ARTSWEEK

Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Cartoonists Daniel Clowes and Seth, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef and two new multi-cultural exhibits at Darling Foundry

ARTISTAT: The number of hours during which Montrealers are invited to occupy new theatre Aux Écuries (7285 Chabot) in order to celebrate its inauguration on Oct. 14 starting at 5 p.m.: 24

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CREEPIER IN 3D: SPELL

Lab experiments

Along with its excellent selection of films, this year’s edition of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma also offers a series of installations, performances and interactive works as part of FNC Lab, the avant-garde and experimental section of the festival.

On Oct. 14 at 1 p.m. at Concordia’s DeSève Cinema (1400 Maisonneuve W.), don’t miss “Rinse, Repeat, Restore,” a conference about the different uses of archival footage, hosted by filmmak­er Gustav Deutsch and archivist Mark Toscano.

Using multiple 16mm projectors, suspended screens and a surround sound system, experimental artists Malena Szlam and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh create a sensorial and dream-like envi­ronment with their audiovisual performance entitled Por la noche volvió delirando “todo es agua” on Oct. 16 at 8 p.m. at UQÀM’S Agora Hydro-Quebec (175 President-Kennedy). If you’re not prone to panic attacks, experience the Dutch duo Optical Machines’ performance of (SHIFT), which combines light patterns with electronic music using a homemade device. It takes place at 8 p.m. on Oct. 18 at the Agora Hydro-Quebec. On Oct. 21, the Zapruder Filmmakersgroup give a unique twist to 3D with SPELL, a performance that includes the screening of a 3D film about a hypnotist dog and a concert that may include ping-pong tables. The festival runs Oct. 12–23. For a full schedule, visit nouveaucinema.ca.

—ROXANE HUDON

 

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Cartoonists converse

Instead of the speech and slideshow fare that has become standard for graphic novel launches, for the release of Daniel Clowes’ The Death-Ray and Seth’s The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, publisher Drawn and Quarterly will host a conversation between the two authors.

“There’s a lot of stuff that I always wanted to talk to people like Seth about that I never would, because when we get together, we just gossip about other cartoonists and complain about mon­ey and stuff,” Clowes says, “and to talk about bigger issues, you know, it seems like the perfect venue for that.”

Death Ray is about a boy who inherits a ray gun that enables him to erase people from reality. Clowes parallels his protagonist’s ability with that of cartoonists to edit characters at will. “I think Andy’s power has a lot to do with that: having control over this little world and if you want to erase half the people in that world, you can do it. He’s somebody who’s doing it in a bigger context than I am, just drawing pictures, but I think that’s why it resonates.”

At the Ukrainian Federation (5213 Hutchison) next Wednesday, Oct. 19, 7 p.m. Tickets 5$ at the Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore (211 Bernard W.).

—YANIYA LEE

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A Montreal mouthful

You’ve got your appetizers, your entrées, your desserts and your wines—but no apple martinis, please. “It’s not a multi fucking 12-15 course meal here,” says Joe Beef’s David McMillan, and his new book with Frédéric Morin and Meredith Erickson echoes that sentiment of unpretentious simplicity. The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts (Ten Speed Press, HC, 304 pp, $40) is half cookbook, half history textbook, all love letter to Montreal and “is so nostalgic it hurts,” Morin says.

Many of the book’s recipes are accompanied by hilariously weird stories and pretty pictures, broken up by interludes about trains, meat smokers and Joe Beef (né Charles McKiernan) himself. An Irishman who settled in mid-1800s Griffintown, McKiernan was equally famous for feeding striking canal labourers as for the alcoholic bears in his tavern. McMillan and Morin may not have those kinds of credentials under their belts, but since opening Joe Beef in 2005 and neighbouring Liverpool House a couple years later, they’ve helped revitalize Little Burgundy’s derelict thoroughfare.

The book will have an initial run upwards of 100,000 copies with U.S distribution, but don’t expect McMillan and Morin to get all Food Network-y. They’re perfectly content to sit in the garden behind their restaurants, poking fun at hipsters and drinking fine wine. For more info on the book and the restaurant, visit joebeef.ca

—TRACEY LINDEMAN

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Foreign tongues

Covering the Quebec visual arts beat can feel a little insular, with so many galleries intent on promoting budding local talent (and rightly so). If you’re feeling the itch to broaden your creative perspective, make your way over to Darling Foundry (745 Ottawa) to see work from two international artists, on view until November 27.

There’s Mexico’s Ricardo Cuevas, whose From Aachen to Iser explores language in its innumerable permutations, juxtaposing visible with invisible elements to question intended meanings. Most strik­ing are Fear no thunder, nor lightning, a video of a blind man reading Braille from a book on which a mountain landscape is printed, and 12,000 words often mispronounced, an installation featuring wall-mounted sheets of those words, but with no accompanying sound.

Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta’s Will we ever be able to mark enough? tackles the many anxieties, fears and tensions that come from living in our globalized world. There’s a table full of everyday objects, individually wrapped in fabric—a collection of potentially harmful items confiscated from travellers at Trudeau International Airport—and projections of hand-drawn maps by a variety of Mon­trealers who were asked to “please draw a map of your country.” Her pieces are both ambitious in scope yet personal in their execution, and leave you much to mull over, especially where nations and bor­ders are concerned. For info: fonderiedarling.org

—MICHAEL-OLIVER HARDING

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IS IT ART?

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA: According to Brooklyn performance artist Marni Kotak, giving birth is the “highest form of art.” And so, why not give birth to her child in a gallery? Until Nov. 7, Kotak pres­ents The Birth of Baby X, a month-long performance and installation at New York’s Microscope gallery, which will culminate in a live birth. The artist has transformed the space into her own little birthing nest, complete with her grandmother’s bed, an old rocking chair and the presence of a midwife. The exhibit will also launch Kotak’s new conceptual work Raising Baby X, in which she turns the act of raising a child into performance art, reaching out to collectors and private foundations for support. It looks like a bumpy road ahead for little Baby X. marnikotak.com

ARTSHOLE

●  JUST JAMMIN’: On Oct. 16, the Black Theatre Workshop presents its annual Poetry Jam, a spoken word competition with the concept of home as its theme. The poets have three minutes to recite their creations in front of five judges, including the Mirror’s theatre critic Neil Boyce. It takes place at 7 p.m. at Shaika Café (5526 Sherbrooke W.), $10.

● MAPPING MILE-END: During a series of workshops about preserving art spaces in the Mile-End, participants were asked to draw maps of the neighbourhood. Running from Oct. 15–25, the exhibit Le Mile End Cartographié will showcase these maps at the artist-run centre Articule (262 Fairmount W.). It opens with a vernissage at 3 p.m. on Oct. 15, with artists and urban planners in attendance. ■

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