Tag Archives: Darling Foundry

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The Goddamn Weight of Dreams

Walter Scott “Heavily Greebled” and Megane Voghell “Jets de sauvegarde,” Fonderie Darling, 5 March – 10 May 2026

A large, abstract sculpture featuring organic shapes and vibrant colors, displayed in a contemporary gallery setting with textured floors and an industrial backdrop.
Gallery view of Megane Voghell’s “Jets de sauvegarde,” Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
—Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

Among the most reliable strategies for coping with the seemingly relentless and interminable meaninglessness of contemporary life — the never-ending cycles of plague, war, famine, and death and the reiteration of these through ubiquitous media — is excess.

Drunkenness is a method of extending dreams into consciousness, or rather, of blurring the boundaries between dreams and waking life, the subconscious and the conscious.

One reason could be that dreams collapse time. In a 1975 study published in the journal Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, researchers found that dreamers of especially bizarre or emotionally charged dreams experienced time at up to 1/100 of the duration of absolute time, meaning that a dreamer could feasibly live 100 dreamtime minutes in the span of one waking minute.

“Living the dream” is commonly held as a desirable goal. We chase after dreams and try to turn them into realities. Cinema emulates the dream state by projecting images and restructuring time and meaning onto a screen.

Cinema, therefore, is the most intoxicating form of media in which viewers become dreamers experiencing collective reciprocal hypnotism.

Quantificateur sonique vol. 4: Charmaine Lee + Maxime Corbeil-Perron, Fondation Guido Molinari, 28 February 2026

Installation views of Maxime Corbeil-Perron’s Nuit Blanche performance at Fondation Guido Molinari. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

In Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, he recounts a child’s dream that she writes down in the form of a fairy tale in 12 stages and gives to her father, Jung’s colleague, as a Christmas present. Stage Six reads: “[Once upon a time, there was] … a bad boy with a clod of earth. He throws bits of it at the passers-by, and they all become bad too.”

This dream is atypical of an innocent little child’s reveries, vaulting into the archetypal realm. Jung recalls that the young dreamer died prematurely one year later and interpreted that her dreams were an adumbration or anticipatory shadow of death cast over her waking life. But Stage Six of the doomed girl’s dream foreshadows more than her own death. It clearly signifies the viral contagion of pure evil that warmongering represents.

There are two assumptions that this archetypal dream suggests but does not make explicit. First is that the boy is bad independent of his implicitly bad actions, i.e. throwing bits of earth. And second is that passers-by who are hit with bits of earth also begin throwing bits of earth.

Les Vespérales with Annie Bloch, Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus, 7 March 2025

A beautifully lit space featuring a white musical instrument with tall pipes, illuminated in red light, accompanied by two small stools and a chair, set against a backdrop of ornate sculptures and dark surroundings.
The LIMINARE at Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The cigarette is the symbol of a machine age in which the ultimate cogs and wheels and levers are human nerves.”
—“Going Up in Smoke” The New York Times, 24 September 1925

Cigarettes are suspiciously emblematic for our accelerationist, disposable, and self-destructive society. We burn through objects and ideas nowadays at such a heated pace that we rarely even remember what happened yesterday.

We chain-smoke people as well, using and discarding them like so many butts flicked into the gutter. “The rapider pace of civilization,” the 101-year-old Times editorial declares, “accounts for the extraordinary growth of the cigarette habit.”

Addiction is a condition that few people like to address. Addicts attempt to avoid it, preferring to believe that their habits are personal choices. And non-users or former addicts tend to sidestep the topic for fear of sounding sanctimonious or self-righteous.

But perhaps the best argument against smoking for the Bohemian radical is that to smoke cigarettes is to be subordinate to hyper-capitalism in its most toxic form. Cigarettes are counterrevolutionary.

In the marketplace of addiction, smokers are the commodities, not cigarettes. Human beings are infinitely renewable and insignificant to mercenary machinic exploitation. One is too many and a thousand is never enough.

Animals of Distinction, Jump Cut, Cinema Moderne, 10 March 2026

“What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Cut”

In her article entitled “Traumas of Code,” published in the autumn 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, the American scholar N. Katherine Hayles suggests: “as the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.” Thus, just as the smooth interface of consciousness is only revealed when it is ruptured by unconscious traumas, computer glitches expose the seams in the fabric of our increasingly digital reality.

The film scholar Laura U. Marks in her 1997 essay “Loving a Disappearing Image” writes about the melancholia of glitchy moving images — diminished, faded, ageing, and decaying visual media that “flaunt their tenuous connection to the realty they index” — arguing that they “all appeal to a look of love and loss.”

What is startling about glitch aesthetics is their durability. At a time when fads and fashions in film and art more broadly turn over with aggregate haste, digital decomposition is perennially hip, a loss that paradoxically lingers. Perhaps this is because accelerated innovation spells accelerated obsolescence.

There is scarcely a city block nowadays upon which one does not encounter a flickering fluorescent light bulb or burnt-out LCD display or some form of seizure-inducing electronic glitch. In the malfunctioning cityscape, subconscious mourning is constant when technological breakdown is ever-present.

A bug in the system means that there must be a line of code missing somewhere.

Mon amour, c’est pour le restant de mes jours, dir. André-Line Beauparlant, Monument-National, 12 March 2026

Two people posing together on a red carpet with a colorful backdrop featuring the words 'LE FiFA 44'. The man is wearing a denim shirt and the woman is dressed in a red suit, smiling at the camera.
Robert Morin and André-Line Beauparlant at the premiere of Mon amour, c’est pour le restant de mes jours, Monument National, 12 March 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich.”
—Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder

In Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a seasoned fisherman risks life and limb to reel in the biggest fish in the ocean. But the fish is so mammoth that the fisherman has to tie it to the side of his boat to bring it ashore, and once he arrives, the fish is just a skeleton, sharks having picked it to the bone.

This tale contains competing morals and compelling insights. One is that avaricious forces will inevitably whittle down to nothing everything that is truly great. Another is that one should never let one’s proverbial pies cool on the windowsill because they will invariably attract unwelcome trespassers. Another is that there is only one fisherman and one fish, but practically infinite axiomatic sharks.

Still another is that fish are ancillary to fishing.◼︎

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 views of Walter Scott, “Heavily Greebled,” Fonderie Darling.

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Massive Lectures

Rolling In the Deep: notes on the immersive turn

“We are thrilled to present the next listening series,” reads a recent press release from Centre PHI, “featuring ambient music legend Brian Eno and conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe in our immersive listening room.”

“Kosmos Klub is about deep listening without boundaries,” trumpets another promotional email for a Bandcamp subscription service. “Each month, curator Ajay Saggar selects an immersive album from the outer edges of sound.”

Lorna Bauer, the Montreal-based artist and 2021 Sobey Award finalist, “transforms space into a contemplative, poetic, and immersive place,” according to a bio from Fonderie Darling.

The nehiyaw interdisciplinary artist Tyler Houseman’s work, touts a PR briefing from La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporains, “embraces ephemerality, ranging from immersive interactive installations to multimedia live video performance events.”

Without a hint of irony, the website for a 3D Virtual Reality exhibition currently on offer at Place Bonaventure reads, “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage tells the story of the RMS Titanic like never before.” It must have been immersive to strike an iceberg and descend the depths of the sea.

Doubtless, 2025 was the year we drowned in immersion.

From curated playlists to culinary experiences to all-encompassing and participative journeys, ‘immersive’ was the inescapable contemporary buzzword that characterized the packaging and promotion of everything intended to captivate our attention and convey a sense of currency in the local arts and cultural scenes.

Which got me thinking: why now is the term ‘immersive’ so pervasive? What about this moment makes us want to be purposefully inundated? Do you ever get that sinking feeling?

‘Immerse,’ according to my 1987 print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — published before there was such a thing as V.R., U.X., A.I., or other such hyperbolic tech-dystopian acronyms — means: “plunge, (in liquid); cause (person) to be entirely below surface of water, esp. baptize thus; bury, embed, (in); involve deeply, absorb, (in debt, difficulties, thought, etc.)” The term originates from the Latin, mergere; mers- meaning ‘to dip.’

Consequently, the only accurate use of its traditional adjective form from the above-noted examples is the ill-fated 1912 Titanic expedition — a truly immersive experience if ever there was one. However, the new meaning of ‘immersive’ that Google wants us to use is, “virtual reality technology that gives the user the impression of being fully enclosed and involved in the simulated environment.” Although the two definitions are not far off.

One of the most glaring parallel virtual realities with real-world consequences exists south of the border. When Donald Trump reassumed the White House in January and rocked the proverbial boat by announcing a spate of crippling tariffs on Canadian goods, our consumer price index spiked from 1.9% to 2.6%, a marked escalation from the chaos Trump instigated during his first term. Just the announcement of tariffs, never mind their implementation, resulted immediately in rising costs for food, clothing, transport, and shelter — the most basic necessities which none of us can afford to forgo, yet none of us can seem to afford.

Increased costs under capitalism translate into increased borrowing. And incremental decreases in Canada’s lending rate only partially offset the soaring demand for credit. The money that we borrow is virtual. The interest we pay back is real. Predictably, by year’s end, Canada’s six biggest banks posted record profits that far surpassed financial experts’ estimates, immersing us deeper in economic uncertainty, while financial institutions immersed themselves in liquid cash.

With everyone drowning in debt, mired in financial difficulties, and deep in thought about how to keep our heads above water while the obscenely rich got even richer, 2025 might have been the most overwhelmingly lean year for most of us since the Coronavirus crisis. And yet, entertainment expenditures and the experience economy outpaced all other categories of consumer spending, rising more than ten percent in 11 months.

No wonder immersion in virtual and simulated environments appeared to throw us a lifesaver. Going deep seemed to be the subconscious reaction to being spread too thin. Still, how deep down the rabbit hole have we gone?

A generation ago, the common indictment of the early internet was that all this scrolling and vapid search-engining would make us shallow. Easy access to a broad field of information meant that each of us could boast a superficial knowledge about a wide variety of subjects. However, “to remain vital,” said the American historian of technology Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book The Shallows, “culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.”

Knowledge for Carr encompassed more than what the horizontally distributed internet could possibly contain. There are deeper forms of memory irreducible to encoding and digital storage. Muscle memory, for example, is not the sort that we can download or stream. It has to be exercised and cultivated over deep time. Durability implies durational ability.

Today’s internet, which we nowadays access evermore on mobile devices, in a state of constant distraction, encourages the opposite of sustained attention. If we don’t immediately recognize whatever appears on our screens, we swipe it away to move onto something more engaging, ostensibly to save precious time. And yet, over the course of a year — or two, or ten — we discover that we’ve spent a significant amount of time immersed in identifying insignificance, the antithesis of depth.

By HyacintheLuynes – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33551991

Twenty years ago, the burgeoning constellations of digital connective technologies sought to capture our attention through immersive sensory stimuli like simultaneous sound and vision, innovations that seem quaint in comparison to today’s drive for wholistic engagement. The video game Second Life, released in 2003, promised an alternate physical existence inside a virtual playing field. The conundrum of this contract was that total freedom in the virtual world entailed total immersion in an adjacent reality. It is noteworthy that the conversation at that time centered on whether or not playing games like Second Life contributed to a fragmentary experience of reality.

“What such video games and design programs lack,” wrote the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff in his 2008 book, Coming of Age in Second Life, “is social immersion. At the intersection of place and time, social immersion comes into being as the constitutional ground for homo cyber.”

An important difference exists between being immersed in a media environment at home, playing a video game whilst sat alone on the couch, or being saturated in immersive experiences out in the world, in the company of other people. We might have assumed previously that domestic immersion fragmented us and being together didn’t. But social immersion may fragment us even more. We construct our digital selves relationally, with digital others, with reckless abandon for the physical implications.

No doubt, looking back, platforms like Second Life were cultural preparation for the kinds of immersive environments that are increasingly intruding upon the shared social experience today. In the confines of Centre PHI’s immersive listening room, or the immersive Titanic voyage at Place Bonaventure, it has never been simpler to spend time both alone and together, to isolate amidst a lonely crowd. “It is easy to become so immersed in technology,” said the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, “that we ignore what we know about life.”

“Separations cut away from continuity,” wrote the philosopher Brian Massumi in his 2001 essay entitled Tell Me Where Your Pain Is, “into separations from it.” The destabilizing potential for immersive separation via technical means has terrifying implications for collective experience, continuous thought, and co-operative action. In 2025, we experienced a durational state of disintegration and deconstruction. We became social subjects immersed everywhere in media and separated from unmediated sociality.

Why did we not heed the warnings of thinkers like Massumi, Carr, and Turkle two decades ago? The short answer is that descending into immersion became more comfortable than rising to the challenges of navigating quotidian reality. And developing the technologies to keep us perpetually immersed became too profitable for the prospectors of the digital age to refuse. We prefer the confines of our little hideaways beneath the waves rather than risk venturing out into the desert of the real.

The terror of confronting real problems might seem too overwhelming to attempt. So instead, we immerse ourselves in artificial worlds, diving deeper into virtual dreams that distract and delight us. Are we all just marinating in immersive experience? And if so, how do we climb out of the soup? A word of warning: a drowning person will instinctually drown everyone around them. Some of them want to immerse you. Some of them want to be immersed by you.◼︎

Cover image: Persistent Worlds, Alice Bucknell, Kunsthalle Praha. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Meet Every Situation Head On

Confrontation, Toninato & Lecours, Homeostasis (Self-Released)

“It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Canadians have long enjoyed an international reputation for being nice. Niceness can encompass a variety of favourable characteristics: kindness, positivity, honesty, fairness, good faith. These are admirable traits to attribute to our sense of national identity.

But niceness can also manifest as toxic avoidance — submission in response to violent aggression, deference in the face of unreasonable conflict. We would rather be agreeable than confrontational, even when it means acceptance of, or even complicity in, injustice.

A recent Leger poll found that Quebec is Canada’s happiest province and Montreal the country’s second happiest city. That so many local residents would examine the state of the world — ongoing genocide, economic disparity, environmental collapse — and the plight of our own metropolis — crumbling public infrastructure, astonishing cost of living, linguistic and cultural hegemony — with such relentless positivity is a testament to our congenial cognitive dissonance.

On old adage espouses that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the best time to sow the seeds of discontent amongst a comfortable Quebec citizenry is right about now.

Place Publique with Alex Tatarsky and Gui B.B., Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025

Alex Tatarsky performs at Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he’d be gone. This guy couldn’t work at The Gap.”
—David Letterman on Donald Trump

The biggest threat to Donald Trump in the 2015 U.S. election was not the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, nor Jeb Bush, nor any of the other potential Republican nominees running against him. Trump’s most worthy adversary was the late-night talk show host David Letterman, the man who in the 1980s made Trump a media personality in the first place. It seems like a lifetime ago and a million miles away, but until 2015, late-night talk show hosts held more sway with American popular opinion than did Trump.

On October 1st, 1986, Donald Trump appeared for the first time on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in an on-the-street-style segment in which Letterman visited Trump’s offices in midtown Manhattan, joking about how he must have had nothing better to do. Dozens of subsequent appearances across the next three decades and two networks prepared Trump for his ascent from cutthroat blowhard New York City real-estate tycoon to international celebrity.

Donald Trump on Late Night With David Letterman, 1 October 1986. Video courtesy of Don Giller.

Letterman was the only talk show host on equal footing with Trump, at times giving him the edge and at others eviscerating him, as in their year-long feud after Letterman accused Trump on-air of racism for demanding that Barack Obama produce his birth certificate. Trump subsequently refused to appear on Letterman, denying him his favourite guest. Recall, the best that Jimmy Fallon could muster was tussling Trump’s hair to determine if it was really attached.

David Letterman frequently remarked that the path to the White House went straight through The Ed Sullivan Theatre. Trump must have felt that a righteous kicking from Dave would surely have revealed any political aspirations Trump might have held for exactly what there were: first as tragedy, then as farce.

When David Letterman signed off as host of CBS’s Late Show in May 2015, it cleared the last remaining hurdle for Trump to announce without a hint of irony his bid for the Republican party nomination — which he did precisely one month later — and ultimately, to win the United States presidency that November. In effect, David Letterman ushered Donald Trump into the public eye and then vaulted him in absentia into the world’s highest office.

Sikutsajaq, Mary Paningajak, Centre Sanaaq, 15 May – 23 August 2025

Mary Paningajak, There is a pandemic around the world Masks must be worn to avoid getting COVID-19, (2021) Drawing on Paper. Atautsikut. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Building Canada Act was passed on 26 June 2025 to fast-track the approval of major infrastructural projects deemed to be in the national interest. While the government has not produced a list of prospective projects, it is likely that it will include pipelines for fossil fuels to traverse the country. It seems improbable, however, that a wall along the 49th parallel is in the works.

In addition to insulating ourselves from an increasingly threatening southern neighbour, it would be advantageous if some of those major projects benefitted Indigenous communities, and not just financially. Building with an eye to the seventh generation will assuredly serve us all.

Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran, 17 July – 20 August 2025

Gallery view of work by Ben Gould at Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”
—David Bowie, “Law (Earthlings on Fire)”

We reap what we sow.

In my experience, I have found this to be one of the most dependable truths. The only thing separating the seeding and the harvest is time.

There is seasonal time and there is epochal time. In many instances, the fruits of our labour don’t grow immediately or discernibly. Or they can grow overnight when we’re neither prepared nor in need of their bounty. Wisdom like fruit seems to arrive frustratingly in abundance or not at all.

Faith is more than the power of positive thinking. It is the authority of indifferent inevitability.

“The Lord is good unto those that wait for Him,” says Lamentations 3:25, “to the soul that seeketh Him.” Waiting is challenging in our artificially accelerated and instant-on age. “The world would not be moving so fast,” write The Invisible Committee, “if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.”

Organ Intermezzi with Áron Sipos, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025

Organist Áron Sipos shows onlookers the organ console at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
—Job 33:4

It occurred to me this week as I was offered a tour of the largest organ on the island of Montreal, an instrument with more than 7,000 pipes, that the biological body is composed of organs, and the mechanical organ comprises a living body.

More than any other element, air is the most divine. It is what binds and completes the Holy trinity. It is at once invisible and material, immediate and eternal.◼︎

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: Mary Paningajak, Untitled (2013), Linocut Print, Avataq Cultural Institute Collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Time & Free Will

Harik, SANAM, Sametou Sawtan (Constellation Records)

“Right now you’re reading about free will. You’re free to go on reading, or stop now. You’ve started on this sentence, but you don’t have to………finish it.”
—Galen Strawson, “Luck Swallows Everything” in Things That Bother Me

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about deliberation.

There are subtle pronunciation differences and yet no change in spelling in the two most common uses of the term ‘deliberate.’

First is the verb: to deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-8’ and means to arrive at some form of conclusion about a problem or question. For instance, to deliberate is what a jury does after hearing legal arguments and examining evidence before establishing a judgment.

Second is the adjective: deliberate. This word is pronounced ‘deliber-@’ and simply denotes an act performed with intention. For instance, a premeditated murder is deliberate homicide. Its connotation is often negative, differentiating the action from something unconscious or accidental.

The verb ‘deliberate’ implies the passage of time. Juries are usually sequestered and allowed a determined period to reach a verdict. However, the adjective ‘deliberate’ does not imply any time at all. A murderer can deliberately kill someone in a split second, no deliberation required.

The word ‘deliberate’ is derived from the Latin language. At its heart is Liber, meaning the god of male fertility, wine, and freedom. The suffix ‘-ate’ means ‘an abundance.’ Passion-ate denotes an abundance of passion; consider-ate implies an excess of consideration. Thus, liberate suggests a wealth of freedom.

But the prefix ‘de-’ in Latin means ‘apart from’ or ‘away.’ So, deliberate literally means far from an abundance of freedom. Consequently, deliberation seems to suggest the paradoxical absence of free will in the nonetheless conscious performance of an act.

When the Orange Cheeto, with reference to America’s involvement in military action in support of Israel against Iran, says, “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” this implies the rarest and most dangerous case of deliberation — a deliberate act that is de facto void of temporal contemplation, intentional carnage in absence of any meaningful forethought.

No Bystanders, Frantz Patrick Henry, Fonderie Darling, 19 June – 17 August 2025

Gallery view of No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“There are no innocent bystanders … what are they doing there in the first place?”
—William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

Some people believe that we see what we’re looking for. This suggests that the world always meets our expectations. If you trust that people are generally inherently good, you will generally see the inherent goodness in people. If you think that people are generally inherently bad, generally, you won’t be disappointed.

Black Ox Orkestar, Matana Roberts, Erika Angell, and Sam Shalabi Septet, Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025

Erika Angell performs at Théâtre de Verdure, 14 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Detonating the bomb is like pushing the button that takes the selfie. At that moment, the imaginary world is in charge, for the real world, with all its discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living in.”
—Byung-Chul Han, “Torturous Emptiness,” in Capitalism and the Death Drive

War is the most perverse form of self-harm — the injury of the Other in order to encourage the Other to injure us in retaliation. Narcissism is the flipside of the self-harm coin and provides the impetus for national conflict. We love our identity to such a degree that we fear annihilation and therefor attack the Other to inspire vengeance, thus self-harming. By this logic, the aggressor is able to claim victimhood as a justification to attack.

In the 21st century, the U.S. rebooted this franchise with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq because of a supposed cache of weapons of mass-destruction that turned out not to exist. Israel’s insistence that Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will inevitably lead to a nuclear weapon is a subtler rationale and requires circuitous reasoning.

It is not logical to say that if Iran enriches uranium, it will use it to manufacture nuclear weapons. It is, however, logical to say that destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities will prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons.

Rick Leong, The Night Blooms, Bradley Ertaskiran, 15 May – 5 July 2025

Gallery view of The Night Blooms by Rick Leong at Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“This democracy thing is easy—you just vote for the guy who promises you the most stuff. An idiot could do it. Actually it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does everything it can to manufacture more of them.”
—Nick Land, “Cross-Coded History,” in The Dark Enlightenment

The technical invention of cinematography in the late 19th century enabled the mass dissemination of images. It also revolutionized acting.

Prior to cinema, theatre set the standard for drama. And the conventions of theatre were to play to the back of the room, i.e. to overemphasize and enunciate and dramatize every movement, every line.

The motion picture camera, though, was able to capture and magnify the minutia of behaviour, recording every detail, every gesture. It took some time to figure this out, and consequently, the majority of early cinema by today’s criteria looks stagey.

I claim that the trajectory started to reverse with the introduction of television. The shrinking of the screenic image meant that actors once again had to overact to convey cinematic sentiment on a diminutive scale. There was a momentary détente during the so-called golden age of TV with productions like The Sopranos and other prestige fare. But the process redoubled in speed as screens shrunk to laptop and then to smartphone size.

The sitting U.S. president arose as an outsize television personality, achieving celebrity status on late-night talk shows and his own reality series. Today, he has honed his overblown persona for TikTok, going bigly-er than ever before.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise album launch, Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025

Quinton Barnes and friends perform at Casa del Popolo, 19 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

‘Knowledge is power’ is a common adage. This axiom presupposes that the acquisition of knowledge — through higher education and life experience — will bestow upon the learner increasing measures of agency in the world.

But what if power is antecedent, not knowledge? That would suggest, rather, that information is produced by systems and networks that exert power in culture and society.

And what exerts power?

In today’s world? Money and violence are likely the most powerful observable culprits. But still, we have not quite located the precise root source of power. There is only one force capable of manufacturing ex nihilo money and violence and therefore knowledge, and that power is time.◼︎

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: Rick Leong, Spell of the Sensuous, 2025, Oil on canvas 182.9 x 182.9 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Out Of the Past: in conversation with Milly A. Dery

Deep in the heart of the Old Port, among Montreal’s most palimpsestic neighbourhoods, sits a stronghold improbably dedicated to the production, exhibition, and proliferation of contemporary art.

Years ago, The Darling Brothers Foundry, an historic monument on Montreal’s industrial map, forged steel. Today, the edifice is an engine of another kind of creativity. Neither a commercial gallery nor an artist-run centre, Fonderie Darling exists at the interstice of private and public interests, of low and high culture, of old and new architecture, positioned at the crossroads of antiquity and eternity.

The Fonderie’s founding director Caroline Andrieux took leave last October after three decades spent helming one of this city’s most venerable cultural institutions. Quartier Éphémère was launched in 1993, when the area was all but abandoned, rebar jutting out from neglected streets, on the cusp of a bitterly contested national referendum that surely would have pushed Quebec further into economic ruin had the province cleaved from Canadian confederation.

Now, with a tentative sense of permanence, the district is awash in new capital, surrounded by luxury condominiums, posh boutiques, exclusive hotels, and gourmet restaurants. And with a city block-sized footprint, Fonderie Darling boasts fresh direction at the command of Milly A. Dery, who at only 34 is tasked with navigating this behemoth out of the past.

She is here for it.

“It’s super exciting,” says Dery with an authentic grin. “It’s also super challenging. A founding director passing the place on to a non-founding director is always a big step for an organization. It only happens once. But in October when I arrived in the office, I felt ready and excited.”

Dery is dressed in relaxed denims and a crisp white blouse. Her spark is undeniable, demonstrating the desire to stoke Fonderie Darling’s fires for the foreseeable future. At once she exudes youth and wisdom, speaking with poise and confidence about managing the Fonderie’s transition.

Dery studied Art History, first at McGill, then completing a master’s degree at Université de Montréal. She worked in private galleries and joined Fonderie Darling eight years ago after dropping off a resumé on spec. “They needed someone to fill in for a month,” she says. At the end of that month, Dery was hired on full-time and has not looked back since.

“Nostalgia is an easy trap to fall into,” Dery says. “A lot of people talk about the ‘90s and how the era was better, different, the city was different, money was different. I want to step away from nostalgia and figure out how to get a place like this into the 21st century.”

“We do look at this space as a little fortress for the artists in the neighbourhood.” Photograph for NicheMTL.

Doubtless, Old Montreal in the 1990s would have been vastly different. Lofts and artists’ studios were cheap and plentiful. Fonderie Darling’s mandate of reclaiming abandoned buildings for artistic pursuits fit right in and harnessed institutional enthusiasm early on. In 2025, though, with property values skyrocketing and public funding dwindling, there is a tension these days between competing crises: affordable housing, and affordable spaces for artistic production.

“Developers used to ring the doorbell every week and make offers,” Dery tells me. “But we are the owners of this building. And we do look at this space as a little fortress for the artists in a neighbourhood that is otherwise unwelcoming for them. You come here and you wonder how this place is still standing. It’s still standing because people fought for it.”

Fonderie Darling has always possessed a scrappy spirit, combining two exhibition rooms, studios in which artists can work in-situ, and an outdoor esplanade that stages public interventions and performance pieces. The Fonderie does not represent artists as a traditional gallery would. Instead, it generates 50 percent of its operating budget from public sources, and the other half from a combination of autonomous revenues, philanthropy, and private donations.

“It’s a difficult equilibrium to maintain,” explains Dery. “Public financing is insufficient. It’s a crazy amount of work for our team to find 50 percent of our revenues.” The Fonderie does charge a reasonably priced admission, $8. Nonetheless, this accounts for only two percent of its annual income. “We have an accessibility policy,” Dery says. In today’s terminology, that means no one is turned away for lack of funds. “I worked at the welcome desk for a long time before changing roles and it’s important to keep it accessible.”

Because Fonderie Darling is free from the pressures of producing blockbuster exhibitions or programming saleable works, it is able to take risks on unconventional and edgier artists and their ideas. When I visit, the spring show is underway — embedded “liturgical-optic” paintings by Numa Amun, plus an exhibition entitled Simile Aria, an ingenious twist on the relationship between vocal and organ pipes by Fonderie Darling artist-in-residence Maggy Hamel-Metsos.

Detail of Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos photographed for NicheMTL.

Dery gives me a tour of the facility and tells me about the forthcoming summer programme. “We have two new solo shows in June,” she says, “by Karen Elaine Spencer and Frantz Patrick Henry.” Spencer is presenting a selection of bold and poetic works that relate loosely to the process of grief. “I think it’s going to be really moving,” Dery indicates.

Henry’s show, exhibiting in the larger gallery, is concerned with architecture from Italy, Montreal, and Haiti as fragments of collective history. “They’re very different practices,” Dery notes, “but still related in methods and approach. Opposite, but connected in some unexpected ways.”

Following Caroline Andrieux’s lead, Dery relishes the liberty to curate challenging programmes. “That’s why we have such a strong reputation today,” she suggests. “Not for economic, popularity, or any consideration have there ever been compromises on the audacity, the quality, and relevance of the propositions that we present. That is a guiding principle.”

Fonderie Darling particularly tends to encourage works that are in dialogue with the space and which revolve around recurrent themes of slowness, sustainability, transformation, and regeneration.

“This sense of reciprocity between the space, the artwork, and the visitor has always been in the DNA of Fonderie,” Dery says, “and important to reinvigorate every time. This space has so many possibilities, and when the priorities are in perfect alignment with the conditions that welcome it, that’s where you get the magic.”

“You don’t need to love art to have an extraordinary time.” Milly A. Dery photographed for NicheMTL.

What, precisely, is that magic? What is art for?

“Art changes my life,” Dery affirms. “It changes my mind. It changes the way I think. It brings joy, unpredictability, a reason to live. Out of the monotony and pressure and oppression of daily life, which is a struggle for many people for many reasons, art is a comfort in many ways. It’s a way to bond, to create relationships. For me, if you come to Fonderie Darling, you don’t need to love art to have an extraordinary time.”

And yet, Fonderie Darling is situated far from what constitutes the ordinary on Montreal’s cultural landscape.

Dery is keenly aware that she has an important job balancing creativity, commerce, urban demands, local politics, and above all, the value of contemporary art in a city perennially on the verge of succumbing to capitalist excesses.

“I would love for Fonderie Darling to be known to every Montrealer,” Dery muses. “For me, it’s about how to make sure that it continues to live for 100 years.”◼︎

No Bystanders by Frantz Patrick Henry and revenons en oiseaux, être un arbre est trop dur et aujourd’hui, il neige by Karen Elaine Spencer launch 19 June and run through 17 August 2025 at Fonderie Darling, 745 Place du Sable-Gris.

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All Dressed

Follow the Art: in conversation with Eli Kerr

Snow once again blankets the city on 6 March 2025 and Galerie Eli Kerr, the modest-sized exhibition space on St. Laurent Boulevard, is crammed to capacity with visitors.

So much so that it is practically impossible to get a good look at the artworks presented at the show, simply entitled Three, which collects three brass, pewter, and bronze reliefs by Maggy Hamel-Metsos, two black-and-white inkjet prints on paper by Geneviève Cadieux, and a solitary impressionistic image called a failure by the painter Liza Lacroix.

Patrons mill about with wine glasses and Montellier cans clutched in hand, double kissing, laughing, mingling in spirals. The curatorial project at work here is about what is on the walls, yes. But it is also sub-textually about gathering together this assemblage of Montreal’s visual arts crowd for whom an au courant vernissage is an event worth braving a late-winter blizzard.

Credit gallerist Eli Kerr — for both the walls and crowd.

Kerr, 36, is one of a handful of visionary Montreal-based curators generating a buzz on The Main and, in doing so, reinvigorating a sense of novelty and delight amidst a global downturn in the art world. Sales in the worldwide art market fell by 12% in 2024 according to a study commissioned by Art Basel and UBS.

Nonetheless, now might be the most opportune moment to helm a new venture in the workaday art sector, where transactions have actually increased, and in a city like Montreal, where art is valued by a wider swath of the general population.

“I thought it was a good time,” Kerr deadpans of his counterintuitively deliberated enterprise, “because this is all I know. I can’t compare it to better times.”

“I really like working directly with artists. We can make decisions much quicker.” Gallery view of the vernissage for “Three,” 6 March 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Kerr relocated to St. Laurent in a storefront nestled between Mount-Royal and St. Joseph, right next door to kindred spirit Nicolas Robert, from a mezzanine-level gallery on Avenue du Parc that he opened during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. A native Montrealer, Kerr was away at that time in Ontario, working through a graduate degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

“It made sense in uncertain times to head back to a place that one understood, and be home around my people,” says Kerr of his return five years ago. “My family, the artists, and the friends that I have. The first gallery came out of a sense of wanting to — needing to — do something.”

Kerr describes his initial commercial endeavour as no larger than a “parking space” that nonetheless allowed him to exhibit singular works of art in alternative ways, focussing specifically upon one sole piece, or a select assortment of them. And while museums and larger art centres were mandated by the government to be closed throughout the Covid crisis, street-level galleries like Kerr’s were among the few businesses allowed to remain in operation.

“I was able to walk this grey line,” recalls Kerr. “It provided that base necessity of being able to put on small-scale exhibitions. And then the opportunity to move to St. Laurent came up, and that opened up a lot of doors. I’m really committed to showing new work. Having artists show things they’ve never shown before. Departing from the precedent — that’s what we want to do in terms of exhibitions.”

Prior to being the proprietor of his own eponymous gallery, Kerr cut his teeth working as an assistant to a variety of local artists and eventually landing a job at Fonderie Darling. “I’ve been organizing exhibitions independently since about 2015,” Kerr tells me.

“There’s a world of insight you can gain working for people. But I’ve always found it hard to work in the arts for myriad reasons. It’s really tough to make a living. It’s tough to do the projects you want to do, in terms of artistic direction. The other option is working in a museum or in an artist-run centre. But you have to have a more by-committee way of making decisions and I really like working directly with artists. We can make decisions much quicker. We might be doing things totally backwards. But there’s an edge to that.”

Gallery view of “The Lion’s Share,” a solo exhibition by the photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri. Photographed for NicheMTL.

At the St. Laurent location, Kerr represents nine artists, a small but robust stable of Francophone and Anglo, local and international talent. The current show on view is called “The Lion’s Share” by the photographer Fatine-Violette Sabiri, and Kerr gives me a walk-through of the gallery, describing what he finds fascinating about her works.

“A lot of the photographs are taken in these before-moments that are in the periphery to a main event,” he explains. “People preparing for a fashion show. There’s a bunch of horseback riders preparing for a competition. She’s looking at these side moments. It’s something spontaneous — and quite painterly.”

The curatorial turn more broadly betrays an impetus for the organization of people and things in a dynamic that implies a propensity for power, but reveals an aptitude for aesthetics. And Kerr possesses a keen eye and sensitivity for the artists and works of art he chooses to display in his space.

“It is such an intuitive process,” he says. “It takes a long time. The most important thing is the human relationship. You have to really want to live with their ideas. And vice versa. It’s a thick question. What I really like about our gallery is that everybody knows each other, more or less. There’s a certain chemistry in the group. It’s not just about the gallery’s relationship to each individual artist. We’re trying to make something where relationships emerge between the artists. I don’t think a lot of galleries work that way.”

While many of Kerr’s artists work within diverse media — sculpture, photography, ready-mades, drawing, and painting — there is a thread of contemporary relevance that sets his sights apart. Kerr seems to be acutely attuned to something in the zeitgeist of this precise place and time. A selection of Joyce Joumaa’s thermostat light boxes, for example, was acquired following her solo show last summer by the Musée d’art contemporain. Kerr’s is an artists’ art space that appeals not only to art lovers and collectors but also to art historians, musicians, writers, adjacent cultural workers, and most notably, his fellow curators.

“It’s been a nice surprise that the group of existing galleries has been very supportive of us,” says Kerr. “They frequent our gallery and come to our events. In most cases they are older than I am and have more experience. It is competitive — the perceived market is only so big. But at the end of the day, it’s good that we all support the same mandate of contemporary art. That does us all well.”

Kerr’s enthusiasm is infectious and evident in every subsequent show he produces. The next exhibition, he tells me, will showcase a series of artworks comprised of decomposing foodstuffs that the Torontonian artist Alan Belcher created. Still, Kerr’s affection for Montreal and the Plateau neighbourhood in particular is apparent in abundance.

“There’s a lot of energy here,” he observes. “It’s always been an exciting city that way. It’s interesting to think about the place of visual arts. But you have to follow the art.”◼︎

Since 1957, a solo exhibition by Alan Belcher opens 7 June and runs until 24 July 2025 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 4647 St. Laurent Boulevard.

Cover image: Eli Kerr photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

Strange Wind

As long as my breath is in me,
and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,
my lips will not speak falsehood,
and my tongue will not utter deceit.
—Job 27:3-4

Breathe!
Breathe, you fucker!
Children gasping the second-hand air
Death and desperation
We’ve got to cut the lies with truth
We breathe.
—Ministry, “Breathe”

My yoga practicing friend repeatedly instructs me to breathe.

Because sometimes I forget. In stressful situations, or when I’m concentrating on some complex task, for whatever reason, I have to consciously prompt myself to inhale.

Nobody breathes online. We’re all hanging on bated breath attached to screens with trembling fingers, preparing for the next inevitable news-related shock, winded and waiting to exhale. Scrolling is a doomed and breathless exercise.

A number of events and exhibitions with breath as their central — or at least peripheral — theme have recently refocussed my attention on wind and air. In doing so, these remarkable experiences have encouraged me to meditate on and reconsider what is sacred about what we might describe as spirit.

The first is a matinée performance that the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal presents on 20 March, featuring the OSM’s principal clarinettist Todd Cope playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. Nothing reminds us of the importance of breathing quite like watching a virtuoso wind musician blowing the audience away with his craft. It is inspiring to witness an artist so in command of his breath, so practiced, doubtless having spent countless hours breathing life into the soul of his instrument.

Mozart completed his Concerto only a few weeks before he died mysteriously and prematurely in 1791 at age 35. This work, then, is literally his last gasp and in retrospect has to be read as Mozart’s final word, written, as it were, on the wind.

In an age long before electrical amplification and recorded music, hearing works performed live would have been the only opportunity to experience them. There is no way today to accurately imagine the gravitas of silence during an era when sound could not simply be dialled up and shut off, when music travelled dryly on airwaves rather than awash in endless torrents and streams.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the OSM.

Later in the evening of 20 March, the OSM stages the day’s second concert by the Beninese French vocalist Angélique Kidjo, singing Ifé, Three Yorùbá Songs, set to a score written by the American composer Philip Glass. Glass’s iconic compositional aesthetic is machinelike and industrial, entailing a mechanized enactment from its performers, firing like a motor on all cylinders, and superficially at odds with the body’s organic demands.

Kidjo’s vocal performance is a masterclass in acute control, the breath of song aspiring to near robotic perfection. And yet, the human vessel, swinging and swaying, is an unparalleled instrument, one that digital artifice could never accurately reproduce.

Kidjo signals to us that the body is ultimately beyond the binary, never entirely off nor on, always oscillating somewhere between these two poles, exposing their relational arbitrariness and functional impossibility.

The thing about breath is that it is not infinite. The fact that it ends gestures to our fallibility and impermanence. Nonetheless, we strive to extend it through technological means.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the protection of breath was paramount, and ubiquitous in the obsession with personal protective equipment and ventilators, adequate circulation and sufficient social distance. We held our breath as we passed by strangers, forgetting — or wilfully ignoring — the fact that we all breathe the same air, that we are all mortal.

COVID interfered with the interconnected rhythms of our breathing in multiple and profound ways and initiated a period after which each breath was measured and catalogued, a daily statistic to be charted and tallied.

I recognize the endurance of breath in Simile Aria, the cluster of suspended pneumatic organ sculptures that the artist Maggy Hamel-Metsos has installed in the cathedral-like main hall at Fonderie Darling. These breathing machines are at once gathered together and isolated, like the social bubbles we were reduced to during the depths of the COVID restrictions.

Detail of Simile Aria by Maggy Hamel-Metsos at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We can recall that even church choirs were prohibited out of legitimate concern for human health and safety. Still, it is impossible to postulate what was lost with the inability to breathe in harmony together. As the exhibition text notes, Hamel-Metsos’s work reconstitutes “pain as a symphony,” summing up life as “a set of sounds measured out by the cadence of our breath.”

In Fonderie Darling’s adjacent space is a confounding “liturgical-optic” triptych of intricate paintings entitled Absoluité by the artist Numa Amun. These three works depict overlapping human figures that represent out-of-body experiences, the soul transcending the material plane, the spirit giving way to the ethereal pull of the divine. Curator Milly A. Dery explains that Amun’s works attempt to signify something that is usually invisible: the space between life and death; the physical and the astral realms; the convergence of knowledge and faith.

What we experience through the limited spectrum of sensory perception is surely only a fraction of what exists. But the body is what we have been given to contain the indefinable and thus must suffice. The spirit is what ruptures the absolute.

Detail of Réveil dans la mort (2020-2021) by Numa Amun at Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The wind blows where it wishes,” it is written in John 3:8, “and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The profound and universal truth of this scriptural passage is that nature possesses its own will. So little of life is within our control. And this makes our choices all the more important if we want to evolve morally and spiritually. The boat with a slack sail is destined to be tossed to and fro on the whims of the waves.

We cannot know when we will run out of breath. We can only remember and remind one another to breathe, consciously and deliberately.

There is something in the air that enriches and enlivens us. Call it spirit.◼︎

Cover image: Angélique Kidjo and guest conductor Elena Schwarz photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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