ART POP 2006
ART OR ARSE?
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POP Montreal’s visual arts component presents emerging, innovative, and celebrated artistic talents from outside of established art canons who are hyper-engaged with/within the points of intersection between music and visual arts (fuck dance, let’s art), high and low art (in a non-boring way), and the transcendent experience with the everyday (lordavmerceh). It aims to propagate the co-mingling of diverse communities and to shatter boundaries of both genre and medium. Consider it an inter-semiotic fuck dance.

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.