ARTSWEEK

Happy as an Asteroid, Wants&Needs Dance, Stelarc, Le Grand Championnat de Rire de Montreal.

Maximal abstraction

If the incessant rain, cooling temps and grey skies of late October are getting you down, I have the perfect antidote: an installation/constellation of exuberant new abstractions by artist Ben Merris at Push Gallery (372 Ste-Catherine W., #425). Opening tonight, Thursday, Oct. 21, the aptly titled Happy as an Asteroid is comprised of a dozen smaller paintings set against a landscape painted by Merris directly onto the gallery walls.

“I choose abstraction for its conductivity,” explains Merris, whose e-mail alone brightened my day with its giddy and animated prose. Abstraction “bounces infinite potential meaning back at the viewer. No sketching or forward planning is involved. Each painting reveals and revels in an internal logic that is forged through rigorous play, mistakes, editing, experiments, repeti­tion, more play and more editing.”

Working in a style that one might describe as psychedelic and “maximalist”—for its abundant spirit, its visual excess and its celebration of life—Merris sees his work as embodying some of the “feral, overloaded rhythms” and “tangled” beauty of leftfield West Coast beatmaker Flying Lotus. “The end painting is an image… dismantling and re-animating itself—a cacophonous, high resolution feeding frenzy of density, pattern, grid, architecture and supersaturated colour.”

—STACEY DEWOLFE

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Ladies and Power

The kids from Wants&Needs Dance are putting on a show of their own this weekend. Company co-founders Sasha Kleinplatz and Andrew Tay are presenting works that address their ideas of identity.

Kleinplatz went into her choreography envisioning a kind of “all-girl fight club,” and came out with an examination of pecking order, cliques and how women relate to each other and how those relationships change. Her choreography for five gals, All the Ladies, reveals the masculine side of femininity in a messy ’70s-style basement, where the majority of the movement is improvised.

“Sometimes I feel like Andrew and I are two sides of the same coin,” says Kleinplatz. “We address a lot of the same things, but come at it in different ways.”

Tay dances in his theatrical quartet, On Power and Permission, which was born out of the sensations of different power dynamics and his questioning of “how society perceives masculine and feminine.” It’s constructed from tableaus featuring body builder and dominatrix images.

The double bill starts tonight, Thursday, Oct.  21 at 7:30 p.m. and runs until the 24th at Tangente (840 Cherrier), with an artist talk after the Friday night show.

—MARITES CARINO

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Talk to the arm

This year, Concordia’s department of communication studies turns 45. To celebrate, Fluxmedia—the university’s interdisciplinary research network—presents internationally renowned body-modification and performance artist Stelarc.

Winner of this year’s Ars Electronica Golden Nica Prize for excellence in the cyber arts, the Australian artist has long been interested in the physical body and its limitations or lack there­of. In previous projects, Stelarc has filmed his internal organs, hung himself using 25 carefully placed suspension hooks and created a series of limb extensions. But with Ear on Arm, he has taken things to a new level.

“The biological body is not well organ-ized. And so it needs to be Internet-enabled in more intimate ways,” he says. You might think he is speaking metaphorically, but he’s not. With the help of advances in stem cell research and surgical reconstruction, Stelarc has grown an ear on his left arm that functions as a “publicly accessible acoustical organ.”

The vernissage takes place today, Thursday, Oct. 21 at 4:30 p.m. in the Media Gallery (7141 Sherbrooke W., CJ Building) followed by a lecture at 6:30 p.m. in the Oscar Peterson Hall. On Tueday, Oct. 26, from 1–10 p.m., he presents The Floating Head at Elektra Lab 3 at Usine C (1345 Lalonde).

—STACEY DEWOLFE

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Does anyone remember laughter?

It could easily be as unbearable as it could be compelling, but one thing is certain, Le Grand Championnat de Rire de Montreal will be unlike anything else you’ve ever plunked 10 bucks down to witness. “It’s an entirely new idea,” offers planet Earth’s foremost “laughologist,” aka event organizer Albert Nerenberg. “People know about comedy shows like Last Comic Standing, where people compete to be the better joke-teller, but this is supply-side laughs, where the untold heroes of laughter are the laughers themselves. This will be the first ever formal competition for laughter.”

Over the summer, Nerenberg and his crew hit the road holding similar competitions across la belle province, rounding up la crème de la crème of Québécois laughers to come to Montreal for le Championnat at la Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 8 p.m., and do battle for prestigious titles like Most Contagious Laugher or Most Diabolical Laugher. “We’ve developed a series of 10 games for this competition,” says Nerenberg. “Nobody’s ever put so many crazy laughers in the same room at the same time. Who knows what’s going to happen?”

For more details, go to laughology.info.

—CHRIS BARRY

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IS IT ART?

SMART RIDING: Bike season might almost be over in the city, but for those brave enough to winter-ride, Korean designer Lee Myung Su has created an intelligent backpack.

Called the SEIL (Safe Enjoy Interact Light), this smart backpack uses LED lights to display brakes, traffic signals like stop signs, as well as arrows for left and right turns, and even emer­gency signals, as you pedal. Using a detachable wireless controller, riders have the option of using driver mode (above) or emotion mode, allowing you to display a variety of emoticons—like rage—on your pack as you ride. It even clocks your speed. leemyungsu.com

ARTS HOLE

•              THE KID’S GONE, NOW WHAT?: Nicole Braber and Craig Thomas star in Fifty Words, a play about a couple who don’t know what to say to each other when they are left alone after their son heads off to his first sleepover. It opens at the Freestanding Room (4324 St-Laurent, 3rd fl.), tonight, Thursday, Oct. 21, 8 p.m., $15. It runs until Nov. 6.

•               SYSTEMS OF HELL, ONLINE: After years of toiling, the people behind radio comedy show The Psychotic Hour bring you The Divine Comedy podcast, an hour-long counter-culture festival that delves into satirical sound and black comedy. It launches with a world premiere and party at Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.) on Saturday, Oct. 23, $9–$14. Get tickets at lavitrine.com.

•                INDULGENT ARTS: Carol Kruger, Carole-Yvonne Richard, Martine Savard and Donald Trépanier are part of the group exhibition Excès, which opens at Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (5290 Côte-des-Neiges) with a vernissage Friday, Oct. 22 at 5 p.m. It runs until Nov. 28. ■

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ARTISTAT:

The amount it’ll cost you to attend Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore’s (2150 Bishop) Local Legends Reading Series this Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 7.m. featur­ing new works from JP King, Daniel Allen Cox and Mark Ambrose Harris: 0

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