It’s not even Thursday…

April 2nd, 2010

But here, despite all odds, are two art openings happening back-to-back tonight that you should go to. The first, a group show at the Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont Royal. It’s called The Tarot of Montreal, and features 22-ish works on paper dedicated to that special pack of cards with the same name.

Or are they really a pack? Are they a fledgling? Or a pod? I am not sure if you call Tarot groups something different than other card groups, similar to owls and ferrets…..oh the mystery!

It’s going to be an interesting exhibition. The curator, Marie-Claude Bouthiller, invited 22 local artists to create works specific to one tarot card each. Max Wyse will be presenting his take on Le Diable while Sophie Jodoin worked with Justice. There’s work by Yann Pocreau and Andrea Szilasi and Mathieu Beausejour oh my! I am truly looking forward to seeing what everyone’s created, and what the exhibition as a whole feels like in terms of potential cohesions.

It’s going to be an earlier opening, perhaps, so go to this one first. 5pm starting time, at 465 Mont-Royal east. The show runs until the beginning of May.

Next, head to articule for the opening of You, Me and You, a week-long video installation by Annie Gautier and Milutin Gubash. I have been looking forward to this show for a long, long time. The video is a real-time encounter with the lives of this artist-couple. Taken over the course of roughly 9 days, You, Me and You, is an intimate portrait of their everyday comings and goings. Some of the stuff that makes up their days will surely be of the sort I cringe engaging with (i.e. having to do the dishes, opening mail, etc). But when set against a backdrop of deeper encounters and exchanges, I think the whole of the piece is going to be achingly sweet and true to the strange arch known as making do and getting by.

What I find most compelling conceptually about the piece is that the video is really and truly in real time. No looping here. Unlike almost all video works seen in galleries, you cannot sit and wait for the events to unfold again if you’ve come in to the show late, or weren’t paying attention. The video will play through the night and into the day, and like our lives, be representative of so much in every moment, and then disappear, leaving the traces of perhaps some type of subconsciously-felt patterns, but no more.

So if you go tonight you can go tomorrow and then the next day and still never really get to see it in its’ entirety. A way of reinforcing its strange accessibility as it echos the lives each of us lead that no one else can see in full and we can surely never re-live.

Unless you have a time machine. And if you do, please, please get in touch.