The exhibit is part of Concordia’s Art Matters, a festival now in its 15th year that gives Concordia students the opportunity to gain experience working with local galleries and curating their own exhibitions. For “(Intimacy),” eight student artists each submitted one piece to grapple with the subject.

The exhibit mixes traditional artistic mediums and modern digital visuals to dwell on the distortion of what is public and what is private in the internet era. Leah Schulli’s Thanks bemoans the status update that has come to serve as an open invitation to publish the personal and the trivial. Riffing on meme aesthetics, Schulli’s piece displays a Facebook status bemoaning interviews one has to conduct in large red letters across the backdrop of a mountain range. The open landscape points to the way people’s statuses echo across cyberspace only to be drowned out by the mass production of similar anecdotes. The personal, magnified and made available for everyone by the internet’s infinite memory, has its intimacy cheapened and worn away.

Her fuzzy, pixeled representation makes her anonymous enough to convey the universality of the situation – everyone is at risk of having these intimate self-portraits plastered across the web.

Public exposure isn’t always this self-aggrandizing; Katie Stienstra’s I’ll Show You Mine delves into the nude selfie and its easy slip into popular circulation. A long-haired blonde peeks out seductively from a curtain, holding her iPhone up to capture her physique on camera. She is printed in ink jet onto a transparent plastic canvas and her fuzzy, pixeled representation makes her anonymous enough to convey the universality of the situation – everyone is at risk of having these intimate self-portraits plastered across the web. Unlike Schulli’s status, the nude selfie is usually meant for a specific audience – often a romantic partner – with the belief that it will stay within that relationship. When her private photos are shared, the intimacy she intends to convey becomes as commodified and public as that of the models on billboard posters that her seductive pose replicates.

The personal, magnified and made available for everyone by the internet’s infinite memory, has its intimacy cheapened and worn away.

Other pieces use comedy to access the more confusing aspects of individual identity in contemporary society. Shawn Christopher’s Cochon grapples with sexual intimacy in his dark and humourous work. This sculpture features about thirty penises of different shapes and sizes standing erect around a statue of a man with a pig’s head sitting on the floor. Some of the penises have had their tops replaced by pig heads; others have been cut down to just the tip. Almost all of the pinkish body and body parts are singed from the fire they were baked in.

The dismembered members, in their quantity and anonymity, bring to mind dating apps like Tinder and Grindr that have the power to make sex another exchange in social media’s gift economy. Nowadays sex is as on demand as Netflix and as a result we often become sexually greedy – the pig’s downcast eyes are a guilty confession. The singe marks on Christopher’s pig and penises reminds the viewer that sex in the age of the internet makes it that much easier to get burned.

Intimacy is getting turned inside out by our technologies and the cultures that germinate from them, changing forms and evolving into a confusing, complex organism that’s becoming increasingly difficult to define. As we all experience the strangeness of being caught up in the World Wide Web, any attempt to help us navigate what it means when everybody and nobody is our audience is desperately needed. These students’ pieces generously offer a little guidance.

 
“(Intimacy) Limits and Consequences” is on display at the the Yellow Fish Art Gallery until March 20.

The post Privates made public appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Their self-titled debut album makes it clear why their music has enraptured the local scene. Viet Cong doesn’t shy away from the atypical, from their lo-fi grungy recording style to their cryptic lyrics. The listener meanders through their songs, unaware of where they will lead. “March of Progress” begins as an instrumental, constructing a repetitive dreamscape with seemingly unstructured white noise. Yet as the song progresses, the noise gives way to gentle strumming with a minimal drum beat, which in turn quickens its pace, leading to the final explosion of psychedelia of guitar riffs before the abrupt end.

Their music embraces the atonal, the band unafraid in using an electric guitar in “Bunker Buster” that clashes against the melody with shrill and nagging purpose. Oscillating from marked apathy to fuelled aggression, vocalist/bassist Matt Flegel’s monotone croons demonstrate his ability to convey dreary ambivalence while maintaining the music’s energetic angst.

While Flegel may be the frontman, drummer Mike Wallace unifies the group. Wallace’s steady and simple rhythms create a structure that contrasts with the wonderfully amorphous instrumentals and binds all four members’ music together. In “Continental Shelf,” arguably the band’s most popular song as well as one of its oldest, Wallace’s beats gallop the song forward against Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen’s lagging guitars and synth along with Flegel’s drawling vocals.

Whether it be their ambiguous genre, their experimental yet accessible sound, or their local Canadiana status, this album is well-worth checking out.

Viet Cong will be released January 20, and they will play at Bar “Le Ritz” PDB a mere ten days later, on January 30.

The post Viet Cong – Viet Cong appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Pop Symposium

These perspectives on music and Montreal were represented throughout the festival’s different segments. Pop Symposium addressed the questions of artistic integrity and corporatization that many artists frequently face. “The Montreal Formula,” for example, featured artists Albert Nerenberg, Murray Lightburn of The Dears, and Krista Muir, who discussed ways to achieve artistic success in Montreal. Far from providing a formula, the panel presented these three role models and their paths to success as inspiration for curious musicians in the audience – several of whom exchanged cards and advice with the panelists after the talk.

A round-table discussion,“The Origins of the Montreal Music Scene” presented a historical look at the role of music in Montreal. In some ways, this panel contrasted with the former, telling stories of bands from the seventies that would play just for the sake of playing, with no concern for success or formula.

“Are We All Digital Sharecroppers Now? Indie Culture and the Corporate Web” invited Astra Taylor, Amy Macdonald, Marie Leblanc Flanagan, Stephanie DeGooyer and Ian Ilavsky to discuss the difficulty of artistic online promotion in the age of data exploitation by internet companies. Instead of a unified and message-driven lecture, the symposium engaged with a multitude of ideas, problems, and potential solutions, inviting opinions from the audience and encouraging divergent opinions of panelists. As Pop volunteer Graham MacVannel put it, “[The symposiums] really contributed substance to the concept of POP as more than just a music fest – it’s about engaging with the community and providing both the public and artists with a forum to interact positively.”

Art Pop

Art Pop, spread throughout Pop’s headquarters at 3450 St. Urbain, acted as an interdisciplinary slice of Montreal art life. Curated by Mohammad Rezai, the video project “POP Life” featured gifs created by over 150 different artists, exploring what pop culture means to them – a dizzying and illuminating series of glimpses into 150 different worlds.

“Sounding the City,” an installation from Jen Reimer and Max Stein, turned four rooms of the building into ‘Montreal soundscapes’ using recordings from different neighbourhoods throughout the city. While the project didn’t translate very well orally – it was difficult to distinguish the rooms from each other – the concept in and of itself was striking in its attempt to map the sounds we hear everyday.

The most impressive piece in Art Pop came from Catherine Gingras, Sandra Breux, Mitz Takahashi and Conor Prendergast, a mix of musicians and geography academics. “Mapped: Trajectories of Montreal Musicians” traced the lives and schedules of 25 Montreal musicians. The exhibit used maps, photos, video, and portfolios for a compelling portrayal of the realities of music in Montreal, presenting as much of a formula as any panel could.

Intimate shows and unusual headliners

As for the music itself, the best way to approach Pop is with no expectations. Over the course of this weekend, The Daily attended many packed shows in small venues, in the same night headbanging to a raw and energetic set from post-punkers Ought, and grooving to the wailing of Mozart’s Sister, a powerhouse electronic duo that combines all the best aspects of Grimes, Chvrches and Madonna. Even at shows as diverse as these, the crowd was always the same: loud, hyped, and sweaty.

The bigger shows may not have maintained this intimacy, but still kept with the POP mentality. At festivals like Bonnaroo and Osheaga, you can expect pretty much the same headliners – Arctic Monkeys and Outkast made the rounds this year. Even North By Northeast, which features hundreds of local artists in the same vein as Pop, chooses predictable headliners, this year showcasing St. Vincent and Mac Demarco, who were also on the festival circuit. With Pop, on the other hand, you never know who is going to be the talk of the festival. This year, headliners included eighties hip hop legends JJ Fadd, sixties star Ronnie Spektor, and British electronic king Bonobo, who closed the festival with an unusual DJ set for the amped up crowd at SAT. Pop’s headliners may be getting bigger, but they’re not getting boring.

Mapping Montreal

Not only does Pop showcase different genres and art forms, but it introduces festival-goers to different spaces. Unlike Osheaga, which takes place in one large spot over the course of a few days, Pop has its participants exploring a huge number of venues spread out over multiple neighbourhoods. All us McGill kiddies that never make it out of the McGill bubble are finally forced into Little Italy, the North and East Plateau, Mile End, Mile Ex, and Parc Extension to witness these (slightly) farther communities up close. One of the best ways to experience Montreal’s music scene at Pop Montreal is by encountering its different venues. Audience members can uncover hidden gems in neighbourhoods into which they might not otherwise venture.

The “Scene”

We should still keep in mind that Pop does cater to a specific scene on the Montreal music spectrum. The festival delves more into the indie sensibility than anything else and one is more than likely to encounter a number of hipper-than-thou young twenty-somethings who hide their snobbery behind perfectly disheveled outfits. The Plateau and Mile End showcase a yuppie, middle-class student population. What’s more, the audience at Il Motore, the one major Pop venue in Parc-Ex, is not very representative of the burrough’s primarily South Asian population. Although Pop may open up a scene for Montrealers to explore, it is nonetheless only one scene among many that exist within Montreal’s boundaries.

13 years after its inception, the festival has grown to an almost overwhelming size. With growth comes corporatization, and Pop Montreal has not escaped this trope – this year, women were handing out Monster drinks at Quartiers Pop on opening day, and the American Apparel sponsorship was impossible to miss. But instead of growing into a concentrated festival with predictable lineups and cheesy promotion contests, POP’s growth has seen it scatter into an experience that can only be described as all over the place – in the best possible way.

The post Slices of Montreal life appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Wednesday, Day
ART POP: Richmond Lam
When and Where: 11:00 a.m. at Quartiers POP (3450 St. Urbain)
Free!
The Series: ART POP is one of POP Montreal’s most accessible features. A visual arts series, it features free installations and performances by local and international artists. It also occurs all day, every day. If you’re looking for a relaxed way to experience POP Montreal, this is it.
The Show: Taken in his Mile End studio, Richmond Lam’s intimate portraits are a throwback to the world of stark black and white photography.

Wednesday, Evening
Film POP: Listen Up Phillip (Alex Ross Perry | U.S., 2014 | 108 min.) – Quebec premiere!
When and Where: 8:30 pm at Théâtre Hall Concordia (1455 de Maisonneuve W.)
Tickets $10
The Series: Film POP is another of POP’s lesser known siblings. The series continues throughout the week with screenings of cinema’s hidden gems, including two films from Quebec: Le trésor de la langue (René Lussier | Québec, 1989 | 42 min.), Le trésor archange (Fernand Bélanger | Québec, 1996 | 76 min).
The Show: Ease into POP Montreal madness with the Quebec premiere of Listen Up Philip, a dark comedy about a writer awaiting the publication of his second novel. Starring Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss, and Krysten Ritter: you may recognize the latter three from the Wes Anderson universe, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, respectively.

Thursday, Day
Symposium: Can Anyone be a Rockstar?: The Gendered Landscape of Music Scenes and Rock Camp for Girls
When and Where: 4:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. at Quartiers POP (3450 St-Urbain)
Free!
The Series: POP Symposium brings an analytical aspect to the festival, presenting workshops and panels that address questions of culture in Montreal and beyond. It also gives some of the headliners a chance to connect with the POP audience outside of a concert hall.
The Panel: Rock Camp for Girls, an awesome community organization focused on empowering girls through music, invites Montrealers to partake in a discussion about the complexities of breaking into the music world as a female-identified or gender non-conforming musician – followed by a karaoke songwriting workshop!

Thursday, Evening
Holobody (with Slight, Nancy Pants, Silver Keys and Superbloom)
When and Where: 11:00 p.m. at Cagibi (5490 Boulevard Saint-Laurent)
Tickets $10
The Venue: Cagibi is an eclectic venue in the Mile End that feels like your friend’s country house: it’s old and worn but filled with charm. It’s also the back room to a café – so on point that it’s almost a parody of an indie venue.
The Sound: Indie-folk melodies alternating with dreamy electro, overladen with the gentle harmonies of the vocalists (who also happen to be siblings).
The Show: The combination of the intimate venue and the peaceful music will treat the audience to a serene vibe.

Friday, Day
CTZNSHP (at POP BBQ with Moon King, Doomsquad, Seoul, Diamond Bones)
When and Where: 3:00 p.m. at Parc de la Petite-Italie
Free!
The Venue: Outdoor greenery, complete with a gazebo; what better way is there to spend a Friday afternoon? (Definitely not in class.)
The Sound: Post-punk with dark melodies and back to basics instruments.
The Show: CTZNSHP shows usually consist of energetic and angsty crowds head-bobbing in a corner of the room, so it’ll be interesting to see that transition to an outdoor setting.

Friday, Evening
TOPS (with Moon King, Lydia Ainsworth, Homeshake, Doldrums)
When and Where: 2:15 am at La Sala Rossa (4848 Boulevard Saint-Laurent)
Tickets $5
The Venue: The hallmark of the Montreal indie scene, La Sala Rossa’s wooden floors and age-old red curtains accommodate both intimate shows and larger crowds.
The Sound: Lighthearted indie electronic music with a faded pop quality.
The Show: Having just released a full-length album, TOPS’ fan-base is already significant within the city, promising a lively show full of happy people and dreamy dance tunes.

Saturday, Day
PUCES POP: Record Fair
Ukrainian Federation
When and Where: Saturday, Sept. 20th, 11:00 am at 405 Avenue Fairmount Ouest
Free!
The Series: PUCES POP wheels and deals crafts, music, and eclectic art pieces to add to your ever-growing collection.
The Show: Once POP has whetted your appetite for new music, head over to the Ukrainian Federation at to browse the record collections on sale. Providers include local and beloved shops, as well as international dealers.

Saturday, Evening
Saxsyndrum (with The Lovely Feathers, How Sad, Dishwasher, Pigeon Phat, Holy Data)
When and Where: 1:00 a.m. at Divan Orange (4234 Boulevard Saint-Laurent)
Tickets $10
The Venue: A small bar with old wooden floors, you would miss this hidden gem at the heart of St-Laurent if you weren’t looking for it. Its grungy vibe makes it a casual and relaxed place that welcomes all sorts.
Sound: Wild jazz and funk tunes.
The Show: The Saxsyndrum duo always look like they’re having the time of their lives onstage and their music makes that feeling absolutely contagious.

Sunday, Day
The Montreal Formula: Thinking outside the box for survival in Montreal Arts
When and Where: 1:45 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. at Quartiers POP (3450 St-Urbain)
Free!
The Series: This is another presentation from POP Symposium. For panels on similar topics, check out Literary Legacies: A Montreal Story, Roundtable: Origins of the Montreal Underground Music Scene, and Stop Being An Idiot and Make Every Show of Your Tour Count.
The Artist: Founder of the World Stupidity Awards, Albert Nerenberg is a Canadian filmmaker, author, journalist and “laughologist,” not to mention a former editor of The Daily.
The Event: Albert and his friends are going to offer advice on how to avoid ending up as the stereotypical starving artist in Montreal.

Sunday, Evening
Kalmunity Jazz Project
When and Where: 9:45 p.m. at Café Résonance (5175 Avenue du Parc)
Tickets $8
The Venue: A well-respected Mile End café, the smell of coffee beans will no doubt linger throughout any performance.
The Sound: Explosive jazz improvisation, with elements of R&B, hip-hop, Afrobeat, funk, reggae, and soul, from a well-seasoned group of musicians.
The Show: These musicians have been performing in Montreal for years; they will no doubt put on a lively and musically playful show to get your groove on to.

The post An Alternative Pop Guide appeared first on The McGill Daily.

For the last two weeks of summer, the city was home to “Decolonizing Street Art: Anti-colonial Street Artists Convergence,” a gathering of artists that aims to assert and celebrate Indigenous cultures. Montreal, Canadian, and international artists spent their time here painting collaborative works around the city, as well as leading workshops on a variety of topics, from stencilling to cultural appropriation.

The Convergence has certainly left its mark – wheatpastes around the city proclaim “Decolonize Turtle Island,” the Indigenous name for North America. This new art serves to remind all settler occupants of Turtle Island to be conscious of their histories. The organizers hope their visuals will shock people out of their complacency.

The Daily met with Chris Bose and Bandit, two graffiti artists participating in the Convergence, to talk about their work, their medium, and what it means to establish anti-colonial values through art. Working in Little Italy in a back alley behind Marconi, Bandit and Bose had their hands dirty with spray paint and were well on their way to finishing a second wall of Indigenous art.

Bose is a self-described “jack-of-all-trades” from Kamloops, British Columbia. He writes poetry, makes films, and is the founder of the Arbor Aboriginal Arts Collective, a group that supports emerging Indigenous artists and promotes the creation and dissemination of Indigenous art.

To Bose, anti-colonial values mean Indigenous values, such as caring for the environment and having concern for the human race at large. “At this festival, I’m taking back wall space and painting Indigenous realities and art,” he says, “as opposed to ads and posters only aimed at getting you to buy something. ”

His murals illustrate this message well. One presents images of addiction, with bottles representing alcoholism, drug addiction, and even love, which he claims can be as addictive as any other substance. A crow standing to the far right of the mural carries the spirits of the dead to the spirit world, Bose explains. His larger mural on an adjacent wall depicts a school of salmon swimming in water that becomes increasingly polluted and murky, draining into a large pipe. The image refers to the recent Mount Polley mining disaster in British Columbia. On August 4, dirty water from the mine, potentially including chemicals like lead and arsenic, leaked into the nearby rivers, causing an environmental catastrophe for the surrounding ecosystems, according to Bose.

Bose paints these heavy issues because, for him, the purpose of art making is “to spark interest and awareness.” He hopes to force viewers to address events such as the Mount Polley disaster, which has received little mainstream coverage. “I want people to see my murals and ask, ‘What’s the art mean?’ and dig deeper to find answers,” he says.

Accordingly, Bose has little patience for those who turn a blind eye to Indigenous issues, especially when it comes to appropriating Indigenous symbols. He reprimands those who don’t know their history and flaunt headdresses without having “earned the right or the title to do so.” If people educate themselves, he says, it will completely change the way they view what now seem like trivial fashion statements.

Bandit, however, has a somewhat different view.

At the start of the interview, the Los Angeles-based street artist was holding a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign that had its middle white line replaced with natural scenery, and was about to reinstall it somewhere nearby. The natural environment contrasts against the concrete surroundings, both shocking and stimulating the viewer. He had also just wrapped up a profile of an Indigenous man with his head turned toward Bose’s work on the rest of the wall, as if bearing witness to his political and artistic creation.

“People don’t know the history,” he explains. “They’re just using Aboriginal culture to their advantage to make money. But at the same time, it promotes Aboriginal culture. I think it helps and it’s better to have exposure, even if it’s in the wrong way, than none at all. The way to reconcile this is through education, teaching people the history behind the symbols.”

Bandit and Bose can agree, however, on the blatant lack of education on current Indigenous issues in both the U.S. and Canada. Bandit posits that the public nature of street art makes the festival an integral educational tool. He points out that it’s public and accessible to all, with no entrance fees that would otherwise be associated with museums or galleries. Street art is also inherently political; it reclaims space, an issue especially poignant at a festival addressing colonialism. Bandit goes even further, proclaiming that “street art is anarchy – it fights the system.”

“I’ll paint any wall. I’ll avoid churches and buildings like that, but otherwise I’ll paint anything,” he says. “These buildings are established on land that isn’t theirs anyways, so why should I honour that ownership?”

Though the Convergence ended September 3, the murals are ready for viewing by any and all Montrealers in Little Italy, along with other wheatpastes and graffiti art around the city available to those who know where to look. The art is effective in its mere presence; it brings Indigenous issues to the forefront because they’re no longer out of sight and out of mind. Yet the art paints a picture of empowerment rather than victimhood. In claiming urban spaces, the artists assert their voices and the voices of the people they aim to represent. Their authorship is a conquest of cultural space. Montreal needs reminders of its colonial past, and this festival has woven these reminders right into the fabric of the city.

For more information about other artists and the festival’s projects: head to the Decolonizing Street Art Facebook page.

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The post Taking back the streets appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The CCA’s exhibit outlines the urban planning of these two cities in the post-World War II decolonization period. The great empires of western Europe had bled out their funds and their willpower, consequently losing the interest and the capacity required to sustain colonies that were demanding sovereignty. At the same time, industrialization had caused tenement villages to crop up as migrants arrived in droves to work in the factories. Housing needs became a pressing issue for these cities that were industrializing and consequently experiencing urbanization at an exponential rate. The United Nations began campaigns to improve living conditions for colonial countries all over the world as increased exposure showed the crowded, unsanitary, and difficult conditions of these neighbourhoods. International agencies began to produce treatises that denoted the poor living conditions and made proposals for change eventually supported by the U.S., a newly-ascended world power. Jacob L. Crane and Edward T. Paxton from the United States’ Housing and Home Finance Agency wrote about the housing crisis and the global call to action that the developed world was participating in. Their article, along with many others, is displayed on the round white table as you first enter the exhibit.

The main room highlights the global trend of such urban planning projects, placing Chandigarh and Casablanca within a context of similar developments. Despite these cities’ development during a similar geopolitical era, their modes of execution were vastly divergent. Casablanca had already long been a city of great importance in Morocco. From the years 1917 to 1957, the population had risen from 82,500 to over 550,000 people due to rural to urban migration. Chandigarh, however, was a city planned from its very inception. Rather than choosing an existing city as its capital, the northern Indian province of Punjab built Chandigarh from scratch to fulfill this administrative purpose.

In the midst of all this decolonization, it would seem incongruous that Western urban planners and architects became the leaders of third world urban planning. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better know as Le Corbusier, the chief of architecture for Chandigarh’s development, was Swiss-French. Michel Écochard, a Frenchman, acted as the director of Morocco’s Service de l’Urbanisme and took charge of the Casablanca project. The effects of imperialism did not end when former colonies became sovereign, so it is not surprising that the imperial powers still had a finger or two in their colonies. Yet the CCA’s exhibit sets out to show how decolonization altered imperialistic attitudes and, for the first time in a long time, local needs were given consideration ahead of the interests of the foreign powers.

Yet the CCA’s exhibit sets out to show how decolonization altered imperialistic attitudes and, for the first time in a long time, local needs were given consideration ahead of the interests of the foreign powers.

Écochard was known for his intensive research into the quantitative and qualitative elements of Moroccan life. He not only looked at the type of land, its unique topographic features, and the amount of people who occupied the space, but used photography to document people going about their daily lives and sent out questionnaires to try and understand how people used the spaces they inhabited. Écochard set out to meet people’s specific needs, not the needs of an assumed ‘universal, rational man’ created by the West. Similarly, Le Corbusier had young Indian professionals on his team, engaging with and influencing Chandigarh’s planning and development. While the West still occupied the leading role, it was clear that the power dynamic between the developed and the developing world was beginning to change.

The intricate planning of these cities and their neighbourhoods revolved around local needs. For example, Écochard noted that pedestrians made up 53 per cent of deaths in Casablanca’s car accidents, a clear sign that the roads needed to be redesigned in such a way as to make walking safer and driving less hazardous. Detailed roadmaps of the city are splayed out along one of the exhibit’s walls, showcasing the differently sized streets, ranging from fast and public thoroughfares such as highways and boulevards to smaller streets intended for residential neighbourhoods. Schools, hospitals, administrative centres, markets, and other facilities were all carefully conceived to serve the needs of the communities planned around them. Chandigarh’s University of the Punjab and capital buildings are marked out along the walls in as much detail as the satellite towns for specific industry and low-income housing are. There was just as much care to the common, every-person life as there was to the grand and luxurious buildings that would serve high-ranking civil servants and educated professionals.

The detailed diagrams, blueprints, maps, and photographs give visitors a concrete understanding of the projects undertaken by these teams. The personal notes scribbled in the planners’ and architects’ barely legible handwriting give you an insider’s view into these cities’ transformation. Yet these papers and plans are meaningless without the voices of the people who actually lived in the city. The back wall of one of the rooms projects a video of Chandigarh everyday life. People crossing the street, taking the bus, going to work, to school, home, shopping. All of that banal, normal stuff we are so familiar with in our own city. Unfortunately, none of these people are given a chance to speak in the exhibit, a crucial omission that keeps the scope of information presented far narrower and far more Western than it should be. As much consideration as it seems these European urban planners offered to the residents of these cities, does it matter if we don’t know whether they wanted it in the first place?

“Casablanca Chandigarh” runs until April 20, 2014 at the CCA (1920 Baile). Admission is free for students who present valid student ID.

The post Urban planning and decolonization appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The memoir follows Southwood who, recently engaged to her boyfriend, moves to Los Angeles to live with him after finishing her master’s degree at the University of British Columbia. He has been offered a job as a cameraman on a reality TV show about the porn industry called Webdreams. It follows the porn stars’ careers and shoots behind-the-scenes footage. As time progresses, Southwood becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the way the porn industry clashes with her ideas of sexuality, as well as with her boyfriend being in such close proximity to women groomed to be the ‘ideal’ objects of male sexual desire. As she encounters these conflicts, she personalizes them and engages in a cyclical narrative of discovery, disapproval, rejection, and retrospective enlightenment that becomes pretty tiresome after the fourth time around.

Each chapter is titled after a sexual act or porn archetype: “threesomes,” “MILFs,” “squirting,” “masochism,” et cetera. In almost every chapter, our protagonist learns something new about porn and is consistently shocked at how large a role it plays in the industry. However, Southwood’s perspective is inconsistent with what most younger readers will have experienced growing up in the age of the internet. Pornography is widely accessible and, as Southwood points out, youth today are being exposed to porn by the age of 11. Those born from the mid-1980s onward would not be nearly as shocked as she was to know that many women shave their pubic hair or that anal sex is a common occurrence in porn’s narrative arcs.  Southwood thus reveals a generation gap that restricts her work to a more porn-shy readership and comes off as either highly conservative or naïve, if not both.

She then becomes insecure about what she learns, wondering what men’s expectations are due to their exposure to pornography. MILFs, who are apparently played by porn stars past the age of 23, make our protagonist feel old. Her inability to squirt makes her feel sexually inadequate, and her discomfort with anal sex bothers her to no end. She translates these issues into insecurities about her own relationship, feeling that her fiancé must want everything from her that he sees from behind the camera. With a strand of argument that dabbles too much in the emotional, she bemoans unrealistic standards instead of dismissing them as patriarchal, doesn’t communicate her feelings accurately, and gets upset when her fiancé does not repeat her own views verbatim back to her. Instead of delving into the complex politics surrounding the industry, Southwood only focuses on her immediate emotional reaction to her boyfriend’s involvement with pornography. Then, a few pages later, we hear the author speaking calmly in hindsight about how now she understands that what once made her insecure is perfectly alright and that the porn industry is a-ok – again, without giving much depth to her justification of this new stance. This melodrama is repeated at least once every chapter.

Southwood’s flip-flopping of opinions throughout her memoir is not only uninteresting to the reader, but also doesn’t offer much information about current debates in the porn industry in the real world. There is a large body of scholarship in feminist and liberal theory about porn and what our society’s stance ought to be on it. Some feminists believe pornography perpetuates sexism; showing barely legal girls being penetrated in every orifice possible and then being ejaculated on isn’t typically thought to empower women. Many are convinced that the average girl does not grow up wanting to become a porn star, but rather is pushed into becoming a victim of the male gaze due to limited employment opportunities.

Others argue from a point of view of concern over the amount of influence porn can have on the viewer. There is no lack of rape pornography that glorifies and legitimizes sexual assault, or of porn that, to many, seems to encourage degrading women as part of sexual encounters. Many worry that viewers’ sexual desires and expectations will be influenced by the material they consume and that this will cause an increase in sexual violence towards women or perpetuate women’s inferiority. In response to this, some feminists have taken up the task of making feminist porn, depicting non-violent, overtly consensual, and respectful sex that is for both persons to enjoy.

However, others argue that no sexual act is degrading in and of itself and to assume that someone who enjoys bondage or sexual submission is being forced into it is to take away sexual agency, both from the porn star and from the viewers who choose to imitate certain acts out of their own will and with the consent of their partner. Advocates of freedom of speech argue that no matter how perverse it may seem to some, pornography should not be censored. Southwood touches on some of these viewpoints in her memoir, but only superficially in her epilogue. These are only some of the arguments surrounding porn that are worth debating. Instead, the reader gets an internal dialogue about expectations in relationships and Southwood’s own body image.

Prude is an interesting examination of the insecurities women feel when faced with unrealistic standards and sexual desires cultivated for male enjoyment, but it fails to give a critical analysis of what is purported to be the focal point of the novel: porn.

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Erik Goulet, director of the festival and animation professor at Concordia, explains that shooting stop motion is a physically demanding and meticulous job. He describes it as “the decathlon of animation,” due to the demands on both the body and the mind. If the filmmaker is not satisfied with the end product, they have to start over because, unlike traditional animation, stop motion must use every shot back-to-back. It requires mastering skills in sculpture, filming, understanding materials, as well as tremendous determination and attention to detail.  Shel and Justin Rasch’s film Dogonaust: Enemy Lines, a 12 minute film critiquing the arbitrariness of war using alien species, took four years to create according to Goulet.

This year’s edition of the festival kicked off with a screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Its director, Henry Selick, a member of the jury for the festival, was present, as was animator Anthony Scott. The screening sold out almost a week in advance, demonstrating the film’s continued popularity two decades after its initial release. Selick and Scott were not the only big names. Joe and Joan Clokey, son and daughter-in-law of the creator of children’s television show Gumby, served as jury members in the competitions as well. The Clokeys have carried on the family business and on Saturday evening they gave a retrospective of Gumby and lead a discussion on this tremendously popular show that aired for three decades. These influential works have been important in popularizing stop motion and broadening its audience. Goulet emphasizes the importance of The Nightmare Before Christmas’ release in 1993 as the catalyst in bringing about a resurgence in stop motion’s popularity. A cascade of feature-length stop motion films followed, including James and the Giant Peach, Chicken Run, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the soon-to-be-released The Little Prince, which Goulet himself is working on. Goulet explains that it was partly in response to this renewed demand for stop motion that he founded the festival in 2009.

Films are submitted to the Stop Motion Film Festival competition from all over the world. One of the great things about stop motion is that it is a genre which generally uses minimal dialogue, if any. This makes films accessible to people from all linguistic backgrounds and serves to focus the viewer’s attention on the visual. It universalizes human communication and enables cultural exchange without any language barriers. Goulet says the festival got about 250 submissions this year  Goulet must select carefully based on both technique and storyline with the intention of being able to present films that, he says,  “are gems […] that you’ve got to see.” Although he is happy to have increased the number of screenings to 70 films this year, Goulet always regrets not having enough time to screen more.

The festival consisted of competitions in three categories of films: independent, academic, and professional. Independent filmmakers pay out of their own pocket to create these films, creating them entirely on their own with full artistic control. Academic films are created in a school environment, usually at the graduate or post-graduate level. Goulet, perhaps biased by his own academic status, has a soft spot for this category, calling its filmmakers “artists of the future [with] brilliant ideas” that haven’t been altered by a commissioner’s wishes. Finally, the professional category includes those films that have been commissioned. This title may be misleading since many of these filmmakers make these films as side projects in venues as unexpected as a garage.

The high cost and time-consuming nature of stop motion makes it a difficult field to get involved in, especially if one is from a low-income background and has less expendable money and time. Grants and commissions that fund the ‘professional’ category are thus important to aspiring artists, but they still privilege those who have initially had the time, money, or university education to have gotten involved in the first place. However, perhaps festivals like this are a way to expose more viewers from diverse backgrounds to stop motion and inspire those to demand resources for their otherwise unattainable creative goals.

Culminating in an award ceremony on Sunday night, the festival awarded prizes to Peter Vacz for the academic submission Rabbit and Deer, Špela Čadež for the independent film Boles, Augusto Zanovello for the professional Lettres de femmes, and again to Peter Vacz as the public’s choice for best film. The most rewarding part of the festival for Goulet was being able to bring stop motion to his city and to his students whom he has inspired over the years and who form the better part of the volunteer crew that made this past weekend possible. This annual festival is a unique opportunity to see films that otherwise do not get much viewership or publicity, providing a stimulating sample of an art form that is over a century old.

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Performance art uses the artist’s body as the medium, contesting the old yet still prevalent hierarchy in the art world which centers around expensive materials displayed in exclusive locations. “This interdisciplinary, or ‘undisciplined,’ lesser-known art form can be characterized by the essential physical presence of the artist during a performance, gesture, or public and participatory intervention; it is typically ephemeral and changeable, and unfolds in the ‘here and now,’” explains Viva! Art Action on its website. As unconventional as a bath house may be for an artistic performance, it was perfectly suited to an art form that aims to question the status quo. The festival was free, giving everyone the opportunity to consume culture the way museums, ballets, operas, and other pricey art venues do not. Not restricted to a purpose-built venue or specific artistic tools, live art is by its very nature more accessible to both viewers and performers.

The Viva! Art Action festival created an inclusive atmosphere centered on collaboration. Artists helped fellow artists set up their performances, preparing and dismantling each other’s acts. Audience members’ reactions and even participation in the performances were key to the artists’ success, making this festival an interactive event which implicated both artist and viewer in the creative process. Live art addresses social realities through this interactive aspect. The diversity of audience members’ backgrounds and experiences feeds into the performance itself. From toddlers accompanied by their young parents to the silver-haired members of the audience, everyone at the swimming pool had the opportunity to engage.

What was most striking about the show was the degree of spontaneity involved. Performance usually implies something rehearsed, pre-planned, and centred on the performer. Yet Viva! Art Action’s artists managed to integrate all the particulars into something impromptu and unique. Tomasz Szrama’s performance began by drawing the audience’s attention to the space itself. Walking into the pool with a bag of fruit, he dropped a single apple on the floor and watched it roll down the slope into the deep end. It was unclear at first whether this was intentional or not, but right after this apple landed at the bottom, he threw a few more fruit down to watch them roll. The apples, oranges, and grapefruit did while the bananas did not.

A series of fruit-related acts – including juicing a grapefruit with his head and squeezing oranges in his pant pockets – culminated in an outrageous feat. After having sawed off two legs of a table and hammering an apple to it, he asked audience members to hoist him up towards the ceiling by a rope-and-pulley system attached to his feet. With a level on the table and the apple in Szrama’s mouth, another audience member indicated how far Szrama was to be pulled upward until the table was perfectly flat. At 10 p.m., way past most of their bedtimes, even the youngest children were captivated by the strangeness and humour of Szrama’s work.

The “Tableau Noir” period, titled after the blackboard where people signed up to perform, followed the three scheduled performances. In this Tableau Noir, any and all audience members were invited to perform. One audience member’s show broached the theme of sport as performance with a hockey shoot-out. In a darker performance, a woman shattered a vase full of innocuous white flowers, and proceeded to use the shards to tear at her long black dress.

Still a relatively recent art form, performance art is avant-garde, and often elusive for many people. The very novelty of live art means it’s mostly free of any preconceived notions, yet also more difficult to approach for audience members not already familiarized with its tropes. While Viva! Art Action did take an important step toward inclusiveness by opening up the floor to audience members, those attracted to this type of art seem to be already part of the scene and generally familiar with its ideas. Within these constraints, Viva! Art Action did manage to blur the lines between artist and audience, encouraging collaboration between the two. As more people get a taste of live art, the participatory art form will only become more accessible and relevant.

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The exhibit was crowded but silent. People stared, awestruck, at large photos set against a white background. One accompanying blurb explained that the teary-eyed woman staring out at the crowd is Natalia, a 15-year-old addicted to crack and living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Another informed us that the little girl in the sink of a dirty kitchen resides in a three-bedroom apartment along with 21 other people. Aesthetically pleasing, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally charged, the photos that surrounded the peaceful gallery commanded the viewer to care about what was once in front of the lens.

Abuses of women’s rights featured prominently in the 2013 exhibit. Ebrahim Noroozi’s photo series of Somayeh and Rana, an Iranian mother and daughter disfigured by acid burns, was among the most moving of the photographs. The burns were inflicted on the pair by Somayeh’s husband after Somayeh requested a divorce. A photo of Rana giving Somayeh a kiss on the cheek is at once heartwarming and heartbreaking. The familiar love between a mother and her daughter bridges the gap between the viewer and these women who live in a society vastly different from our own. Significantly, Noroozi does not cast these women as powerless victims, but as dignified survivors. It fills the viewer with rage, pity, sadness, and a deep, guilt-filled sense of relief to know that we have by chance been born to a place where such horrors are less known. While for us these photos are simply an afternoon in an exhibit, the situations portrayed remain all too real once the lens is turned away.

The photo series at the World Press Photo exhibit were not grouped thematically, a wise curatorial choice. The emotionally draining photo series of global poverty, conflict, and patriarchy were separated by beautiful photos of wildlife: penguins waddle around a pristine snowscape and sea creatures float in meditative blue seas. Sports photos showed graceful gymnastics, powerful triumphs of matadors, bull racers, and fencers. Both refreshing and relieving, it was wonderful to admire the pure aesthetic value of these lighter photos.

Whether they were focused on humanitarian crises or the natural beauty of our earth, this year’s photos opened the viewers’ eyes to the unfamiliar. They gave value to the subject present in front of the lens. They let us see more of our own world and prompt us to feel connected with the other beings normally out of sight.

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The wall directly in front of the staircase has a mirror on it. An iron rope hanging from the ceiling divides the mirror in two. To the left, a stack of wooden chairs – similar to the ones you would find in your high school storage closet – is covered with a sheet of plastic, as if discarded. These cryptic and intriguing pieces are the works of Kolakis.

Turning the corner of the large column that occupies the centre of the room, viewers find themselves faced with Bureau’s paintings. Canvases are smothered in layer upon layer of oil paint, accumulating on their surface in peaks, slightly raised – like icing on a cake. With their bright, playful colours and textured surfaces, they command the viewer’s attention from the plain white wall. The contrast between Kolakis’ industrial-looking works and Bureau’s paintings is remarkable, yet these works have much more in common in their purpose than they do in aesthetics and appearance.

The key word here, as the title of the exhibit points out, is ‘material.’ Both artists strive to explore, discover, and play with their art’s medium in divergent approaches. Kolakis’ “Untitled (Rug)” is a set of different-sized, concrete-covered rugs rolled up and leaned against the wall, like Persian rugs in an overcrowded antique store. This atypical material highlights the necessity of texture in defining a specific object. Can we still call these rugs if they are covered in concrete and no longer pleasant to walk on? The viewer is able to hone in on the concrete’s rough surface, its light grey shade, and its rigidity.

Similarly, Bureau’s paintings disclose the nature of the material he uses. While Kolakis’ displayed works are monochromatic – a glass panel, the grey rugs, the black iron – Bureau’s are bursting with colour. Like Kolakis, Bureau’s works focus the viewer’s attention on the material itself, a materiality which in this case happens to occur in manifestations of colour. Four consecutive paintings are sliced through, front to back, to reveal each individual layer of paint, which together built up to the final façade of the piece. Yellows, blues, blacks, whites; all varieties of colours have oozed out of the canvases’ cracks and hardened. In almost every work displayed, Bureau makes the process of painting evident by making incisions, exposing the artistic labour otherwise masked by the final product.

Bureau explains that he sees art as something “labour-intensive” in which time is a factor. For him, the process is a mix of both “control” and “intuition and freedom.” This emphasis on process, and the straddling of choice and chance, can be found in Kolakis’ works as well. Her chairs are mass produced objects that she did not design herself. She has let something external to her creative process decide what her creation will consist of, yet as the artist she has assembled her work as she sees fit. United in method and purpose, Kolakis and Bureau glorify their media by bringing them to the forefront of their work.

Living in a material world is showing at the PHI Centre (407 St. Pierre) till September 28. Free admission.

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