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Desire

Lèche-vitrine, Art Dressé, Espace Transmission, 8-18 April 2026

Catherine Machado performs The Maintenance Worker at Espace Transmission, 8 April 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL

The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

The British slang “window-licker” is a derogatory term for a person with diminished mental capacities. It is akin in meaning to the “R” word and considerably more offensive. It indicates the propensity of mentally handicapped people to do foolish things, like, for instance, lick windows.

Since the release of the 1999 Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” however, the expression has taken on another connotation: unconsummated desire. The song’s video, which has not aged well, especially presents overt themes of longing which suggest a covert toxicity that accompanies objects of desire. There is an implication as well that desire itself is mindless, that wanting is a form of weakness, ripe for control.

“Window licking” in the 21st century has come to signify still another type of desire — the desire for the representation of an object. “Windows,” after the Microsoft operating system, are what we commonly refer to in the act of looking-through onscreen. Window shopping and window dressing are no longer practices reserved for meatspace. And what appears within the digital window can be infinitely adjusted, altered, augmented, or may in reality not even exist.

The digital world, among other dubious consequences, has exponentially multiplied and convoluted “window licking,” not only in meaning. Nonetheless, the variation of sense in the circuits and wires and distributed networks of interconnected machines always has real-world consequences.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Mount Royal Center, 10 April 2026

Panel discussion titled 'Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter' at Centre Mont-Royal, featuring four speakers seated on stage with a large screen displaying event details.
From left: Cory Doctorow, Astra Taylor, Yoshua Bengio, and Nahlah Ayed. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I don’t need anything. I want.”
—Mr. C., Twin Peaks: The Return

At a recent conference on A.I., Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Daniel Béland identified two categories of power: power over and power to.

Power over, Béland loosely defined in the negative as the power of one person or group or nation to subjugate and control another. Power to, he described in the positive as the power to assist or overcome or empower another subject.

Judging by the standing-room only crowd, the potentials and perils of A.I. are of immediate interest and acute concern to a broad swath of luminaries across the disciplinary spectrum. I was seated between a retired McGill Engineering professor and the head of a public relations team from a Montreal-based startup, and each of these individuals listened with discernable alarm, as if there were some secret code to be cracked in the participants’ responses.

Artificial Intelligence, like any technology, has the potential to demonstrate, and the capacity to exert, both types of power. In the hands of some users, A.I. could be a force for capital ‘C’ Control in the Burroughsian or Deleuzian sense — protocological, algorithmic, inhuman domination that subjugates us through a series of automated if-then propositions. In other hands, A.I. possesses the power to ease the burden of impossibly tedious or time-consuming labour, to liberate us from work that has always posed an obstacle to progress and growth.

The problem is that human beings designed and implemented A.I. in our own image, so to speak, and as such it aims to satiate our wants more than our needs. A.I. has its own essential desire. It desires to satisfy our desires — if you like this, then you’ll love that — and inoculate us in doing so against the virus of dissatisfaction.

The Intense Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026

A full orchestra performing on stage, featuring musicians playing violins, cellos, and other instruments, with sheet music on stands and a conductor directing the performance.
Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Maison Symphonique, 15 April 2026. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Over the counter, with a shotgun,
Pretty soon, everybody’s got one.
—U2, “Desire”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government made headlines this week by being the first in Canadian history to secure a majority outside of a general election. Through a series of floor-crossings and byelections, the Liberals now occupy 174 out of a possible 343 seats and can operate until October 2029 without facing the threat of a no confidence vote.

Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre described the Liberal mandate as undemocratic, accusing the party of coordinating “dirty backroom deals.” According to Poilievre, Carney orchestrated his majority by force, using vaguely anti-revolutionary coded rhetoric: “Mark Carney is saying to Canadians: ‘Your vote does not count,’” Poilievre declared on 9 April in Richmond, B.C.

The Liberals’ byelection sweep recalls the famous anecdote about the conversation between Lenin and Trotsky on the eve of the October Revolution in November 1917. According to legend, Lenin, in a fit of uncertainty, asked Trotsky, “What will happen to us if we fail?” To which Trotsky was said to reply, “What will happen to us if we succeed?”

“An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions,” writes Slavoj Žižek in Living in the End Times, “it retroactively creates its conditions.” Carney is in the process of performing a similar soft socialist revolution in Canada and, given the populist surges underway in Alberta and Quebec, I for one reluctantly have to admit that I don’t hate it.

Quatuor Molinari : Musique à voir, Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026

A string quartet performs in front of an audience in an art gallery, with red abstract paintings in the background.
Quatuor Molinari performs at Fondation Molinari, 29 March 2026. Tomas Dessureault for NicheMTL.

“The Buddhist will tell you: ‘All life is pain.’ Pain comes from always wanting things.”
—‘Sally’ Moltisanti, The Many Saints of Newark

We are under the impression, mistaken in my opinion, that if we were only to consume the correct media, desire the proper commodities, collect the right art, listen to the authority-approved music, watch the acceptable films, belong to the prestigious clubs, trust the most reliable experts, keep the most important company, and engage in the most sophisticated sexual escapades, our wanting would be absolved and our suffering effaced. Because if we only want the righteous things, we shall receive them.

Still, it’s not the things that we desire that make us righteous or not; it’s the wanting.

Plural : Foire d’art contemporain à Montréal, Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, 10-12 April 2026

A woman stands beside a large mural depicting a blue depanneur storefront covered in graffiti, with rain falling down.
Gallery view, Jasmin Bilodeau, Dépanneur 2025, photograph printed on polypropylene. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.”
—Saul Ha-Levi Morteira

The old “wheelbarrow” joke, which I have told many times, hits different in the age of ICE and bears repeating.

A man crosses the border every day carrying a wheelbarrow full of sand. And every day, the crossing guard at his checkpoint dutifully sifts through every grain of that sand and finds nothing.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the same man transports his wheelbarrow full of sand over the border, in the face of the same increasingly confounded crossing guard, sifting to no avail, evermore certain that he is being deceived by some ingenious smuggling scheme.

Finally, the crossing guard reaches his last day on the job and implores the man with the wheelbarrow: “Please, I’m retiring tomorrow. You must tell me what it is that you have been smuggling through my checkpoint!”

To which the man replies, “I thought it was obvious. I’ve been smuggling wheelbarrows.”◼︎

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: Fatine-Violette Sabiri, Portrait d’une chambre orientale, 2022, Édition 2/3 + 1AP, inkjet printing on archival paper, 24 x 36,” Galerie Eli Kerr, acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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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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Into The Abyss: in conversation with Andréanne Godin

Drying atop a desk in the artist Andréanne Godin’s studio on Rue Chabanel are three identical garden trowels, replicas fashioned in matte grey clay.

The original object, a utilitarian version with silver metallic blade and an orange and black handle, is placed nearby, apparently for comparison. These facsimiles of an everyday tool one uses to dig into the earth are indicative of Godin’s artistic process, one moored by a preoccupation with revealing what exists below the surface.

Dressed in dark Levis denims and a pair of grey sneakers, Godin has invited me round for a studio visit, and a candid and sprawling conversation. She has made us a pot of black tea which she serves with homemade candied ginger and spoonfuls of honey.

“I thought maybe, I understood maybe.”

Godin will spend the next two months as artist-in-residence at Fondation Molinari’s central gallery to create works intended to “resonate with those in the Foundation’s collections,” according to the press release, culminating in a springtime exhibition opening 12 March 2026.

“I thought maybe, I understood maybe,” Godin says hesitantly when I ask her what will come of the residency. “I want to create monochromes that will be big enough to occupy your whole vision when you stand at a certain distance from them. I don’t know if that’s what I’m going to be able to do. But that’s what I want to do.”

At a time when artists of all stripes appear obsessed with the concept of “immersion,” here is one that literally plunges headlong into her work. In the fall of 2024, Godin learned how to freedive and became interested in the ways that we perceive colour while submerged underwater.

Her most recent exhibition entitled 48.312403, -78.048948, presented late last year at Galerie Nicolas Robert, produced among other items a series of wild clay pastel sticks that Godin gathered while freediving at lakes within Quebec’s Abitibi region. She shows me several wooden pallets that were specially constructed to display the pastels, and a handmade chart of colour samples with meticulous marginal notes.

“I could just think that I was going to be surrounded by a colour that you won’t really be able to see.”

“I never really dove in a lake before with my eyes open,” Godin reveals. “It’s an experience that must be very close to meditation. I could just think that I was going to be surrounded by a colour that you won’t really be able to see. But you’re going to see something. I was thinking of certain pieces of Molinari, like Les Trapèze. They’re not stripes. But there’s something organized on the space.”

Godin exhaustively catalogued every detail of what she saw at various depths with microtonal shades of colour that she gleaned from those dives. She began by testing different ways of layering and saturating the colours on paper, creating a shimmering and vibrational optical effect.

“In red it works less,” she explains. “In yellow, I feel that it really works well.” Godin pulls out a large sketchpad and thumbs through it. “I’m going to start by filling these 30 pages with monochromes created out of different layers of all these different colours,” she tells me.

“I feel like everything’s up in the air.”

Godin, 41, grew up in Val-d’Or and moved to Montreal in 2007, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in Fibres at Concordia University. “The first time I went in an art museum, I was 17,” she says. “I was in CEGEP. But I had already decided that that’s what I wanted to do. I remember being a kid, being five, and wanting to be an artist. The only thing I liked to do was drawing.”

The prestigious Galerie Nicolas Robert has presented Godin’s work for more than a decade, and she has exhibited a number of times there, as well as at Axenéo7 in Gatineau, and Oboro in Montreal, among others. She has held local and international residencies previously, most notably at the Christoph Merian Foundation artist’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, in 2017, and at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, the previous year.

This past December, Godin was appointed Assistant Professor in the discipline of Image Experimentation at Université Laval, so throughout the next season, she will split her time between a new teaching job and her research-creation residency at Fondation Molinari. “I feel like you get back the energy you put out into the universe, and maybe I put out a little too much energy,” she laughs. “I feel like everything’s up in the air.”

We talk at length about her earliest transcendent encounters, those which started Godin on the path to her current artistic practice. “My youth was very related to enjoying nature,” she says. “I think that’s why now in my work it’s so related to outdoor experiences. Even for this project at Molinari, when I thought about my relationship to landscape, it’s always been the forest.”

Et là, nous marchâmes… | And there, we walked…, 2014-2015, (Detail), Porcelain, sculpted natural graphite, wall drawing, Variable dimensions. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Godin recalls vivid childhood memories of blueberry-picking excursions with her father — memories that translated into a sculptural installation called And There, We Walked…, which she exhibited at Nicolas Robert in 2015. The work consists of a porcelain basket filled with blueberries fashioned from natural graphite. The tiny graphite blueberry sculptures become tools in the exhibition to create immense, impressionistic wall drawings.

“I love sculpture,” says Godin, showing me the basket, still half-full of shiny black blueberries. “But I was just thinking, ‘man, I don’t know where to put these things.’ Whenever I make sculptures, they’re usually really small, because I don’t want to have to store them. I love that drawings don’t take up a lot of space, but also somehow take up space,” she says, unfurling a thick paper scroll containing one of the drawings. Her studio transforms into a makeshift art exhibition strewn with random examples from her vast oeuvre.

“I was always working in black and white and then I started to work with monochromes. So, for me, it was just an easy transition. One colour. It was the same thing as working in black and white, even if it was all blue or all red. When you teach it, you have to understand colour at another level. Trying to figure out ways of communicating colour, or impressions, or feelings that I had when I was diving, it’s a very humbling experience. It feels like being in the service of nature.”

Nature, I propose to Godin, is something like the opposite of art: objects self-organize naturally, in contrast to being organized with effort by an artist’s intelligence and intuition.

“I do think that nature organizes things in a way that somehow, if you’re sensitive, or if you stop for a second and look at how it organizes things, can teach you so much about how to organize things in a gallery. What is the relationship with your body as you approach this thing?”

“This idea of being surrounded and touched by colour is different than the idea of seeing it.”

In The World of Perception, the book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he writes that, “the things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation […] people’s tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours, or the places where they like to go for walks.”

Evidently, a sustained contemplation of perception colours every object that Godin makes — from sculpture, to drawing, to candied ginger. The ways that Godin senses and reflects and reorganizes the objects in her world reveal what is unseen beneath our own surfaces, just as the shades of clay she trowels from lake beds expose the earth’s intrinsic character. Nonetheless, it is the whimsical hue of experience that seems to motivate her most.

“I’ve always loved closing your eyes and being in the sun and seeing that red,” she muses. “Feeling that you’re embraced. And at night, seeing all of the sparkles when you close your eyes. That’s also fun. This idea of being surrounded and touched by colour is different than the idea of seeing it. It feels like you can touch it somehow.”◼︎

Andréanne Godin is Fondation Molinari’s 2026 Artist-in-Residence.

Cover image: 48.312403, -78.048948, Detail. All images photographed for NicheMTL.

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The Immediate Data of Consciousness

Solitary Dancer, “Mi Sueño,” SDIII (Y-3000)

“The parts of our duration are one with the successive moments of the act which divides it; if we distinguish in it so many instants, so many parts it indeed possesses; and if our consciousness can only distinguish in a given interval a definite number of elementary acts, if it terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates the divisibility.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

What is ‘now?’

The question more accurately formed might be, ‘when is now?’ Or, even more precisely, ‘how long is now?’ When does the present turn into the past? At what point does the future become ‘now?’ And how long does ‘now’ last?

Can ‘now’ change history?

These might seem like merely speculative questions. But the implications of contemplating them and the partiality of their possible answers reveal profound consequences. It is not just semantic.

Quantifying ‘now’ is the genesis of our notion of time. Duration is what defines movement. Time is what determines value. And value is how we measure what is important.

Yuki Isami, Rives, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025

Yuki Isami performs at Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, 29 November 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The things of this world, that seem so transitory to philosophers, are not continuous. They are composed of discrete atoms, no doubt Boscovichian points. The really continuous things, Space, and Time, and Law, are eternal.”
—C.S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things.

Sigmund Freud in 1925 penned an essay on a newfangled contraption called the Mystic Writing Pad — essentially a rudimentary Etch A Sketch-like surface which could be written upon and erased ad infinitum. He found this device interesting for a few reasons.

The Mystic Writing Pad consists of a slab of wax resin with two sheets covering it: one made of celluloid, and the second of wax paper. The writer uses a stylus to imprint script onto the surface of the two sheets, leaving an impression in the resin rather than a trace on its surface. The two sheets can be detached from the resin slab whenever the writer wants to erase the Pad’s contents.

Freud notes that writing on paper in ink exhausts the capacity of the writing surface. Before long, as the writer takes more and more notes, pages and books and volumes are filled, and the writer needs to acquire new pages, books, volumes upon which nothing has yet been written.

The Mystic Writing Pad, however, offers Freud an “unlimited receptive capacity” for the extension of memory into the present. If the note you took is no longer of use, or you desire to discard it, you can simply wipe it away and start anew.

Freud uses the Mystic Writing Pad as a metaphor for perception consciousness.

“The unconscious,” writes Freud, “stretches out feelers … towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.” The frequency with which our conscious mind erases experience, just as the writer detaches and thus erases the Mystic Writing Pad’s pages, is, for Freud, “the origin of the concept of time.”

However, Freud notes that even when the two surface sheets are raised, the wax resin layer retains a permanent trace of the writing. The more the writer writes on the pad, the deeper and more chaotic and palimpsestic these inscriptions become.

Traces & Returns, Galerie JANO, 3 December 2025

Pascale Jean, “If I Could Hear Your Texts.” 2024. Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40″. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Fact and past are not interchangeable, nor is their relationship primarily one that points from the writer’s present into the object’s past.”
—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.

We all have both subjective and objective experiences of time. Sometimes time appears to drag. At other times, time leaps ahead as if some unseen force spurs it on.

Time when we are young seems comparatively slow because we have lived less time against which to compare new time. As we age, time seems to fly by as the experience of time and our familiarity with its passing accumulate.

The clock empirically measures out time, apparently reminding us of our faulty perceptive faculties when set against mechanical and digital rhythms. And while time may go on forever, we are all aware that we do not. And so, time as it passes becomes more valuable in its increasing scarcity.

Quatuor Molinari, Rhythmes canadiens, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025

Quatuor Molinari perform at the Conservatoir de musique de Montréal, 5 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the smallest unit of matter is the fold, not the point. Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole…”
—Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity.

Time is the operating system upon which our lives unfold.

The hyper-capitalist obsession with time management and leisure time indicates that time is no longer money; time is far more valuable than any monetary currency. We cannot reliably exchange our labour time for money anymore since the work bubble has burst rendering labour practically worthless.

Time has subdivided into such infinitesimal units as to give the illusion of continuity.

Corporation, “Sa dent douce à la mort,” Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

“…the method of intuition owes everything it is to duration.”
—Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Bergson-Deleuze Encounters.

Two polarities of temporal progression exist in tension: one based upon the concept of causality, and the other upon free will. At one end of the spectrum, events occur in succession because of an arbitrary but causative link. This and then that.

At the other end, some form of conscious agency acts as the causal force encouraging progress and fashioning outcomes according to intelligence and design. That because of this.

Intelligence deploys a number of strategies. Natural selection implies that the most successful of these strategies become standard.

Rationality as a strategy seems to have worn out its usefulness, though, given that ostensibly rational will brought us to this moment. Intuition succeeds rationality as a radical alternative, cleaving causality and free agency into arrays of chance.

Only time will tell. But given more time, time inevitably tells another story.◼︎

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: The McGill Islamic Studies Library. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Dead Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

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: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed

Hesaitix with Laced and Amselysen, Espace SAT, 31 May 2025

Laced performs at Espace SAT, 31 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Look at me and watch yourself
Everyone is someone else
When you speak the echoes chime
The voice is yours, but the words are mine.
—Nomeansno, “Machine”

Perhaps the reason that everyone is so fascinated with the spat between the Orange Cheeto and Tech Bro Numero Uno is that we recognize the lowest form of petty squabble magnified and reflected in the behaviour of the world’s most powerful people. Reality TV has migrated to Truth Social and the network formerly known as Twitter and returned full circle back to reality.

In the beginning, God created man in His image. Now that man is in charge, we are finally free to fashion the Gods we deserve.

The Womb is a Room in Another Person, dir. Catherine Machado, Mission Santa Cruz, 4 June 2025

Lynley Traill (left) and Mariana Jiménez Arango (right) star in The Womb is a Room in Another Person. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’m living in an age that
Screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There’s no one in sight.
—Arcade Fire, “My Body Is a Cage.”

Practice makes perfect. So be careful what you practice.

Since 1957, Alan Belcher, Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June – 24 July 2025

Eli Kerr (left) and Alan Belcher (right) at the vernissage for Since 1957 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Why shouldn’t everything we’ve constructed be deconstructed? What’s so special anyway about some abstract concept like democracy, or liberty, or justice? What’s so special about art when a crypto billionaire spends $6.2 million on a banana duct taped to the wall?

Later, that same crypto billionaire might spend $40 million on meme coins to attend a private dinner at Trump National Golf Club, effectively buying an audience with the leader of the so-called free world. Influence peddling is the highest artform of our era, an artform that requires highly specialized skills, and abundant material resources.

Ours would not be the first toxic civilization to fall away, and likely won’t be the last. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of the Apes knows that composition is inevitably followed by decomposition. It doesn’t matter whether these are good times or bad times or in between times. They won’t last.

Shapes with Thee Soreheads, Caniche, and Shunk, Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025

Shunk perform at the Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The other day I was searching for a CD amidst a pile of them that was taller than I am. Crouched on the floor trying to locate the spine of the album I was looking for, I raised my head just in time to see the entire stack come crashing down on me, one sharp plastic jewel case after another — Tom Waits, These New Puritans, Roger Waters — colliding with my forehead. It was slapstick. I walked around for three days with a discernible bump on my brow, wounded again by music.

I recounted this story afterwards to Gary Worsley, the proprietor of Cheap Thrills, to which he replied, “Good thing you don’t have much heavy metal in your collection.”

Superposition, Jinny Yu, Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June – 24 August 2025

Marie-Eve Beaupré introduced Jinny Yu at the vernissage for Superposition at Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do whatever common people do
Never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And then dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do.
—Pulp, “Common People.”

The last time you were here, walking hurriedly southward on Rue Dézéry from Métro Prefontaine, the snow was knee-high and it was Nuit Blanche and you were on your way to the same place that you are on your way to now, Fondation Guido Molinari, on the east end of Sainte-Catherine, a converted Spanish Bank in Hochelaga that housed the artist’s studio and living quarters while he was alive and now serves as a monument to his substantial legacy.

The air was painfully cold then, and the sidewalks were not cleared, except for the worn pathways of footprints that carved meandering makeshift snow trenches which deceived every second step into a potential broken ankle. The lamplight illuminated a sepia scene, and icicles hung from the most European of balconies in Canada, and you thought to yourself that you were fortunate to be living here in a city that prized arts and culture to such an extent as to celebrate Nuit Blanche with nighttime events at places like this.

Today, though, it is late spring, and the air is soft and warm and mild as baby’s breath — either the plant or the respiration — and songbirds are singing you on your way to your destination. Black girls in skin-tight spandex and white girls with naked tattooed arms sprouting from flowing sundresses walk before you down the one-way street, and beautiful girls’ backsides bounce on bicycle seats when they ride by, and you are grateful for Montreal’s crumbling and bumpy roads. An elderly woman in a purple robe and matching hair walks twin Scottish terriers on two lime-green leashes, smiling at you as she ambles past.

The scent of lilac overwhelms your olfactory sense, intermittently interrupted by the acrid stench of compost, because it is garbage day and the garbage collectors have left the tops of all the receptacles open to air out. You can smell the accumulated age of the neighbourhood, this time superimposed upon all the eras that came before it, the decomposing wood and musky tobacco fumes belching from open doors of flats with no air conditioning and out onto the sidewalks.

An ambient breeze carries puffs of pollen lazily through the park, where old men ride on reduced mobility scooters with high visibility vests wrapped around their seats. They smoke and are unshaven and sift through garbage cans gleaning empty beer bottles and cigarette butts that they can roll by hand back into smokable form.

It is 6:17pm and you are 17 minutes late. But it doesn’t matter right now because you feel alive and particularly present in a way that you haven’t in some time. You want to elongate everything about this moment, to remember the detail of every discrete sensation, to capture them as they wash away like grains of sand on some faraway beach.◼︎

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: Alan Belcher, Carbonara (2024), Carbon drawing on canvas with imported pancetta stagionata, egg yolk, pasta water, pecorino romano, agricola due leoni, olive oil, and black pepper. 18″ x 18″ x 2.25″

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