Prior to last Wednesday, the only type of event I had ever attended at the Arts Lounge—located in the basement of McGill’s Leacock building—were a handful of the weekly Bar des Arts (BDA) gatherings, which always promise a boisterous crowd of tipsy students. The Fridge Door Gallery (FDG) Fall 2013[Read More…]
Art
High concepts
McGill students window-shopping west of campus may encounter a different display on the exterior of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery. Just east of the windows showcasing North Face jackets, something else is being sold: conceptual art. A large print of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art is roughly[Read More…]
Rallumons le Red Light reclaims Montreal’s Red-Light District
Whatever its faults, Montreal’s entertainment district cannot be described as poorly lit. On the evening of Oct. 24, a new artistic illumination joined the gaudy lights at the intersection of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine. An excited crowd came to witness the unveiling of Rallumons le Red Light, an installation[Read More…]
Art imitates life, in all its monotony
Jonas Mekas has been making movies ever since he stepped off the boat from Lithuania to Ellis Island in 1959. These films have covered a diverse array of topics and have ranged from the provoking and intellectually challenging to the downright bizarre. Known colloquially as the ‘godfather’ of American Avant-Garde[Read More…]
Venice in all its glory
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is showcasing their interdisciplinary exhibit, Splendore a Venezia, exploring the interplay of visual art, music, and political culture in the Venetian Republic between the early 16th century and the fall of the Serenissima. The museum investigates these overlaps, exhibiting a diverse collection of work: [Read More…]
Zooming in on the magic of the everyday
(3.bp.blogspot.com) In his current exhibit at the McCord Museum, Hungarian-born photographer Gabor Szilasi documents “The Eloquence of the Everyday” over 30 years and two continents. Through both black and white and colour images, Szilasi focuses on a variety of features that make up the everyday: urban and rural architecture, private[Read More…]
A night at the museum
Perhaps one of Montreal’s best kept secrets is the Contemporary Art Museum’s Nocturnes—a program that aims to combine three Montreal pastimes: music, art, and socializing. The part-gallery exhibit, part-concert series is a cultural hybrid where those interested in both mediums can comingle on the first Friday of each month. The[Read More…]
Quebec Couture
mmfa.qc.ca Who Denis Gagnon is and what he does goes much deeper than a basic understanding of fashion culture. Celebrating 10 years of creation, Gagnon is not only a fashion designer—and an adored one in Quebec—but a couturier, a man who is true to his craft in its most ultimate[Read More…]
Within Which All Things Move
Chloe Roubert Google Street View cars, mounted with nine cameras, roam the earth recording whatever happens to appear before them, from tumbleweeds floating across deserted highways to Justin Bieber’s grandparents in the front yard of the pop star’s Ontario home (earning Street View the apt nickname “Googlerazzi”). The Google cameras[Read More…]
Dissecting art
Nicholas Ruddock’s debut novel, The Parabolist, is told through interlacing narratives that pivot around a group of University of Toronto medical students in 1975, taught by Roberto Moreno. Moreno is a recently immigrated Mexican poet and member of the (fictional) parabolist movement, a group which “arranges words and ideas in such a way that the energy input burns.
