Combining forces
DELICATE AND FORCEFUL: “When We Grow Up” (detail)This fall, the visual arts scene gets interactive, with a plethora of shows inviting visitors to participate in the creative process. Things get started tomorrow, Friday, Sept. 4, when Jim Holyoak and Matt Shane bring their collaborative project Grayscale Rainbow to Articule (262 Fairmount W.).
Friends and collaborators since the beginning of the aughts, Holyoak and Shane are set to transform the space, covering the walls with drawings they will develop over the course of their month-long residency. Taking the idea of the residency literally, the pair will actually move into the gallery, blurring the line between home, studio and exhibition space.
Though I have yet to see an exhibition of their work, a tour of Holyoak’s Web site, which features illustrations by both artists, whets the appetite. Compelled by similar themes, such as the encroachment of the urban environment on the natural, the two have distinct drawing styles that contrast and complement—Holyoak’s delicate and detailed, Shane’s forceful and impressionistic.
As mentioned above, the vernissage takes place tomorrow and visitors will be invited to add their two bits during the interactive drawing sessions on Sept. 13 and 27, between 3–5 p.m.
by STACEY DEWOLFE
Fleeting film fest
MUSTACHIOED MOGGY: From a short by Bryan Scarth
“Last year was our inaugural year and the theme was ‘In a Montreal Minute,’” which was a bit hackneyed and dull,” says Sean Michaels, co-organizer of M60: Montreal’s 60 Second Film Festival. “So we wanted to energize it and the theme Deception went right to the heart of filmmaking.”
For round two of the popular festival, participants were given a month to create a minute-long film around the theme, which brought in all kinds of dark, kooky and bizarre works.
“The greatest thing about the fest is the gob-smacking diversity of the films we get,” says Michaels. “There’s a shambolic murder mystery, a machinima—a movie made out of video game graphics—film about Elvis Stojko and a dark CGI, Terry Gilliam-inspired take on Western Capitalism.”
Seventy-four films will be screened in all at the three-day fest, which runs nightly at 8:30 p.m. from Sept. 9–11 at the Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent), with a closing party on Friday night.
“We’ve no plans yet for the party, but it’s going to be a chance for the film- makers to meet each other and for everyone to celebrate the ephemeral nature of these films.”
A DVD of the films will be sold on a sliding scale. Tickets are $7.
by SACHA JACKSON
Corpses at the Cleopatra
Those wanting to get a jump on Halloween will be eager for writer-director Chris Wilding’s upcoming event, Several Scenes Involving a Decomposing Corpse. Best part? The unholy marriage of venue and material takes place in the vintage sleaze of Café Cleopatra (1230 St-Laurent) on the lower Main (which, as you’ll  recall, usually features 40-year-old strippers on the ground floor and a transvestite review upstairs).
“I looked at the Cleopatra and fell in love with it,” says Wilding. “The people there made us feel at home right away. It’s a beautiful place that might be dead soon, too—so for our show, that’s a point in its favour.”
This “cabaret of wrongness” from Nanny Bumpkin theatre is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: “The scenes all involve a corpse in some way,” says Wilding. “Sometimes it’s a love interest, sometimes a family pet, sometimes a prop … It’s definitely a family show.”
Ummm, not really—the evening of “decaying dead interacting with live actors” is 18-and-over. It runs Sept. 9–24, tickets $15 at the door.
by NEIL BOYCE
Going nowhere fast
“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” if you believe the words of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass. For Christelle Faucoulanche, whose work centres around themes of physical and artistic exhaustion, this line seemed the perfect springboard for a highly aerobic performance about getting nowhere fast.
As the culminating project of her three-month residency at the Darling Foundry (745 Ottawa), the 26-year-old Bordeaux artist pounds the treadmill along with  Quebec queercore performer Val Desjardins in “The Red Queen’s Hypothesis,” a live simulated chase scene set against a projected Montreal backdrop. “It’s a performance about a James Bond scene,” she says. “It’s about deconstruction of this theme, a simulation about cinema, sport and gender.”
Faucoulanche’s free performance takes place tonight, Sept. 3, after nightfall, and will be the last of the Foundry’s Thursday Night Summer Series. In case the opportunity to meet sweaty artists isn’t incentive enough, the Foundry’s Cluny ArtBar is open from 5 to 10 p.m., and DJ Maltchique provides the party’s soundtrack. Simulated or not, “at the end there will just be real exhaustion,” laughs Faucoulanche.
by DAVID LEVITZ
IS IT ART?
OFFICE SPACE: Everyone procrastinates at work. It’s so prevalent there’s even the Freedom app, which allows you to disable networking sites while you work. But while Freedom stops you from obsessively checking Facebook and Twitter, the CubeGuard goes further by physically stopping your co-workers from invading your personal space.
 Modelled after those thingies they use to keep you in line at the bank, airport and just about anywhere else there’s a queue, it adheres to the sides of your cubicle (or doorframe) allowing you to pull across your “Please Do Not Disturb” banner when you’re tired of the chit chat.
Though limited in design—smiley faces and distant mountain ranges sum up the collection—you can customize your message and are encouraged to share “colourfully direct messages” to help “ward off unwanted interruptions.” So you can, you know, get back to G-chatting.
cubeguard.com
Arts hole
COMEDY WRITER: Writer and former Montreal resident/indie rocker Cecil Castellucci returns to the city for a one-night only performance at the Too Much Show, a weekly live comedy event hosted by George H. Braithwaite. Castellucci will perform alongside comedians Jay Devine and Bruno Pierre Ly. It goes down tomorrow, Friday, Sept. 4 at 9 p.m. at an unnamed location (3655 St-Laurent, #205), tickets are $5. • WILDERNESS ON THE WATER: Centre St-Ambroise (5080 St-Ambroise) presents Wilderness 2, an exhibit of recent, nature-inspired paintings by Elaine Smith. The vernissage takes place tonight, Thursday, Sept. 3 from 5–8 p.m.
Artistat
The number of female artists, including photographer Katia Gosselin and painter Susan Szenes, whose work will be on view at Galerie D’Este (1329 Greene) as part of the group show Women Artists, which opens Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 5 p.m.: 7
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