Dr. Sketchy’s, which has permanent locations in various other cities in North America,  set up shop in the Mainline Theatre in Montreal, a small black box theater. The main stage was right in the middle of the room, surrounded by three raised platforms with rows and rows of soft sea green seats. The room was mostly dark except for the few beams of light that surrounded the theater, the main stage itself empty except for a flat platform, covered in black velvet, littered with blue and black pillows. A stand with a book on the platform was covered in large plastic chains, and a black wooden chair stood on the side with a black, stuffed raven in its seat.

The room filled quickly with creative types taking out their sketchbooks, setting up their easels, and taking out their charcoal and pastels. A reporter toting only a spiral notebook and a few pencils might feel a bit out of place, even if they were determined to move beyond their usual doodling to the more elevated discipline of sketching.

After a few announcements, it was finally time for the session to start. Three female models, dressed punk getup to imitate characters from the series, walked onto the stage and after some cheer, quickly took up their poses. In the two minutes (positions weren’t held for long) it wasn’t easy to capture the angry shocks of pink hair, the hips covered in tight leather pants, and the fierce badass looks the models gave with my pencil and notebook. Dream-themed music was piped in (“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and the like), some of it recognizable from references in the books, most of it not. The sketch session continued on for an hour and a half. At one point, the models’ shirts came off to reveak pieces of black tape that covered their breasts.

The effort toward celebrating this auspicious date in Sandman’s history as a franchise was admirable, but came off a bit half-hearted. It might have been a successful sketching session, but was it a successful Sandman-themed sketching session, as it was billed? This collision of two very different outsider cultures, between the province of teenage outsiders in black eyeliner and hoodies (Sandman) and of adults with disposable income and a desire to feel mildly subversive, but still classy (the neo-burlesque scene), might look like something put together by an out-of-touch focus group on the outset. But after a bit of thought, it makes more sense: media and entertainment catering to ‘outsider’ social demographics, combining themselves in hopes of gaining a bigger audience. Maybe it didn’t work out terribly well this time around, but the effort was noble.

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Fear, courtesy of German artist Thomas Demand’s new exhibition Thomas Demand: Animations, which features various films and photographs that depict his paper sculptures. He creates sculptures of everything from recorders and escalators to cruise ships. These paper images capture extremely realistic visions of the common objects of our daily lives. They distort the distinction between reality and illusion, creating the fear that captured me and filled me with wonder throughout my whole trip through the exhibit.

What fascinated me the most were the films of these lifelike paper deceptions in motion, created by Demand and his assistants with the use of stop-motion technique. The films were shown with projectors of various vintages, from grainy 35mm to modern digital. He uses stop motion to create visions of things as unlikely and surreal as rain (for which he employed translucent candy wrappers). I was beginning to lose my sense of reality: if an artist can create such realistic images out of paper, who’s to say that the world I inhabit is not itself artificial? Something created from paper by a master craftsman? These were the thoughts that caused the feelings of terror creeping through me as I saw the loops over and over again, and wondered at the unexpected mysteries of each film.

What entranced me the most was the film component of Yellowcake, a mixed-media piece that also utilized sculpture. Like the other pieces, Yellowcake had an entire floor of the gallery to itself. It depicted the Ethiopian embassy in the Vatican, from which stolen stationary was used as false evidence against Saddam Hussein, and used to promote President George W. Bush’s agenda to involve the United States in the Iraq War. The film showed surveillance images of an outdoor room with stairs and an elevator. I stood in a room, dark except for the projected image of the embassy, filled with expectation. Above me, sounds of night filled the room, and every now and then, bumps, bangs, and moans echoed through the darkness. “Someone is coming,” I immediately thought. Suddenly the room turned on, and was flooded with light. Suspense reached a new level, and for a moment my hands shook. Yet the climax never arrived, and I left the scene before its power of constant suspension could take full control of me.

Demand powerfully shows his viewers how easily reality can be created with the common media that surround us, such as paper. He establishes novel distortions of reality that challenge the viewer’s preconceived notions of what is possible in a contemporary exhibition, and uses the lightest of materials to tackle the heaviest subjects.

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