Tag Archives: Concordia

All Dressed

The Atrocity Exhibition: in conversation with Tomas Dessureault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Une année sans lumière: notes on a new dark age at Quebec universities

Many inside and out of academia were deeply troubled recently when Donald Trump’s White House decided to withhold U.S. $400 million in grants and contracts at Columbia University over what the administration described as the school’s “failure to address on-campus antisemitism.”

The U.S. President in April also terminated $2.2 billion in funding for Harvard and announced in May that an additional $450 million would be frozen because, according to a joint statement from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration, the university had become “a breeding ground for virtue signalling and discrimination.”

An overwhelming majority of international scholars have voiced their concerns that targeting these institutions’ budgets (which fund broad and unrelated research activities like cancer treatments and viral outbreak prevention) as a reaction to ideological disagreements between Trump and university administrators, amounts to an unprecedented act of political coercion, and may be unconstitutional.

Both Harvard and Columbia have filed lawsuits in Federal Court against Trump’s moves. Doubtless it will only hurt the White House that their lawyers were educated at Harvard and Columbia.

Trump’s cuts have manifested immediately in staff reductions. Columbia is set to eliminate 180 jobs, while Harvard President Alan Garber took a voluntary 25 percent pay cut. However, neither of these measures will be enough to offset the cumulative multibillion-dollar shortfalls these universities face.

Academics have roundly denounced the Trump administration’s decisions by various means, writing damning op-eds in sympathetic publications, or, more dramatically, leaving the U.S. altogether.

Jason Stanley, who authored a book entitled Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future and until March was Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale, has since relocated to Toronto as an academic refugee. Stanley, who is Jewish, claims that the United States is “tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship.” As one of the west’s leading authorities on political philosophy, he should know.

To Canadians, it appears appalling that American centres for higher learning might be punished, or purged, because of their political leanings. But it is obviously happening domestically, too. And it is happening specifically in Quebec for even less rational reasons. It is not political ideology that is being penalized here, but rather native language and regional origin.

Last year, the media widely reported staggering tuition increases implemented by the CAQ government to be levied against international and out-of-province students starting in the 2024-’25 academic year. Ostensibly, the plan was to correct a supposed imbalance in funding between the province’s French and English universities. The increased tuition would serve a two-fold purpose: the surplus revenue from foreign Anglophone students would be transferred to Francophone universities to fund French-language education for Francophone Quebecers, thus resisting the supposed decline of French in Quebec, as well as limiting the share of public capital escaping the province from foreign students who often leave after graduation.

Resulting from Quebec’s policy shift, enrollment is down across the board — applications from international students to all universities have declined by an average of 43 percent — and McGill this week announced the elimination of 60 staff positions. Ironically, it is Francophone universities that have experienced the steepest drop-offs, with UQTR at around 60 percent. Who knew, few from the international Francophonie want to move to Trois-Rivières.

This is why the CAQ’s policies are so ill-conceived — because in attempting to injure English-speaking students and immigrants, Quebec is hurting everyone, native Francophone Quebecers included. If fewer international students are paying the hiked tuition prices at McGill and Concordia, then UdeM and UQÀM are receiving less than hoped for in financial transfers from these schools.

Not to mention the secondary and tertiary damage. If Quebec universities are facing a projected $200 million deficit this year, guesstimate all the additional currency these foreign students will not be spending in the province — on food, rent, bills, clothes, Opus cards, nightlife, and all the other things students typically spend their money on. Imagine the losses for the SAQ and the SQDC alone.

It should go without saying that French-speakers are also landlords, grocery clerks, employees of Hydro Quebec and Videotron, Uniqlo and H&M, food servers, bartenders, delivery, bus, and Uber drivers. Students, whatever their language and nationality, animate an immeasurable proportion of Quebec’s economy. Kneecapping them hurts Quebec first — and most.

Then, there is the damage to Quebec’s reputation as a destination for advanced education. Clearly, foreign students this year have already reconsidered coming to this province to attend university. Even if the CAQ quickly reverses its policies and resets tuition fees to precedent rates, international students have already been given the impression that they are less welcome here than in other Canadian provinces.

Quebec risks further exacerbating its stereotypical “Brain Drain,” a phenomenon observed for at least the last quarter century as talented graduates evacuate elsewhere. No doubt, fewer academic rock stars will choose to work in Quebec in the future because they will have the privilege of teaching fewer high-quality students. Perhaps this is why Jason Stanley chose UofT over McGill.

Students move to Quebec to train as doctors, professors, legislators. They start businesses, become community leaders, and thicken the soup of Quebecois society. They make celebrated movies, write insightful novels, and establish important literary journals. They launch legendary record labels, found defining festivals, establish iconic recording studios, and form bands of distinction that go on to produce albums that define entire generations. Some of them start magazines to write about it all. Especially students deepen the profundity of the culture of a place.

The CAQ’s strategy is a ridiculous equation that anyone with intelligence can see is straight-up bad math. It is anti-immigrant and xenophobic at best, and intolerant and flat-out racist at worst. And its impact in practice is so arbitrary that it actually makes American policy look nuanced for at least naming a target. Trump despises the woke. Whereas Legault abhors everyone who isn’t a mirror image of him.

Education is not an affront to politics, nationality, or language. Rather, it enriches them all.◼︎

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