At the gala I met Mary Maynard from the local Factory Line Collective. Maynard has been running the show for two years with Ian Truman, her husband, and Jeremy Hechtman, former director of the MainLine. Maynard’s knowledge of the entertainment industry, acquired by working on a film set, enables her to be present in nearly all of the steps  of the event’s creation. Though relatively new, the event has proved popular. “It’s really emotional, because it’s our second night and it’s already sold out. We see [the project] growing up, and I find that really wonderful, in the sense that we see that there is an actual need for this kind of event.”

Sophie Daunais-Ouimet, author of Carrelage, as well as the play’s two performers, Noémi Lira and Pascale Labonté, are all students at Université du Québec à Montréal. Carrelage blurs the line between reality and fiction, and the distinction between the main character’s mind and the outside world. It tells the story of two acrimonious roommates, Mathilde and Fanny, when the latter accidentally dies in the bathroom. In a reference to Fanny’s death, Carrelage means “tiling” in French.

For the performers, getting in the skin of their characters was an intense experience. Lira said that “to be in Mathilde’s skin was to create a psychological block, a defence reaction against all emotions.” The anguished looks on the faces of audience members was a good indication of Carrelage’s effect. For her minimal-but-sufficient setting, Daunais-Ouimet placed a bath and shower curtains in the middle of the stage.

Also present at the Gala was The Carrier Pigeon Play, written by Julie Foster and directed by Michelle Soicher, both of Concordia University’s Fourteen to Never Company. Carrier Pigeon is an original and sadly hilarious exploration of the differences between men and women. It explores this ancient subject along the axes of expectations in love, finance, and time, through “the profound and intricate language of nonsense.”

Solstices, written and directed by Laurie Murphy from Cégep de Saint-Laurent, is a play about a couple living with the psychological consequences of losing a dear friend. The performance was heavy with anxiety, but the beauty of the relationship between two lovers amidst a personal tragedy overcame the more overproduced aspects of the work.

Finally, If Phones Could Talk, written and directed by Alyssa Harms-Wiebe from Concordia, is an amusing critique of the smartphone culture among the city’s creative class. Set in a restaurant, the play lampoons the damage these devices have wrought on the traditional conversation: two people are on a date, but one of them keeps texting. To make her point, Harms-Wiebe mounted a screen at the back of the stage, on which the texts sent by the character appeared in real time. The effect distracts the audience, a playful meta-technique that reveals fresh ingenuity on the part of the playwright.

In all, the Gala was a successful bilingual event that granted space to some of Montreal’s most talented young directors. Fitting, too, that this combination of English and French theatre should take place on the Main – the traditional boundary between anglo and franco Montreal.

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The exhibit itself is a combination of three series of mixed media works (watercolours, oil pastels, ink and marker) and a selection of sketches. The Floral series are mixed media portraits representing black male subjects against a floral background. Turning Away explores the theme of the perception of the individual of the viewer, and consists of paintings of female figures with their backs to the viewer. Finally, Eze Nwanyi, which means “Queen of Women,” is a series of oil pastel large-scale paintings that represent black women in a holistic and affirmative fashion.

For the artist, Eze Nwanyi was an attempt to amend the biased and normalized view of the beauty, a view that is imposed upon us by magazines and reinforced by social media. “From a [black] woman who has been proven as less attractive by recognized academics, or who is regularly turned into an object of lust, I wanted to create a work of art,” explains Nnebe, referring to a discredited 2011 blog post on Psychology Today. Throughout the history of Western art, the black female figure has always been seen as an inferior, hypersexualized character. As a black woman herself, Nnebe wanted to “take the black woman, strip her down to nothing, and reclaim her image.”

Nnebe emphasizes the political role of her representation of black women. “I think people underestimate the importance of the stereotype within the media,” and how that impacts the everyday lives of women of colour. She refers to Sesko’s and Biernat’s study, “Prototypes of Race and Gender: the Invisibility of Black Women,” which explains how “[…] black women are more likely than black men or white men and women to go unnoticed by others in a group or social situation.” On the subject of stereotypes, Nnebe addresses the persistent tropes  of the ‘welfare queen,’ and the ‘angry and emasculating black woman’ and how it influences her in her everyday life. “If I act in a certain manner, the message I may be trying to get across will be lost in others’ representation of me as just another ‘angry black woman’.”

In that sense, Eze Nwanyi, by depicting a black female figure outside of the normal social and media contexts, constitutes a rebellious political statement. Nnebe summarized her political goal as “trying to change the representation of black women in my work […] trying to reclaim the image of the black woman, reclaim her voice, and give back the dignity and power that she has for so long been denied.”

Nnebe’s Floral series was the artist’s first foray into fashion illustration, representing  well-dressed black men in a floral and decorative setting. “I feel as though fashion is the best method of recording the various facets of black masculinity,” she explains. Less overtly political, the Floral paintings give the impression of a young artist practicing her technique. However, there is an undercurrent of gender exploration here, as the flowery backgrounds deliberately undermine her subjects’ masculinity.

Nnebe’s work will be on view until March 5 at O Patro Výš, 356  Mont Royal East.

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