Just when we thought summer would never come, we got slammed with a mini May heat wave. Over thirty degrees out, smog, and a holiday long weekend. All the windows open and everyone outside in the streets, in the lanes, in their yards, on their decks and back balconies, smoking, yakking, playing music, building things with power tools and generally getting on my nerves. I, for one, couldn’t wait for the neighbours to get back to work.
Just when the workweek rolled around again, we got slammed with a transit strike. On the first day of which, I had to attend a meeting downtown. Which never happens any more. I have become far too used to keeping my schedule. The one day that I really have to be somewhere I don’t want to be I wind up having to walk and hour and twenty minutes to get there. In the heat, and the wind – my hair blowing into my lip-gloss, and then strafing glasses with sticky pink streaks. I arrived at the meeting sweaty, parched and half blind, but only four minutes late.
Just when all my meetings were done for the week, and I thought there was nothing more in store to remind me of stress and such, we went to the last OBORO vernissage of the season and half a dozen friends from my old life in the corporate world were there. When worlds collide: Concordia meets OBORO meets Discreet. It was a lot to take in at once. Plus, the show was packed. And me, so bad with names!
In the main space, Cynthia Girard’s The Sect of the Flying Mouse was especially popular with the under four-foot tall crowd. A guy in a golden mask played live piano. At one of the loudest most frenetic moments in the evening, Girard stood on a stool silenced the crowd and asked for four minutes to read from her most recent collection of poems: The Sect of the Flying Mouse. This was a gutsy move, especially as she then proceeded to read in English – with a very French accent, with very Egyptian eyeliner – a story about a beetle that had crawled inside her head on a branch that she had inserted in a hole that she had drilled inside her skull. Just when I thought it couldn’t get darker it got so funny that I fell in love with it. All in all a courageous girl, our Cynthia Girard.
PDF Press Release: Cynthia Girard, The Sect of the Flying Mouse
A park bench had been installed in the small room, the perfect theatre seat for viewing Josephine Mackay’s beautiful film 100 Views of Mount Royal. The title is an allusion to 100 Views of Mount Fuji, the famous series of prints by renowned 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. In her poetic depiction of Montreal’s Mount Royal through the seasons of the year Mackay included – completely unwittingly – scenes from the front covers of every OBORO brochure ever printed. One emerges from 100 Views of Mount Royal and views the Mont Royal through OBORO’s office window. The piece and the place and the space – a perfect match all around.
PDF Press Release: Josephine Mackay, 100 Views of Mount Royal
Just when I thought I spend the rest of my life bumbling around the gallery saying hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye to the same thirty people or so – Stéphane whisked us out of there and we were suddenly out on the street in the very late afternoon sun. And just when I thought I’d walked to and from OBORO in every which way possible over these past eleven years, we found a new route home. We walked on a street one block long that neither of us had ever walked on before and – just as our mini May heat wave is coming to a close – we stumbled upon this scene right out of Cuba, or someplace hot, where they paint everything bright colours.
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