaic that Trudeau Sr. spoke of when he spoke of multiculturalism. We are Canada.

Future generations of immigrants will look back on us to see how well, or poorly, we welcomed them. How will they remember us?

The Things We Cannot See, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 22 March – 11 May 2024

Rafael Y. Herman, Purpura Affectum,​ ​2022, inkjet print, 58” x 87”. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I am in love with the silence of the image. The world can be a noisy place, and cities, especially, are brimming with cacophony. Sirens. Horns. Loudspeakers. Busses, trucks, and cars with booming stereos. People shouting in every language. Even our own minds are almost always filled with the din of a thousand simultaneous thoughts.

When I find myself before an image, the first thing I notice is its silent fury. Images don’t need to speak. They say everything they need to say simply by way of exhibition. There is a profound honesty in the ability to communicate without words, to show rather than tell, to implant an idea as if by telepathy. Images broadcast on another frequency.

Janet Werner, Spiders and Snakes, Bradley Ertaskiran, 21 March – 4 May 2024

In Janet Werner’s recent paintings, what comes into focus is an artist at peace with her risky vision.

When I interviewed Janet Werner for NicheMTL back in December 2022, I thought that her work was about juxtaposing two images against one another or cutting an image in two and rejoining the splice. But it has evolved to represent the entirety of its mediumicity: the tape that holds two images together; the canvas folded over on itself. It’s as if the artist has once again taken a step back and incorporated herself viewing her own distorted images.

There is still a sense of violence to Werner’s new body of work. But in this collection of recent paintings, what comes into focus is an artist at peace with her risky vision. Werner has achieved a new plateau of confidence in her signature schtick, which takes it beyond a gimmick and into the realm of a bona fide post-modern art vernacular. It is both refreshing and challenging to witness an artist progress in real time. It forces the viewer to progress, too.

The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney (20 March 1939 – 29 February 2024)

Brian Mulroney understood that good leadership is about service — a concept that seems lost on today’s politicians.

An old adage espouses that if you’re not a radical in youth, you have no heart. But if you’re not a conservative as you come of age, you have no wisdom.

The late former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced some deeply unpopular initiatives during his tenure, not least of which was the Goods and Services sales tax, otherwise known as the GST.

In 1991, when the GST came into effect, many Canadians saw it as a grab for cash, punishing citizens for spending their hard-earned money. But it was also necessary to come up with some sort of innovative revenue stream to fund government operations, one that would stimulate the domestic economy while keeping Canada competitive in an increasingly global marketplace.

Nobody likes taxes. But taxing people on what they spend rather than what they earn is a smart and fiscally conservative manner of doing both of those things, and Mr. Mulroney possessed the foresight to enact this particular tax and do it at the tail-end of his time as Prime Minister, effectively falling on his own sword for the sake of our nation’s future.

Brian Mulroney understood that good leadership is about service — a concept that seems lost on today’s politicians who are more concerned with their immediate public image than with long-term priorities that will outlive their political careers. Canada is in desperate need of a return to Mulroney’s brand of conservative wisdom.

It is not every day that you have the opportunity to pay your respects to a former Prime Minister. So, I braved the unseasonably bitter wind last Thursday and stopped for a moment at St. Patrick’s Basilica, where Mr. Mulroney was lying in state.

I wasn’t anticipating his family to be there greeting the public. But there they were, welcoming fellow mourners with gratitude and grace. Feeling a bit nervous in the presence of such a public figure, I shook Mila Mulroney’s hand and recited the usual formal niceties — that I was sorry for her loss.

Unexpectedly, Mrs. Mulroney held onto my hand for quite a while and spoke to me directly, thanking me for taking the time to come. And I realized that this was not just a formality for her. So, I told her that her husband was a good man who served our country with honour and dignity and thanked her and her children for their commitment to him.

Their commitment to him enabled his commitment to us.◼︎

Cover image: Janet Werner

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Engine of Survival: notes on Nicolas Grenier’s future visions

The future was undoubtedly Leonard Cohen’s purview.

Montreal’s perpetual poet laureate seemed to possess an uncanny ability to diagnose and prognosticate what was to come. His 1992 song entitled “The Future,” from the album of the same name, is a blunt indictment of the tortuous human path Cohen foresaw. “Things are going to slide,” he growls ominously in the chorus; “slide in all directions.” The filmmaker Oliver Stone used this song to superb effect in his 1993 film, Natural Born Killers, a sendup of serial-killer celebrities and the American media’s creed, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Stone’s satire of murder and media was an attempt to hold up a funhouse mirror to the geopolitics and popular culture of the not-too-distant day, as if to say, behold what you shall become. There was a sense at that time that over-the-top satire would be enough, that the public would inevitably decode this cinematic harbinger, this prolonged Saturday Night Live skit, anticipate the dangerous future toward which we were tumbling, and change course. But that didn’t happen. The film instead encouraged the sardonic acceptance of death and destruction as tabloid entertainment. And Cohen was right: the future was murder.

Nicolas Grenier’s outstanding new works of sculpture, drawing, and painting, now on exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran, echo Cohen’s dire futuristic warnings. Charcoal drawings on paper depict chessboard scenes of toppled deities; abstract op-art paintings pop out into three-dimensional space; two prominent statues placed on pedestals in the gallery’s center fuse famous figures: the Statue of Liberty melds with Vladimir Lenin, and Siddhartha with Jesus Christ in extremis. Surely, some form of Cohen-esque poetry is at work in conventional artistic traditions being deployed in the service of subverting cultural conventions.

There is an undercurrent throughout Grenier’s oeuvre that all bets are off. The old yardsticks of human civilization are being uprooted and the twin columns of ideology and religion — those once-permanent measures of human progress — are irrevocably transitioning into hybrid, mutant forms. They are unrecognizable, and yet still indispensable. A fundamental theme of the show, entitled Esquisses d’un inventaire, is the sense that the winds of change themselves have changed. An alternate title for this collection could have been the Cohen lyric: “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it’s overturned the order of the soul.”

Although they are technically excellent, even nearing perfection, Grenier’s illusionistic paintings, in particular, hint at a devolutionary impulse in operation in the historical record. Seemingly clean lines upon closer inspection reveal the jagged imperfections of the painting process — and of the media themselves. The canvas’s flat surfaces are enlisted to do more than simply represent images; the two-dimensional plane does triple duty here, transcending its function as a purveyor of paint and jumping valence into the realm of performance. What the paintings mean is a matter of interpretation. What they do is not.

It is noteworthy that Azza El Siddique’s enormous and slowly corroding two-headed cobra is on display in the gallery’s basement bunker space, as if symbolically manipulating the inner workings of the underworld just beneath Grenier’s superficial interface. In its repose, the snake evokes a majestic ferocity, poised just as easily to kill its prey or turn on itself. The opposite of Ouroboros, the fabled serpent devouring its own tail, this creature of revisionist mythology has no tail to devour, and no orifice from which to expel its own venomousness. It is pure appetite, the world serpent now eating for two.

Throughout the twentieth century, and every century before it, there was a broad cultural assumption that the future would be an improvement upon the past, that each generation would be better than its ancestors, that technology would aid humanity, and that the word ‘progress’ possessed some intrinsic, universal consequence. In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the first iteration of a new, millennial generation in which progress is synonymous with stagnation and retrogression, in which technologies reflect human failures, and in which the monolithic future has shattered into shards of potential futurity.

This new-normal, doomed-future mentality is a result of what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher described as “consciousness deflation” or: the systematic and deliberate destruction of individual and collective social agency. The ability to imagine better futures has been replaced with the inability to imagine such things, and with the assumption that time is but a slow march towards oblivion. Of course, capitalists are among the first to advance this assumption, because nothing is as profitable as despair. Keeping large populations of people in ignorance, with some hint of remembrance for a time when the future seemed bright, is a tenet of Control.

One of the biggest challenges of foretelling the future is effectively communicating a prophetic vision. And one of the biggest curses of the psychic mind is not having an answer. How to tell the others? Nostradamus predicted the future in cryptic metaphors. Leonard Cohen wrote poetry and recorded them as songs. Oliver Stone set them to ironic, brutal images. And Nicolas Grenier paints, draws, and sculpts complex concepts simultaneously into aesthetically pleasing and thought-provoking works of art. Creation, not destruction, will save our future. And the best modes of communication are also the oldest.

Although Leonard Cohen is championed by today’s wokest, he was hardly of that ilk, decrying the rise of drug use, frivolous sex, and abortion, and pointing to a perversion of more traditional morals as the culprit for humanity’s imminent descent. Yet, there is a crack in Cohen’s crusty façade, and that is how the optimism gets in. If we are to survive as a species, Cohen suggests, we need to love without conditions, without borders, and without prejudice. There is no roadmap for that future. It is unprecedented. It is literally off-the-grid. That is what I see Grenier’s works signalling as well: where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Verily, the only path to the future is back.◼︎

Esquisses d’un inventaire continues at Bradley Ertaskiran through 22 April 2023.

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Worldwide Pants

Week-end, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 7 January 2023

I know that this film is supposed to be funny. I know that it’s radical chic, retro now, and forever cool. I also know that it contains complicated tracking shots that make it a significant technical achievement. I get that it’s satire. But what has come to pass is not far off. It seems the ultimate goal of global conflict is essentially a weekend away.

Discuss these and other matters of Godardian concern (en français) at the Cinémathèque’s Roundtable, “Godard aujourd’hui?” 8 February 2023, 17:00h, free admission.

Zoë Mc Pherson, On Fire, Pitch Blender (SFX)

Music more than other artforms orders time. Of course, everything including every form of art exists in time, just like every fish swims in water. Film unfolds in time. Photographs capture it. Dance moves through it. Even paintings, once dry, slow time down to a complete standstill, when we’re standing still in front of them. But music orders and regulates, assembles and reassembles the time we exist in while it is playing, whether the music has a time signature or not, whether it has rhythm or not. Musicians, too, structure time, especially techno musicians.

Time is a strange thing. It appears to move both forward and cyclically at once. Seasons forever turn from one to another. Yet a sense of newness always accompanies them. Just like fashion.

I noted that Zoë Mc Pherson in their press shots for Pitch Blender wear a pair of black techy-looking Diesel trousers circa about 1997. I noted them because I had the same trousers. They were pretty high-grade back in the day. In Canada, a pair of Diesel jeans cost a little over $100; those pants were at least $250. I had to save up. They might have been issued on the cusp of Diesel introducing their short-lived StyleLab line, possibly prototypes for a higher-end, more limited, and more design-oriented kind of collection.

Delighted by Mc Pherson’s pants in the photographs, I emailed an old friend who works in fashion and, acerbically, she wrote back, “Y2K nostalgia is real.” I remember thinking at the time, back in the ‘90s, that those pants with all their snaps and pockets would suit living in some sort of post-apocalyptic world — a compartment for everything necessary for survival.

Sure enough, here we are, in survival-mode. Still, I’m glad that Mc Pherson dug out those particular trousers because it recharged my street cred and rejuvenated my classic wardrobe. Although I don’t have them anymore. They must have at some point disintegrated, along with the future. But I did naturally have the matching jacket in quite good condition and I’ve rescued it from the back of the closet and have been turning heads with it all winter. One more time.

Pitch Blender is released 3 February via SFX.

Julia Dault, Never Odd Or Even, Bradley Ertaskiran, 19 January 2023 – 25 February 2023

The longest palindrome I know is, Go Hang A Salami / I Am A Lasagna Hog. The actor Michael Anderson who portrayed The Man From Another Place on the original Twin Peaks series shared this wonderful palindrome in an interview contained on the extras for season one’s first DVD release. Fans of Twin Peaks sent Anderson palindromes after his backwards-talking character repeated the phrase “Wow Bob Wow” on the show.

Never Odd Or Even is a palindrome as well, which I never would have guessed had the press release for Julia Dault’s solo show, now on at Bradley Ertaskiran and despite the construction worth the visit, explained it. The works aren’t explicitly palindromic to me, but what you can do is start on one side of the gallery and move around to the other side, and then reverse course and rotate backward in the opposite direction, and voilà. A palindrome in action.

Julia Dault Never Odd Or Even continues through 25 February at Bradley Ertaskiran.

Contretemps, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, Soft Power (Safety Records)

Machines are hard and I admire them for that and at times I think that we should become more like them. Like Eddie’s unfurling, drunken diatribe in hurlyburly, either the play or the movie, we should aspire to become things — colder, harder, like rocks, or machines, to ensure our longevity. Machines may get old and break down, but machines do not go soft.

I can attest from personal experience that being soft has never empowered me to do anything, not least the things I want to do, especially those things for which being hard is prerequisite.

Soft Power is released 3 February via Safety Records.

Andy Warhol, Screen Tests, MAC, 17 November 2022 – 10 April 2023

Last February in Houston I went to a screening of a selection of Andy Warhol’s films on 16mm at Rice Cinema. It was my first film in a theatre after the pandemic, and I was excited to see real celluloid snap through a projector once again. But I could not have chosen more challenging material to rekindle a love of movies.

Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. He didn’t just suggest it; it was His divine order. And Jesus knew that if He didn’t command it, nobody would do it. Nobody does it anyway. But that doesn’t make it any less of a command.

It’s easy to love our family and our friends. It’s easy to love our pets. It’s encouraged to love celebrities and public figures whom we’ve never met and don’t care to love us back. But enemies are difficult to love. It’s practically impossible.

I think Andy Warhol made his Screen Tests to build empathy in viewers, to teach us to love, to force us to stare into a stranger’s face (some famous, some not) until it dissolves into abstraction, until the reel runs out and we’re left with nothing but a banana and a beam of light.◼︎

Andy Warhol as seen by Nelson Henricks screens at the Cinémathèque Québécoise January 26 – 28, 2023.

Cover image: Zoë Mc Pherson photographed by Lucie Rox.

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All Dressed

La Femme 100 têtes: in conversation with Janet Werner

The visionary 20th century artist Brion Gysin believed that trends in the visual arts arrived, innovatively speaking, about a half-century ahead of those in modern literature. Thus, only by the late-1950s did Gysin and his most famous collaborator, the Beat Generation author, William S. Burroughs, deploy in narrative fiction those decades-old cut-up techniques that Surrealists like Max Ernst called “Collage,” or filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein dubbed “Montage.”

The internet, though, has scrambled these clear temporal taxonomies, and today, it is more difficult to define which trends influence which, and when. The cut-up has become a legitimate artistic method that, true to form, exists best out-of-context, when it neither follows nor is followed.

Cutting into the written word, like cutting into the photographic image, produced for Burroughs and Gysin unexpected and often exciting juxtapositions — transitions that possibly reveal concealed meanings, tease out inscrutable interpretations, and even render the psychically repressed in sharp relief. The meaning of things evolves and adapts, too, across disparate media and genres. More recently in the Hip-Hop lexicon, for example, the phrase “in the cut” is used literally to designate an actual, physical location where something — or someone — is concealed. In the cut, some fundamental truth is obscured, lurking, threatening to be laid bare.

The Montreal artist Janet Werner’s latest cycle, collected in a beautiful new publication entitled Sticky Pictures, rests squarely on the splice. A number of Werner’s provocative paintings take fashion photographs — almost exclusively women — as their subject matter, cut, pasted, and represented in Werner’s striking, painterly figurative expressionism. In the cut, which paint on canvas makes even messier somehow, Werner’s viewers are encouraged to look between, to search beyond the image for what was omitted, and what, if anything, exists in the void.

“It’s been a kind of sideways step,” Werner tells me of the montage style, during a December visit to her studio in Montreal’s Mile-End district.

“It’s been a kind of accidental move into that cinematic idea. Lately, I’ve been intercutting images, which causes a shift. You can’t read the images in the original way because there’s something happening. I guess I want them to be objects that contain questions, and that make you wrestle with how to interpret them. So, it’s not necessarily a critique, but it’s an opening up, possibly, of how to interpret the images. I was for a long time hiding the cuts. Now, most of these paintings have these splits in them. You can see where the collage is happening. Having not studied cinema, I’m not familiar with all the terminology, like jump-cuts, and different cinematic techniques. There is a sense of time that’s introduced by these splits.”

It is that sense of time that lends Werner’s work its urgent momentum, propelling the viewer forward or alternately scrubbing backwards over the rupture. It’s not unlike our experience nowadays of scrolling through social media, for which Werner confesses a fascination.

“It’s Instagram, really,” Werner says. “I’m actively looking, and it’s a terrible addiction, and I have an addictive personality type, so I just feel it’s sort of ruining things a little bit. Although at the same time I’m so curious and interested in everything. I was never a big Facebook person. I’m not much of a talker. I don’t like to generate text for any kind of consumption. But images, that’s my life. So Instagram is just like an endless stream. And it’s hard to not look. And also, you feel responsible to participate. That’s a mechanism for sharing what you do, and everyone’s looking at it. If you’re not participating, you feel a little bit like people won’t know about your stuff.”

Nonetheless, Werner has achieved venerable artist status, the au courant Little Burgundy gallery Bradley Ertaskiran representing her work after a decade-long relationship with curator Megan Bradley of The Parisian Laundry. “2008 was my first show there,” recalls Werner. “It’s been 14 years, wow.” Bradley Ertaskiran actively tours Werner’s catalogue, along with all their artists, at influential international fairs like Art Basel in Miami and The Independent Art Fair in New York City.

As well, Werner now operates under the aegis of prestigious Los Angeles gallery Anat Ebgi, which will feature her solo exhibition, entitled, Call Me When You Start Wearing Red, in January. “There’s something so flexible-seeming about the medium of painting,” Werner marvels, “that it can still be functioning and still be practiced by so many artists. Such a simple medium, that’s incredible.”

Werner’s cut-up paintings seem to appeal so much to the senses — visually at first, but also, notably, to texture and tempo.

“I love all the senses,” Werner admits.

“I think about dance a lot, and choreography. Rhythm. Movement. Those things are certainly a part of what I think about when I try to create movement in an image, which is static. I was having this conversation with someone and he used this phrase, which I loved, which was ‘dialogue of withholding.’ The idea that you can’t actually solve these images because there’s this rupture. And there’s some kind of a disturbance in the formal elements, the colour, the rhythm, the movement through painting. I think that’s how it’s solved.”

To me, there is a glaring problem in Werner’s works: they seem to aestheticize a sort of violence. As with Hitchcock’s famous Psycho shower scene, which reduces Janet Leigh to death by a thousand cuts, there is a perverse pleasure in lingering over images of beautiful women in bits.

“My earlier work had more ugliness,” Werner explains, “a different kind of violence. I think these are still kind of violent in ways because of the split. In my earlier work, there was a more expressionist handling of that disruption where I would destroy the face more obviously. These kind of retain their photographic reference. But some of the earlier things, they were actually wiped out. I wasn’t trying to make something ugly, but I was trying to alter the reading, removing the face in different ways.”

To read these works solely as resistance to fashion’s unattainable ideals, or as a pleasurable destruction of traditional beauty conventions, is too one-dimensional. They are that, too. Yet Werner conceives of them as another mode to subvert fashion standing in culturally for desire writ large.

“In spite of the fact that the material I use is drawn from fashion, it’s not something that I grew up looking at,” Werner says.

“I consciously avoided looking at fashion magazines. I thought they were … not anti-feminist, but I resisted them as a feminist. I felt like it was a mistake in values. But now as I use that material, it was so fascinating when I did turn to look at it, having dismissed it and not looked at it for so long. There’s so much seduction in there. As a painter, shape and light and colour — all those things are the language I use. I don’t really think consciously about critiquing the material though in the process of subverting it, which is important to me. There is, I guess, an undercutting of the original toward another end, which is rather open-ended. Shifting the narrative away from Capitalist desire. Although there’s a whole ‘nother conversation about the system of art and art collecting and all that.”

We rest for a while on a painting called Folding Woman (2009), the first in which Werner explicitly began to accentuate the cut. “This was Nicole Kidman, actually,” Werner explains. “I subscribed to Vogue, and the magazine arrived and accidentally had folded exactly like this. So I just taped it on my studio wall and it sat there for years and I did nothing with it. And then one day I was like, ‘I don’t know what to paint, I’ll just paint that,’ and it kind of opened up all of this.”

Looking around at all the beheaded women with orphan limbs induces an almost carnivalesque atmosphere. I chose to solve the withholding of the cuts by interpreting them instead as folds, like the Fold-Ins the cartoonist Al Jaffee made famous on the back pages of Mad Magazine, which revealed a hidden message when the page was folded over.

“There’s no verbal or narrative solution,” Werner tells me. “There’s something about how the pieces come together that, in a sense, answers the problem that’s set up in the painting. In terms of a physical understanding and processing, I believe that if you respond to the images, it’s a physical response to something that’s happening that’s activated in the colour, and the tonalities, and the movement, and composition. Those things we somehow physically understand. Even if it’s not translatable into something that’s coherent in verbal terms. That’s why it’s not verbal. It’s another language.”

I ask if Werner sees painting as a language. “I do. I do, yeah,” she affirms.

“And I think of myself as a kind of formalist, an abstract painter. Even though they’re figurative, it’s very abstract in how I solve the problem. How the colours operate, it’s an abstract language.”◼︎

Call Me When You Start Wearing Red runs January 21st – February 25th, 2023, at Anat Ebgi Gallery.

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Autumn Serenade

Janet Werner, STICKY PICTURES, Bradley Ertaskiran, October 15th 2022

Tucked in the back room of Bradley Ertaskiran — the old Parisian Laundry, and one of the finer gallery spaces in the city — was the book launch for Janet Werner’s formidable new publication, Sticky Pictures. People talked and drank wine and had their books autographed by the artist in attendance and pretended not to look at one another.

I adore the frequent subjects of Werner’s paintings — girls. And I revel in the pleasure of adoring them through Werner’s painterly gaze rather than my own sharp male one.

A joke about Andy Warhol’s desire not only to be a part of the art scene but to be seen being a part of the art scene was that he would even attend the opening of a drawer. I am such a space cadet for art in this city that I go to the launch of a book.

Il Trovatore, Opera de Montreal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, September 13th, 2022

An open letter to my dear ex-wife of 43 years, the lovely Ms. Marlene Ssøørreennsseenn:

Dear Marlene;

It is with heavy heart that we must equivalently admit after trying to make things work despite having been divorced for over four decades that our 12-day marriage was a mistake. Had we children they might have given us grandchildren by now, but alas we were only wedded for a little less than two weeks in the late 1970s, and starting a family didn’t come up in conversation, as women’s liberation at that time socially forbade any unsolicited babytalk.

Suffice to say that we did not bring out the best in each other, what with the fourteen-year legal battle in the mid-‘80s over the fortunes from the fortune cookies following our second and final dinner date at Wings, which as you will apprehend is long since closed due to health violations.

With this Wing fortune, I thee forfeit the last scrap of our love affair, leaving you the worse luck, both figuratively and literally. Should the numbers on the verso ever win a lottery, I trust your solicitor to contact me forthwith with my fair share, as determined by concurrent legal precedent for post-nuptial fortune cookie winnings.

In closing, please forward any and all future correspondence to:
L. Oserfield

Heartbreak Hotel, room no. 237 (haunted)

Backxwash, with with LaFHomme, Morgan-Paige and Jodie Jodie Roger, October 28th 2022, Le Monastère

There is no doubt that Backxwash is the hottest hip hop artist in Canada. The crystalline concentration that comes with sobriety shines on HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING. This year’s Halloween weekend album launch was a triumph of both style and substance, fashionable and profoundly meaningful, profane and sacred.

Backxwash is the antithesis of mainstream rappers who self-aggrandize and court controversy, or make patent pitches for luxury products that their listeners can ill afford. A constant and self-reflexive state of awareness permeates the recording and was ever-present in its live performance, too. Refreshing is not the word because the album is akin to gargling with activated charcoal, but whatever the descriptor, it’s deeply cleansing.

Boris: His Life in Music, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, October 18th, 2022, Salle Pierre-Mercure

The loss of Boris Brott to Montreal’s classical music community is immeasurable. Still, the show must go on, and the Orchestre Classique de Montreal paid appropriate tribute to the verve of a man who lived for that orchestra. The OCM began its 83rd season by lovingly presenting some of Brott’s all-time favourite musical works.

Before the performance, a photographic montage of Brott cycled onscreen, images of the maestro with celebrities and dignitaries, clowning around, full of wit, wisdom, and life. What a life lived, and what a legacy Brott left behind, carrying dutifully on in the tradition of his musical family before him who dedicated their days to tuning the world.

Brott’s death seems all the more tragic considering its accidental nature, and after his miraculous recovery from the nastiest strain of covid at the beginning of the pandemic. However, as the saying goes, the man who dies in an accident understands the nature of destiny.

This Is Not A Scarf, Soha Zandi, Somaye Farhan & Elahe Moonesi, Place des Arts, October 30th 2022

In protest of the shocking human rights abuses taking place in Iran right now, a group of artists created an inspired imaginative response that took place on the steps of Place des Arts, without any fanfare or official permission from the usual authorities. They showed up with a pile of scarves and stood there waiting for passersby to tie them on in any fashion they saw fit. The result was a sincerely moving performance, which was a performance by virtue, but produced a spontaneous moment.

I was temporarily enlisted to stand guard next to a pile of camera equipment on the busy Saint-Catherine Street sidewalk when an elderly gentleman approached me inquiring, in French at first — a Quebecois accent from another time and place — what was going on. He appeared to be about sixty-five, tall, lean and cleanshaven, with an enviable headful of smartly styled salt-and-pepper hair. He had on a fitted black leather jacket and hanging around his neck was a comparatively outdated digital camera, an old Sony with a top-mounted viewfinder.

I apologized that my French was not as good as my English, but he was well-spoken in both languages and when I told him this was a performance art piece for Iranian freedom he looked at me for a moment, his face becoming very grave, and said, “I think this is the end of the world. But I won’t be here to see it. I’m eighty.” I was surprised by his candour and tried to nod knowingly as he took leave to photograph the happening.

Returning, he mused, “A lot of people in Quebec complain, but we are lucky to live here.” I knew what he meant. Peace activism begins and ends with peaceful activism, acting peacefully.◼︎

@nichemtl

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