Highlights from Art Pop 2005:
Step From My Mouth: The Woodcuts & Paintings of Billy Childish: Artist, musician, author, poet, general shit-disturber, and of course, simultaneous none-and-all-of-the-abover, British artist and champion of the amateur Billy Childish exhibited his fascinating works for the first time in Montréal in conjunction with the British Council. The common line on Childish is that he has released over 100 albums, painted over 2,500 paintings, and published over 30 books; a prolificacy which suggests that he creates works as easily as words step from his mouth. Looking at Billy Childish’s art is a lot like listening to him speak -- no matter how frankly he speaks of his own dysfunctions, or sounds off on others’, every intense word comes across as deliberate, regardless of its conversational nature. In the same way, Childish’s art is both immediate and lends itself to careful consideration. Billy Childish: champion of the amateur, founding member of the ‘Stuckists’ (stuckism.com), and a man hard to pin down as anything but absolutely essential.

POST-POP!: An exhibition of ground-breaking concert poster art from around the world. The “post-popular” describes a world of ever multiplying and narrowing musical sub-genres coming up alongside – and defining themselves against – one another, closing the already-declining window of mass appeal. Concert posters play an important role in encoding, making visible, and articulating these processes of differentiation, and therefore in mobilizing the resulting musical communities. This leads to the creation of a fascinating urban landscape, transplanted into Galerie Madame Edgar, in which wildly different musical sub-genres, visually translated in wildly different ways, co-exist, and in which the repeating of similar codings worldwide blurs the line between the local and extra-local. Showcasing the role of poster-art in independent musical scene-definition, POST-POP! exhibited the work of over fifteen concert poster artists from around the world – Seripop (Montréal, QC), The Little Friends of Printmaking (Madison, WI), Leia Bell (Salt Lake City, UT), Tetsunori Tawaraya (Japan), etc.

Pavilion Three: Platforms, Terraces, Temples, Palaces, Courtyards, Stairways and Pyramids: Pavilion Projects, DareDare, and POP Montréal collaborated for a fête gallante, a multi-disciplinary outdoor performance piece addressing the political, social, and personal history of Montréal’s famed Square Viger. "A mysterious, melancholy, dreamlike world populated by well-dressed people who flirt and play gracefully in a park like surroundings. Featuring four separate performances commissioned by Pavilion. Toronto artists Luis Jacob, Will Munro, David Armstrong Six & Quebec’s Les Fermières obsédées, took over Square Viger’s concrete garden. The outdoor event cycled around a number of performances addressing the history of Square Viger as well as the politics of the intimate and social sphere. These exigent actions were inturn supported by musical interludes provided by the sprawling Gavin Deathfuck, Dorothy Gellar, Awesome and the first effort by DELORO (band as artist collective featuring Armstrong Six, Tony Romano, Dave Clark & Dallas Wehrle (of the Constantines)."

Puces Pop: With over 79 taste-making presenters, this curated fair presented a spectrum of quality independent cultural entrepreneurs from artisans, zine makers, record labels, fashion designers, poster artists and more.

We Sold Our Souls to Rock 'n Roll: The still concert and press photos of Yannick Grandmont and Christopher Heldt, expertly charged with spirit and electricity, brilliantly walked the line of documenting a burgeoning musical scene on a tangible, realisitc level, and heightening the awareness of the artificiality of rock star aesthetics.

Six for Five: An Illustrated History of the Jewish Criminal 1900-1940: Pat Hamou's sepia-toned, cross-hatched drawings of Jewish mafia members were imbued with contradictory thoughts: pride, shame, intrigue, humour, etc., thoughts intimately tied to this history all-too-often forgotten.