from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Thu, May 1, 2008 at 1:39 AM
subject Feds under the gun to fire up economy; L’âge du consentement sexuel passe à 16 ans
Dear Stephen,
Ugh, a hard match to lose. And when the habs scored those two goals back-to back we thought the tide was turning…
I met François at a random bar on St.Zotique—le petit s—but we left after the scoreless first period. Waaay too gino. We went to Vices Versa for the rest of the game, then across the street to a quiet little neighbourhood bar, then tried another on Belanger, then finished the night at Mes Aieux where we played a couple games of pool and munched on pretzels and tried to forget a heart-breaking loss.
I spent my day alternating between cleaning the apartment and working on the third space gallery operating grant. Which is coming along slowly. I sent my final DHC text off to Rosemary at C Magazine and she responded, with a few alterations, but mostly positively. I’m fairly happy with the text at this point.
Hey, and good news: I heard from Debbie in NB and she is going to rent us her cabin on the Kingston Peninsula for the summer. It has no electricity nor running water but their is a propane barbecue and fridge, so I’m sure we’ll manage. In fact, I’m positively looking forward to it.
So much to do before the summer: find a sublet, for instance. Make and save some money. Ahh, there’s the rub.
Oh, and I tried to combine hockey and book club tonight with terrible results. My battery died at Vices Versa just as I was connecting to Craig at Happinez. There was no plug handy and finally, it just didn’t feel right, trying to participate in a book club meeting while watching playoff hockey. What was I thinking?
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Wed, May 7, 2008 at 9:24 PM
subject Body of fallen medic begins journey home; Contrebande de tabac: Ottawa redouble d’ardeur
Dear Stephen,
Sorry for the lack of letters. I’ve been busy, but have also completely forgotten to write. Clo’s friend Nathalie is visiting from Paris and is staying with us all week. I’ve been working at DHC since Monday and will be in again tomorrow, as there is still much to prepare for the de-install, demolition, construction and montage. And the Sophie Calle team have completely different measurements on all their plans.
Tonight we went to the launch of Electra, a festival of digital art and music, at Usine C, an amazing space. But the first main show was a little on the low ebb side of things and we left, feeling tired and stuffed from the healthy goodness of eating at Aux Vivres. After three nights straight of barbecue, it was time for a veggie break. Even though I cook vegetables on the barbecue everything ends up tasting like charcoal. Which doesn’t actually taste as bad as it sounds.
Oh, and I should probably thank-you, though I don’t know how involved you are in the process, but Third Space was awarded a Canada Summer Jobs grant, and so we will hire a student this summer to do my bidding, mwha-ha-h-ha (evil laugh).
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
bcc pm@pm.gc.ca,
date Sat, May 10, 2008 at 10:02 AM
subject Re-enactments on exhibition to May 25 @ DHC/Art Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal
Hi folks,
Just a reminder for those of you that haven’t seen this show yet. My favourite piece is Inconsolable Memories by Stan Douglas (and not just because I’ve spent so much time repairing the projectors). However, to get the best effect one does need to spend some time with the work, so if you plan to go visit, plan for at least an hour or more.
-chris
TWO MORE WEEKS!
RE-ENACTMENTS
Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki,
Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer, Kerry Tribe
Curator: John Zeppetelli
February 22 – May 25, 2008
pic
Richard-Max Tremblay
Culture is a repository or an archive to be plundered, contested, evoked or edited. Much contemporary art appropriates, re-imagines or otherwise re-visits established cultural texts, including popular culture and the history of art, film, and performance. The aim is to generate new meanings and fresh relevance from this source material, often by reiterating its value in the form of homage or deflating its claims with critique, but always by rerouting it to mysterious and unexpected places.
DHC/ART Foundation radically transforms its spaces for a major media art exhibition. Re-enactments gathers six artists whose work, in some way, critically re-stages films, media spectacles, popular culture and, in one instance, the intimate moments of daily life. Some of the projects offer bold objectifications of our image-saturated world, while others trigger poetic confusion between memory, fact and fiction. By vividly addressing politics, spectacle and subjectivity these re-workings of cultural texts or events of the past pose compelling questions about the present.
Jean-Luc Godard is the inspiration for two works in the exhibition: Kerry Tribe uses Godard’s experimental television masterpiece France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, made with Anne-Marie Miéville, as the starting point for her poignant dual-screen installation Here & Elsewhere; whereas the extraordinary tracking shot in Godard’s film Le Weekend is the basis for Nancy Davenport’s Weekend Campus, a slow horizontal pan – composed of hundreds of still photographs – over a cataclysm of stalled cars, gruesome accidents and impassive witnesses set at the entrance of a university. Two earlier moments in film history by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès are referenced in Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) – a speculative, multi-screen take on labour and globalisation. Stan Douglas’ two-projector, single-screen film installation Inconsolable Memories uses the Cuban film classic Memories of Underdevelopment as its foundational text. Douglas’s “recombinant” installation complicates the original by manifestly displacing its time frame.
Notorious televised sports and entertainment spectacles inform the three projects on view by Harun Farocki and Paul Pfeiffer. Farocki’s Deep Play subjects the 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy to a stunning formal, scientific, and statistical vivisection over twelve synchronised, real-time video projections. Michael Jackson is the subject of two Paul Pfeiffer works, Live Evil (Bucharest), a small, two-projector piece which shows a quasi-mirrored image of Michael Jackson in performance while visualising the palindrome of the title, and Live From Neverland, an eerie meditation on the pop star’s hugely documented child molestation trial. While not directly inspired by a film or television text, Ann Lislegaard’s I-You-Later-There nonetheless evokes the cinematic experience. The re-enactment in this work consists of a strong halogen light pulsing to the chant-like thoughts of a female voice onto a rectangular surface made of floorboards, which becomes a screen or a stage, complete with the sounds of a creaking floor.
pic
451 St-Jean Street in Old Montreal
(please note the exhibition continues at 468 St-Jean)
Montreal, Quebec
Opening Hours:
Wednesday to Friday from 12 PM – 7 PM
Saturday and Sunday from 11 AM – 6 PM
Information: Cheryl Sim – Program Coordinator
(514) 866-6767 ext. 206 / cheryl@dhc-art.org
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:41 PM
subject CAW inks deals with GM, Chrysler; Le NPD dans les platebandes du Bloc
Dear Stephen,
Sorry I haven’t written to keep you completely current with my life. Rae and his friend Young arrived in Montréal a couple nights ago; they camped out on the South Shore the first night, but have been at our place the past 2. They leave tomorrow. I’ve been meeting up with them after work and we’ve been walking a lot, up and down the boulevards St. Laurent and Mont Royal. It is somewhat exhausting. Work is getting intense, though today Cheryl and Sarah hosted a little cocktail in honour of the opening of Cannes. The only Québecois film at the festival this year was produced by Phi. The negotiations with the Sohie Calle team are getting more and more detailed and animated. I feel there are still many things to do and that many more things will slip between the cracks and that the whole de-install and installation period will be nuts. And I’m taking on more and more coordinating with Third Space as we lead up to a board meeting Tuesday. Clo and I are hoping to go to Trois Rivières on Sunday, and hike in the Mauricie area on Monday. There are art openings tomorrow at Skol and La Centrale I’d like to go to. The apartment is a mess and I’m on a budget of less than $20/day. I wore my new French $3 sneakers today, James really liked them and thought they are more comfortable than I initially thought they would be, they make my feet hot and stained my socks. And I’m not getting nearly enough sex and it seems there are more and more beautiful women strolling about. C’est la vie à Montréal pendant l’été.
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Tue, May 20, 2008 at 10:08 PM
subject Fire a double-murder suicide, police say; Ottawa exclut certains contrats du mandat de l’ombudsman
Dear Stephen,
Sorry again for the irregularity. It was a hectic weekend.
Friday after work at DHC I went to SKOL for an opening by Toronto-based artist Kerry Reid, who was exhibiting a great project where she finds some random, broken object—such as a sole puzzle-piece, or a broken teapot, or a corner of a brick—and then tries to find a manufacturer to re-create the object. She also taught herself ceramics in order to re-create the objects in a bizarre cottage-industry fashion. The trompe l’oeil and craftsmanship was great, and I love the comment on labour, supply and demand, and consummation. I think I’ll invite her to Third Space, if not as a window display then maybe at the NBM. Despite never hearing back from Jane about the possible curator position there, I still have a tendency to plan exhibitions there.
Robert Rauschenberg died last week. His early work had a big impact on how I think about artwork. He had a pretty interesting life. He practically bought himself a tropical island near Florida. As he bought adjacent properties he let the elderly tenants live rent-free in their former houses. He even provided the maintenance.
I’m currently reading about sustainable architecture and am deciding that someday I’d like to build a self-sufficient house. What are tax credits like for things like solar panels, windmills and devices to capture rainwater and treat waste? As I see this growing glut of cookie-cutter condos sprouting everywhere like weeds, it makes me think that if we can’t outright outlaw them, we can at least make rules that new housing be the most energy-efficient possible.
We spent the latter part of Friday night playing Cowboy and Indian dress-up with artists Lorie Blondeau and Adrian Stimson at La Centrale. I’ll post some photos on Facebook when I get a chance.
Saturday night we met up with a group of Clo’s Gatineau-era friends to celebrate Celine’s thirtieth birthday. We ate at a basement-level Russian restaurant in Cote des neiges and polished off two bottles of vodka. There was an older gentleman singing Russian songs to pre-recorded songs, some which included backup singers. There was dancing, it was a lot of fun.
Sunday we went to Trois Rivières to visit with Elie. We stayed overnight, eating at a somewhat generic Italin restaurant. Kent joined us the next morning and after debating going to Shawinigan to sped three hours in the woods doing Arbes en arbes, we went for brunch instead. It was raining and cold, after all. After brunch we joined what seemed to be the entire population of Trolis Rivières at the mall. Stores were the only thing open for the journée nationale des les patriotes.
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Tue, May 20, 2008 at 10:20 PM
subject TSX gains despite global declines; Affaire Charkaoui: plus d’un million en frais de justice
Dear Stephen,
Sorry, my last message didn’t send this morning; sometimes my computer, Gmail, and the Internet just don’t get along. I don’t know which of them acts up the most, but in any case there is not much that can be done.
I had a day from hell today. What should have been a simple three-hour or so Stan Douglas film change turned into a veritable nightmare. And it is not over yet! I accidentally loaded the wrong film on the film looper. That in itself wasn’t so bad, but getting the longer film onto the next looper to compensate was far more difficult. Parts needed to be changed, and Simon and I spent hours physically walking around the projector in a circle to hand-load the film. The it was both too tight AND too loose. Somehow, through magic or sheer determination, it managed to work itself out by about 6:30. I still have to sync and focus the films but should be able to do it in the morning before the gallery opens.
By then I was already late for a third space board meeting which I joined by having them call me at DHC. The meeting itself went well, we decided on a few short and medium-term strategies, including the decision to not hire a student this summer. After my ear was sufficiently burning I met Clo at the biblioteque nationale and we cycled to Byblos, a quaint Iranian restaurant on Laurier, because we were both too tired to cook. Lazy!
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Sat, May 24, 2008 at 7:34 AM
subject Edmonton teen describes night of teen’s rape and murder; Harper ira vendre son plan vert aux Européens
Dear Stephen,
Last night the biggest worst-kept art secret was launched with the vernissage of the Triennale of Quebec Art at the MAC. For some strange reason the MAC decided to keep all forty participating artists a secret until the day before the launch; trying to build some sort of anticipation in a back-handed kind of way. The show itself looks good; it is big and expansive, bold and generous, and nicely laid out, but I definitely need to go back to check out the work in more detail. Last night was more about running into folks from the community and chatting.
We ran into Heather Anderson and Josée Drouin-Brisebois and walked up Bleury in the rain with them to eat sushi at a Japanese restaurant but the restaurant was too full and couldn’t or wouldn’t accommodate us. It sort of took the wind out of our sails and we decided to go home, but stopped back at the MAC to use the facilities and ran into Karen Tam again, and she was just leaving to eat with Adad Hannah and his family, including little ten week-old Toro, so we headed to Chinatown with them.
I ran into Ray Cronin, who is now the official director of the AGNS, not the interim. He is in town just to see the triennale; we might run into one another again today at the Oboro function. Speaking of which, I have to run, we’re both working there soon.
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Mon, May 26, 2008 at 8:40 PM
subject Bernier resigns Foreign Affairs post; Maxime Bernier démissionne
Dear Stephen,
Day One of the de-install went fairly well. Simon picked me up with the rental van and we grabbed a few items from the Home Despot on the way/ We started the day with a big team, over a dozen of us, and after a brief briefing, we all set to work, dismantling projectors, players, carpets, wiring. Pakart came at 1pm for the Stan Douglas stuff going to the NGC in Ottawa. We’re sending the rest to the studio in Vancouver tomorrow but I am going to include something a little special for our friend Brodie, a little souvenir of Montreal: a St. Hubert box. Simon and I stopped at L’express on St. Hubert for takeout on the way home, after another shopping spree at the Home Despot. Maybe tomorrow I’ll even get some some gravy in a can at the grocery store. Or maybe that would be going too far?
We spent a relaxing Sunday, by the way. Sex, breakfast at home with the newspapers, coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches on the balcony, cycling in the sunshine…Actually we took the metro and bus down Parc to retrieve our bicycles, which were luckily still where we had left them. Claudine had choir practice in Parc Lafontaine and I washed laundry and hung it out on the line. Cleaned the kitchen a bit too. We cooked hamburgers on the barbecue and watched movies, Roman de gare and The Savages.
My arm is still bothering me, even more so now that I worked it hard last Thursday building that wall, Saturday cracking beer bottles working bar at Oboro, and today moving things around. I really, really need to see an osteopath, but have no idea when I’ll find time.
Oh, good news on the apartment sublet: I think we found someone, a Belgian research student and his partner. Have to work on details this week, but it seems promising, and it is for almost 2 months, so our rent will be covered. Now we’re looking into whether or not we need to have the cats vaccinated in order to fly cargo a week ahead of us. Any ideas?
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Wed, May 28, 2008 at 8:00 PM
subject 3 adults, 2 children found dead in Calgary; L’opposition veut entendre Bernier
Dear Stephen,
The decentre books are finished; we received three in the mail yesterday. The first launch happens this week in Charlottetown as part of the APAGA and AAARC conference. Despite all his hard work (he did much of the work himself), I am annoyed with Rob, as Claudine has not yet been paid and she has two other translators to pay for their help on the texts. It was a big job and they all worked super hard on it. Somehow, in a book dealing with artist-run culture, it seems fittingly ironic that the money just isn’t there. The books have a very simple design, not much flash, and we’ve only caught one typo so far after a quick glance through.
Speaking of money, I lucked out with my bank card today, saving myself a bit of uncomfortable embarrassment. I’ve been driving the huge cube truck back and forth from DHC to the storage space in Lachine, and today we stopped at a diner for lunch in between trips. It was a lunch to be paid fro with the DHC credit card, but the diner didn’t take Visa. I don’t understand why: they accept Mastercard. What’s the big difference? Anyhow, my card worked, but I checked tonight and there is sixteen cents left in my account. Talk about cutting it close!
Work has been progressing well. We are even a little ahead of schedule, if we don’t count the last-minute changes. It appears that we can’t block one of the entrances to Gallery 6; which means we have to re-configure a wall to allow two entries into the one big gallery. Fire code: sometimes it is just unrealistic and unaccommodating. There are other little details that need to be finalized, a certain ventilation grille needs to be sourced out, but tomorrow I should have a little more time to do those things.
-chris
from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Fri, May 30, 2008 at 7:05 AM
subject Father in Calgary massacre felt possessed; Dans l’embarras, ici comme ailleurs
Dear Stephen,
I forgot to mention to you François’ book launch at Cheval Blanc on Tuesday evening. It went really well, lots and lots of people. The book looks good with Caroline’s illustrations. I think the collaboration was a success.
Last night after work (which was another day of driving the truck, picking up Masonite, returning the truck, picking up more stuff from the quincaillerie) I rushed home, had a quick shower and then picked up Karen Tam and Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf and we drove to Saint Hyacinthe for the book launch of the catalogue for the 2006 Orange event. It was a smaller, more reserved crowd, but the book is really well-produced. We stayed late talking, then tried to find a restaurant, but all were too noisy, and then went to the director Marcel Blouin’s house but ended up talking more and not eating, except for some Doritos. A bit ironic, given the theme of Orange (food and agribusiness) and that the theme is a bit of a passion for Marcel. We hit the road well after midnight and then almost ran out of gas.
Hopefully it will be a shorter day at work today; I’m already feeling a little out of gas myself.
How are you handling the scandals? Do they keep you up at night? I sometimes dream about work. Last night it was of a tour of the new DHC building, the one under renovation and that I have never been in. Earlier this week it was about the satellite spaces renovations. Last week it was of Phoebe at a photo shoot in Cannes. The subconscious is a strange, strange thing.
-chrisfrom chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com>
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Sat, May 31, 2008 at 8:36 PM
subject Canadian kidnapped in Haiti returns home; Paul Martin, un premier ministre en avance sur son temps?
Dear Stephen,
Had a fun pizza party at the Oboro technical director, Aaron Pollard’s place last night. He had prepared more than twenty pizzas, making the dough and sauce from scratch. They were delicious and the gathering was fun though I was exhausted from work. We started the demolition of the G6 walls yesterday. Continued today, though it was a short day today. We had an appointment to have Kuan shaved in the morning and what I thought was a haircut appointment for myself at 4. Turns out it was for 3; the studio closes at 4. I was late, caught in traffic as the Tour de l’Isle was on. As if all the road construction wasn’t enough, they go and close off major arteries for events. I’m not really complaining; one of the reasons I love Montréal is all the events.
Gilles and Rose-Marie are staying overnight, they will be back shortly. Clo is out for her first concert with the smaller choir, she’ll be back later. I’ve got Third Space gallery work to do, which I might attempt whilst in front of the TV watching the Pittsburg-Detroit hockey game. There is certainly less pressure involved when it doesn’t matter who wins or loses.
-chris
DEAR PM 