By Jack Dylan



Most of us in Montreal are by now already familiar with the work of local graffiti artist Roadsworth. Even before his arrest last November and the subsequent media attention, natives of the Mile End district couldn’t miss his bold and imaginative street installations. You’d be walking across an intersection and suddenly notice that the crosswalk had been turned into a giant light switch. Then the next day, you’d see that an owl had perched on a parking space, or that ivy had grown along the dotted yellow median. This mysterious transformation (and undeniable beautification) of the neighbourhood continued in this fashion for quite some time, along with growing admiration and intrigue of residents. But all ended abruptly, when the elusive good Samaritan known as Roadsworth, a.k.a. Peter Gibson, was arrested and charged with over fifty counts of public malfeasance.

Jack Dylan: For you, perhaps the worst thing that has come out of all this is that you’ve had to stop producing your work.

Roadsworth: That was the first thing that came to my mind when I got out of jail that day. After I spent fourteen hours in a cell, I got out and was cursing the fact (...read more...)

Interview by T. Jeffrey Malecki



Telephone poles are staple objects of the modern cityscape: practically innumerable, often sculptures in themselves, holding up modernity’s favourite means of communication. Jack Dylan’s posters communicate in a different way, and can seen be on poles throughout the city announcing the shows of (and often representing) Montreal’s hipsterati. Characterized by simple and haphazard line-drawings, either absent or baroque backgrounds, child TV stars, his friends, quirk and irony, these posters can by turns be arresting and inane, funny and incomprehensible. We had a brief email correspondence about art, Saddam Hussein and his mother.

Jeffrey Malecki: Do you believe in art?
Jack Dylan: Yeah, sure. Wait. I mean no.

JM: In what way do you see your posters as contributing to the aesthetics of the city? Does their function (as ads) conflict with their aesthetic potential?
JD: No not at all I think. In fact, without the functionality, there is no aesthetic potential, the images wouldn't exist and the pole would be bare. Who's going to go around slapping up pictures on telephone polls just for the hell of it? And pictures of the Olsen twins no less! Posters are a very special medium because that [sic] makes (...read more...)

By Adam Bobbette
to Mr. Nader and W.S. with love

Mid May with W.S. and P.R. riding through the east; we ride through the white suburbs that look like Florida, like I never thought were in Montreal, with trimmed, very square hedges and white brick, and white overhangs, and they border on a huge cemetery, as so many suburbs I’ve been to do. And we take the suburbs to the end of a road onto a dirt path and into a field. Fields in cities always remind me of gangsters. What else happens but dead bodies in the abandoned parts of the city? The forest in the city is where people get buried. Though I probably saw this in a movie.

For mediaeval imaginations the forest outside the city is where the werewolves hang out. That’s where people go to become animals, or where they go when they become animals. The wild is outside the city. Though the werewolf is part of both, the city dweller gone animal, gone lawless, and the animal gone city dweller. When you’re a werewolf you belong to both but, paradoxically, neither. And when you’re a werewolf you are allowed to be killed without punishment by (...read more...)

By Gina Badger

Walking is a kind of reading Braille. We learn the city by the soles of our feet. If you are lucky, you will have discovered the sculpture park in the middle of night, towards the end of summer, when the air is wistful and calm. It is one of those secret spaces, so exposed and strangely placed that it becomes invisible. If you move through the city with only a destination in mind, it’s possible that you might never find it. But if you read with your soles, sometime you’ll end up here, and I wonder what stories you’ll find?

The garden is tacked onto the northern boundary of the Mile-End, sandwiched between long industrial buildings in red brick and flanked by whizzing roadways and chugging trains. Aside from a couple of large poplars that have swallowed part of the chain link fence separating the park and the tracks, there is little by way of large plants or interesting topography. The space is exposed and a bit hostile, despite being filled with a dozen or so whimsical, beautiful sculptures. The pieces are large in scale, mostly twelve or so feet high, and made of reclaimed materials, wood and (...read more...)

Corner of St-Laurent and des Pins, photograph: Emily Raine.

By Emily Raine.
Interviews by Neale McDavitt-Van Fleet.


“I’m tired of glamour… we get bombarded with large glamorous ads, so I said, fuck that, I’ll put my own people up,” writes Francisco Garcia. “His people” have thus far been a collection of “family, friends and freaks,” meticulously recreated in colossal proportions from black and white photos, then pasted high up on outdoor walls. In less than a year of painting, he has slowly worked his way through his family, then his friends and has begun to depict and celebrate the hordes of characters in his own neighbourhood, the pedestrians and coffee drinkers, the weirdos and laundromat-leaners, the nameless individuals who people our own little worlds. He says that, instead “of working in a soup kitchen, I do this. This is my way to help people, and when I can guarantee some smiles, then I’m doing just that. The Plateau has gotten very businessy. That’s why I use real people, and the concept of family, too. Trying to bring back some of the warmth.”

He describes one painting in particular, an image of an old man displayed in the Mile End, which he (...read more...)

Image by End, photography by the author.

By Emily Raine

Like any taxonomy, street art is a slippery one. Another way we might try to define, it is in negative relation to large-gallery art and commercial design work. While a great deal of street art marks a renewed interest in the techniques of European classical art—at least in relation to graffiti—it tends to be fervently anti-corporate, and even its most successful artists express frustration with the mainstream gallery system for its commodification of their work and the behemoth prices charged in so doing.

Often, the difference between a street artist’s hot-gluing mundane objects to a wall and, say, Tracey Emin doing the same, is that the street artist, more often than not, will not see any money for his or her troubles, and risks arrest in the execution. Like graffiti, street art challenges the authority of urban aesthetics, where the monied hold a tight monopoly on the legitimate means of visibly occupying city spaces—most private citizens cannot afford to rent a billboard, and so must resort to either vandalism or invisibility. There is an inherent polemic in the very act of staking out a space in the city, even if it (...read more...)

Image: Artist unknown, photograph by Emily Raine.

By Emily Raine

This week’s Reading Montreal postings explore new directions of local street art, often allowing the artists to speak for themselves in interviews with other artists. The enties over the next few days will seek to illuminate radically different approaches to creating art in the streets, and as such pay less attention to more traditional spray painted graffiti and wall images (which, of course, still breathe tremendous life into street art, composing the majority of the works and displaying an incredible depth of skill and breadth of creative interests). Rather, we will look at diverse approaches with very different agendas, such as Glen LeMesurier’s toxin-cleaning statue parks, Nader’s street-refuse taxidermy art, and Roadsworth’s now-infamous street stencils.

Graffiti—at least as it is commonly known today—is widely accepted to have emerged from the subway tunnels of New York in the late 1960s. It was exciting and revolutionary and political; it was the aerosol scream of a thousand kids nobody would listen to, sending their names out of the ghettoes and into the rest of the city, in technicolour. Traditional graffiti continues to be a means for writers to assert their existence on every inch (...read more...)

The photos in this collection of images all have something in common: the smoke pouring out of every chimney is moving from left to right. These images, all from the excellent online collection at the McCord Museum, were found by typing 'factory' into the McCord database search engine.

Quite a few images of factories came up, most of which were reproductions of drawings done in the late 19th century. Some images show smoke, some don't, but all that do clearly show a stream of dark vapour moving from left to right.

Assuming that the many different artists dispatched to make renderings of various factories at different times could have drawn the smoke moving in any direction, why did they all choose the left to right orientation?

In the period of rapid economic, physical and industrial expansion of the late Victorian era, one always wanted to live upwind from whatever factories happened to be in your city. Usually the people that built the factories were the ones with the option to live wherever they wanted. Major centres located in the northern hemisphere (including Montréal, of course) all had prevailing winds travelling from the west. So industrialists built their factories in the eastern (...read more...)