SLEEPLESS AT SEA:
From Dear Canada Council

Emily Holton’s latest dream-like works, Dear Canada Council/Our Starland, are two novellas bound back-to-back in a reversible book. In them, we find a sleepless narrator pleading with the Canada Council for help in founding a town, and a cast of characters wandering the Okanagan Valley, picking fruit and sleeping under the stars.

“I don’t have the ability to come to the table with fully developed ideas in my head,” says Holton. “I just need to sit there and mess around and wait for something to happen, and follow it until it feels right. It’s fun—I leave the studio at the end of the day like, ‘Yikes. Brian Linehan? Really?’”

She co-launches her book tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 7 at 7 p.m. at Sky Blue Door (5403B St-Laurent, enter via alley) with J.R. Carpenter, author of Words The Dog Knows. “If you haven’t read her book yet, you’re going to love it,” says Holton.

by VINCENT TINGUELY

Stuck tongues and eerie eyes

A CANADIAN TRADITION:
Thorneycroft’s “In Algonquin Park”

This weekend marks your last chance to check out two fantastic shows at Art Mûr (5826 St-Hubert)—both of which close on Saturday, Nov. 8. In the front gallery, Diana Thorneycroft’s Group of Seven Awkward Moments finds the artist riffing on pop culture, consumerism and all things Canadiana in a series of photographs setting miniature tableaus against recreations of iconic Group of Seven landscapes.

My favourite is a rather gruesome yet humorous image of a bunch of children standing around a metal pole covered with their frozen, dismembered tongues. The remainder of the photographs, though equally playful, are much lighter in tone.

Not so the photographs in the adjacent space. Inspired by the controversial and provocative work of French painter Balthus, Janieta Eyre’s In the Scream of Things is an oddly compelling group of images in which young girls—their wide-eyed innocence made even more strange by the little discs that Eyre’s has placed over their pupils—stare out at the viewer, seemingly immune to the uncanny presence of butterflies, feathers and plates which float mysteriously around them.

A third show, Michel Boulanger’s multi-screen animated video, Champ Témoin, runs in Art Mûr’s upstairs gallery until Nov. 25.

by STACEY DEWOLFE

 

Gather, performance artists

If you were under the impression that performance art consists of artists cutting themselves up while swearing contemptuously at the audience, ACTIO is here to prove you (mostly) wrong.

Now in its seventh year, ACTIO brings together artists from UQAM, Concordia and Laval universities for a weekend of performance and discussion.

HAPPENING ART:
From Sarah Bronsard’s “A Palo Seco”

“It’s a kind of a Happening,” says organizer Valérie Boxer. “The performance allows the artist to express something in a very direct, even visceral way that really can’t be reproduced if it’s recorded.”

This Friday night, Nov. 7, 20 artists will perform at Eastern Bloc (7240 Clark) followed by a series of talks on Saturday, Nov. 8 about how to continue practising in a post-educational context.

Friday’s roster includes Emmanuel Lagrange Paquet and Lucas Passarelli’s live-action Jedi drawing. A digital nod to Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, the act includes a sensor-equipped lightsaber whose movements are tracked on video to create an image.

Jean-Sébastien Gauthier will be performing live video mixing that explores the hitherto unknown links between the poppy, Remembrance Day, opium production, James Joyce and The Wizard of Oz.

See www.actioperfo.com for info.

by MATT JONES

Liar in love

Carolyn Guillet’s one-woman cabaret, Plucked, Hammered and Strung, a performance event based on “a woman, a piano and five lovers,” finishes its two-weekend run at the Bain St-Michel (5300 St-Dominique) this Saturday, Nov. 8.

LOVER INVENTOR: Guillet

In an attempt to deal with the death of her father and resurgence of all her dead affairs, Guillet takes the audience though a labyrinth of fantasy and reality. Funny, dark, brutal and touching: a cross between Peggy Lee and Mozart improvising “Variations on the Theme of Love.”

Tongue-in-cheek, Guillet remarks, “I tend to have a bit of trouble distinguishing myself from the different men in my life—pop psychiatry calls it ‘co-dependency issues.’ But I don’t see how it could be that at all. I don’t depend on my lovers. I become my lovers. I fail to distinguish between them and me.”

About the semi-autobiographical material, Guillet says, “I steal things. And then I lie. The men in Plucked are imaginary. The one thing I’m really good at is inventing lovers.”

by NEIL BOYCE

Is it art?

SELF-PUBLISHING 101: Taking a DIY approach to your personal success can sometimes be profitable. Edmonton-resident and illustrator Raymond E. Biesinger has done just that, using his “can do” attitude to create his own specialty publishing house.

Belgravian Press is a “tiny Canadian book publishing house” that unabashedly “focuses on the publisher’s diverse interests,” which include, but are not limited to, his own illustrations.

The press’s first book, 100 B/W: 100 Black on White Illustrations, is culled from Biesinger’s portfolio and the pages are filled with illustrations he’s done for periodicals like The New York Times, Nylon and Vue.

Despite the personal trumpet blowing, the collection is worth a look, not only for the drawings themselves (his signature style is a mix between design and hand-drawn) but also to simply see that self-publishing can at least look classy. Belgravianpress.ca

Arts hole

SOUND ART: OBORO gallery (4001 Berri, #301) presents Babbling/Sounding/Noising Cubes, by Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon. The show consists of wooden objects that contain a number of sounds that when played together create an acoustic vocabulary. The vernissage takes place this Saturday, Nov. 8 at 5 p.m. The exhibit runs until Dec. 13.
• HEAD IN THE CLOUDS: Artist Guy Laramée’s latest installation Le Nuage d’inconnaissance is currently on view at Centre d’exposition CIRCA (372 Ste-Catherine W., #444). It runs until Nov. 15. • EMO ART: Architect and artist Claude Thuot presents his latest work L’automatisme émotionnel contemporain at Galerie du Viaduc (5806 St-Laurent). Until Nov. 9.

Artistat

The year a new dance form, Contact Improvisation, was initiated by American dancer Steve Paxton — a style featured this week at Studio 303 (372 Ste-Catherine W., #303) in the show Un peu de vie dans ce monde mourrant starting tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 7 at 7 and 9 p.m. with Andrew de Lotbiniere Harwood and Nita Little: 1972