Program 2022

design by LOKI

A Post-Pandemic return

The headquarters of the third edition of the FAIMTL returned to the site of the last pre-pandemic edition, WIP (Work in Progress) at 3487 Saint-Laurent. The site hosted launches of printed works and zines and presentations on Friday, May 20 from 1 to 7 pm, as well as a printing workshop for children and zine workshops at the Grande Printed Art Fair on Saturday May 21. Satellite events held at the partner venus of the festival, included:

• demonstrations and workshops on artisanal printing at studios such as l’Atelier Circulaire and La Bourgeoise Sérigraphe;
• Vernissages and exhibits at Zocalo, Atelier A. Piroir, L’Imprimerie, Arprim, Concordia, l’Atelier Circulaire, la Maison de la Culture Janine Sutto among others
• Guided visits to archives including Artexte and the BAnQ;
• Participatory workshops for creating prints and zines hosted by the Queer Print Club, L’Abricot, le Centre for Expanded Poetics and the artists Jacinthe Loranger, Todd Stewart and Tyrin Kelly.

The Montreal Print Arts Festival was organized in 2022 by ARCMTL,  Arprim, Zocalo and the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University, and is made possible thanks to the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

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À l’affiche Arprim UQAM – May 20 

Presentation by Gwenaël Bélanger, professor and director-adjunct of the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM and Marie-Pier Bocquet, general and artistic director of Arprim, artist-run centre devoted to printed art.  

This presentation retraced the 2021 edition of À l’Affiche, a contemporary art publishing initiative jointly developed by Arprim and the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM.
Audience learned how the artist Nadège Grebmeier Forget was able to transpose her rich performative artistic practice into the printed arts by exploring the full range of technical possibilities and the variety of materials offered at UQAM. 

Exposition Tête-à-Tête – May 3-29

This group exhibit, coordinated by Johanna Griffith, presented the work of artists Myriam Tousignant, Anne-Marie Berthiaume, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, Ashley Miller, Zoé Boivin, Carmen Dubuc, Laurie Girard and Céline Goudreau.  

From a simple hello to in-depth sharing, communication is at the heart of all our relationships. Likewise, the roots of printed art are also closely linked to communication. Taking this into account, the Tête-à-tête project, overseen by Zocalo, a center for artists in printed art, chose four duos of artists from different generations to discuss current social issues. This sharing had begun virtually in the fall of 2021. Initially, the artists received large cardboard tubes recovered from an upholsterer and they were invited to draw inspiration from the Morris column, a column of advertisement display. While historically, printed posters announced artistic events, those of the Tête-à-tete project are rooted in printed art and performance. 

Print Media Undergraduate Pop-Up Exhibit – May 19-29 

A pop-up exhibit featuring undergraduate students of the Print Media department at Concordia University. Many were also for sale during the GRANDE printed art fair that took place Saturday May 21 at the WIP, while others could be ordered via contacts w the artists as displayed with their prints. 

Featuring: 

Felix Mux Wahl, Alexandra Riesemberg Britez, Issy Tessier, Spencer Magnan, Stephanie Bourgault, Leplesh, Annabelle Bessette-Frappier, Amandine Vassaux, Agathe Leroy, Maddi Berger, Beatrice McAviney, Levana Katz, Octavio Rüest-Santes, Mélanie Reid, Megan Pressey, Emilie Depelteau 

La Foire à l’œuvre – May 5 – June 2

La Foire à l’œuvre was a benefit exhibition to mark the Zocalo artist-run centre’s thirtieth anniversary. The centre represents, above all, thirty years of collaboration and creation. 

Forty members, past and present, generously accepted the invitation to submit prints to sell for the benefit. Over two hundred prints were offered for sale.  

Artists : 

Chloé Beaulac • Caroline Ariane Bergeron • Micheline Bertrand • Joanne Bouchard • Marie-Ange Brassard • Danielle Cadieux • Lise Carrière • Annie Conceicao-Rivet • Claudette Delisle Menier • André Dubois • Carmen Dubuc •  Christine Dubuc • Carole Fisette • Raymonde Girard • Élaine Godin • Céline Goudreau • Johanna Griffith • Monique Handfield • Suzanne Hervieux • Denise Lachapelle • Nancy Lambert • Michelle Lasalle • Carole Lebel • Claire Lemay • Lise Leroux • Henriette Letellier • Jocelyne Lusignan • Élise Massy • Anna Jane Mcintyre • Julie Métivier • Mariane Moisan • Françoise Nadon • Emmelyne Normil • Sylvie Painchaud • Lucille Pelletier • Winifred Pinet • Lucille Ricard • Isabelle Tessier • Myriam Tousignant • Marie-Thérèse St-Yves • Jean-Paul Thomin 

Special Project Rotten Candy – May 21

For the 2022 edition of FAIMTL, ARCMTL commissioned a screenprinted collective zine Rotten Candy, curated and printed by artist Tyrin Kelly of Trap Door Printing. 

Rotten Candy is a DIY transmission broadcasting the shifting state of underground scenes due to lack of space and gentrification. It’s bittersweet; sending out the alarm for resurgence while artists continue to make it happen and have fun under pressured circumstances. Rotten Candy is a collaborative effort curated by Trap Door – showcasing artworks by Shogo Okada, Emmanuel Okot, JG, Hugo Bernier, Andrew Gibson, and Tyrin Kelly.  

Roots and Wings Anna Jane McIntyre – May 20-26 

Roots & Wings was a special project by Montreal artist Anna Jane McIntyre, featuring a flock of relief-printed birds that fly across the window of the FAIMTL / Grande venue, WIP on Saint-Laurent near Milton. Printed on cotton rag paper with watercolour, woodcut and gold leaf, the work references how printmaking & biology gave Anna both roots and wings from which to ground her life-art practice in. 

Anna Jane McIntyre is a visual artist-parent with a practice combining shape-shifting, mark-making, thinking, doing, looking, breathing, $5-improv-benevolent-capitalism and microactivism. Anna’s work investigates how people perceive, create and maintain their notions-of-self, belonging and culture through behaviour and visual cues. 

Anna’s projects are an expression of Afropresentism that combine her cultural influences (Trinidadian,British, adoptive-Canadian) through the juxtaposition of familiar materials in novel contexts. Her work acknowledges the past and present, imagining a surreal dream of what is to come. 

Silkscreen printing demonstration and workshop at Le Temple – May 22

Le Temple, an artists’ studio primarily dedicated to silkscreen printmaking, held an open-door printmaking demonstration and workshop. Led by Todd Stewart, a founding member of the studio, participants were invited to Le Temple on a walk-in basis throughout the afternoon session. They were given a brief introduction to the silkscreen process and shown steps to creating their own print made from a series of abstract and graphic stencils on silkscreen frames and using a variety of inks and equipment.  

Todd Stewart is an author, illustrator, filmmaker and printmaker. His printed works have been exhibited across Canada and abroad.   

Normand Biron Exhibition at A. Piroir – May 14

Launch of Normand Biron’s book, Les mots du regard: Promenade en art (1974-2015…), published by Editions Liber. 

In addition, Normand Biron as a curator launched an exhibit of work he chose from the studio’s collection, featuring the following artists: 

Bonnie Baxter, Louis-Pierre Bougie, Paul Cloutier, René Derouin, Albert Dumouchel, Catherine Farish, Marc Garneau, Betty Goodwin, John Heward, Harold Klunder, Hélène Latulippe, Jean McEwen, Stella Pace, Lisa Tognon  

All Conceivable Sources, MFA print media graduate exhibit at FOFA gallery, Concordia — May 13-23

This exhibit showcased works by the MFA in Print-Media Graduate students at Concordia University. The exhibition adopted the bibliography as a methodology to curate a diversity of practices in the expanded field of print. Spanning from installation, performance, to typesetting and screen-printing, the artists engaged print in all its conceivable sources, reflecting on the complexities and possibilities of the medium in contemporary art practice.  

This show featured the following artists: 

Ioana Dragomir, Hei Lam Ng, Zahra Hosseini, Alli Melanson, Sabina Rak, April White. Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc, Dominique Pétrin, Megan Stein, Vinicius de Aguiar Sanchez, Helena Rakic. 

GRANDE Print art fair 2022 – May 21

design par LOKI

The GRANDE Print Art Fair brings together more than 50 artists and organizations selling posters and printed art in the context of the Montreal Printed Arts Festival. Silkscreen prints, posters, letterpress, engravings, every form and every new trend in printed art are on display! GRANDE allows the public to not only discover the amazing art being produced here and across Quebec but to meet and mingle with artists themselves at their table, and find out about the many collectives and organizations that serve Quebec’s printed art sector.

Henriette Valium exhibit guided tour – May 17

Guided tour of Henriette Valium’s exhibition in the presence of two of the artist’s long-time collaborators of the artist, Marc Tessier and Louis Rastelli.  

The Maison de la culture Janine Sutto presented an immersive exhibit, plunging you into the universe of the multidisciplinary artist Henriette Valium. Printed art, comics, video, music and paintings comprise an incredible body of work left by this extraordinary artist who passed away on September 1, 2021 and who remains one of the major figures of the underground arts scene that emerged in Montreal in the 1980s. He was part of a round table on printed art in 2016 during the first Montreal Printed Arts Festival, and was also featured in 2019 during the Volume 2 MTL festival: Art and the book.
In addition the influence he left on the generations that succeeded him, he left a considerable body of work, provocative and marginal, protean and abundant, sometimes enigmatic, free from any compromise, which he pursued inexorably for more than four decades.  

This event is a collaboration between the Montreal Printed Arts Festival, the Montreal Comic Arts Festival (Festival de BD de Montréal) and the Maison de la culture Janine Sutto. 

Printmaking workshop and demonstrations La Bourgeoise Sérigraphe – May 19

La Bourgeoise Sérigraphe is a small screenprinting studio founded in 2009 by Iris Sautier. In addition to professional printing services, the studio offers classes and supervised rentals to a wide range of individuals, businesses, and entrepreneurs. As a former graphic designer, Iris worked for over a decade in various graphic design companies before trading her computer for ink and paper. A couple of years after starting her studio, she has further developed her skills and interests by learning other printing processes, such as relief, intaglio and lithography at Concordia University and The Royal College of Art in the UK. She recently acquired a relief press as well as a professional big format inkjet printer in order to be able to offer a wide range of printing mediums to her customers and to promote the cross-over of the techniques. 

Participants were able to visit this professional printmaking studio and discover the techniques of screen-printing, relief and intaglio.  

Herbarium Quebecensium BAnQ – May 19

Picking, pressing, drying, gluing: participants came and explored artistic practices in printed arts similar to the making of a herbarium, as well as heritage documents on the subject of botany. The presentation was followed by a visit to the Special Collections storeroom, where some of the most valuable documents are kept. A unique opportunity to discover the Bibliothèque Nationale (Rosemont site), which is in a building built to store tobacco leaves, and which now houses all of Quebec’s published heritage. 

Collage Collaboration and Risograph at CEP – May 17

In this workshop led by CEP Risograph Coordinator Jessica Bebenek, we created collaged posters to print palimpsesticly on the risograph. Bebenek gave a short history of risograph printing traditions and demonstrated the fundamentals of the printing process, followed by a group collage session in which each participant created an 11×17” poster. We then over-printed our posters, creating spontaneous collaborative prints.  

The Centre for Expanded Poetics is a collaboration space which organizes film screenings, equipment workshops, conferences, and symposia. Their library and reading room consists of a substantial collection of 20th and 21st century experimental poetry, as well as texts on art and architecture.  

Chloé Beaulac Impression Marginale conference – May 18

Discussion and dialogue over tea! 

Chloé Beaulac presented her research and creation project Pèlerin-l’inconnu as part of her residency at Zocalo. Then, within the framework of FAIMTL, she also discussed the evolution of her practice, her questions concerning the photographic archive and the creations that resulted from this existing project on the margins of traditional printing. 

Labour of Love – May 20 

Roundtable discussion about labor and capitalism in print art moderated by Emmanuelle Jacques, with the participation of Alvaro, Marie Samuel Levasseur. 

Creation of Wealth / Labour of Love is an artist’s book that takes the form of a currency in effigy of artists who combine their profession with their role as mothers. Artist Emmanuelle Jacques drew the portraits of about forty of them while discussing the impact of motherhood on their artistic practice. Long confined to a parallel economy, mothers and artists have developed essential expertise to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Emmanuelle Jacques is inspired by it to compose the texts of her book. Through a relational approach, she then uses this symbolic currency to interfere on the fringes of the art market and traditional distribution networks, and weave a community where economic exchanges and artistic creation would be means of taking care of the each other. For this round table, the artist invited Alvaro and Marie Samuel Levasseur to discuss the ways in which they approach, in their respective practices, certain themes at the heart of the Creation of Wealth / Labour of Love project: power, hierarchies, privileges, care, collaboration, slowness, and this, through the prism of the printed arts. 

Concordia Queer Print Club Zine workshop – May 18

“Queer Bodies” Concordia Queer Print Club Zine Workshop  

This event was a chance to discover and explore collaborative zine-making with the Queer Print Club (QPC). Demos were given on how to create and play with various different types of zines and covered choosing paper, formatting, creating, editioning, and experimenting within the framework of zines. All attendees were invited to create their own works as well as collaborate with others and the QPC on a collective work. The event was curated and led by QPC executive members Koi Katigbak (they/them), Micha Paradis (they/he) and Lauren Falvo (she/her), and was complete with drinks, music, creation and collaboration. The event also featured the launch of QPC’s Collaborative Riso Publication, “Love Letters to My Young, Queer Self”.  

The Queer Print Club is a student-run Concordia University collective of queer artists and printmakers. Members of the club include Concordia students enrolled in various different disciplines within and outside the Fine Arts Department. They aim to create a non-hierarchical space to discuss, share ideas and make together (or apart) zines and other print projects. Their projects explore the collaborative, community-based and democratic aspects of print and also create a space to fuel members’ personal projects.   

Cut paper stencil printing workshop Anna Jane McIntyre – May 20

Artist Anna Jane McIntyre gave an active demonstration of cut-paper stencil printing.  

Nous nous emmêlerons L’Imprimerie Launch – May 18

Nous nous emmêlerons is the result of the first Chantier, a research project on the printed and photographic image (2018) gathering artists Gwenaël Bélanger, Mathilde Forest, Mathieu Grenier, Céline Huyghebaert, Janie Julien-Fort, Camille Lamy, Stéphanie Nuckle, Eliza Olkinitskaya, Étienne Tremblay-Tardif and artists-curators Caroline Boileau and Stéphane Gilot. 

At the end of this collective residency, Céline Huyghebaert and Camille Lamy invited everyone to extend the experience in a book. Common themes had emerged in the studio: disappearance, erasure, negatives, invisibility… The book was built around these ideas, without limiting the theme to a single word. Through the pages, artists offer different images of appearance and disappearance: traces of absence, alterations, broken screens… Special attention is given to the form of the book, to evoke ideas of dissolution: of colors, of the sequence of pages, of images replaced by their textual description; but also blurring names, captions and a certain hierarchy we wrongly believe is needed in order to work collectively. 

Ex-Libris Atelier Circulaire members exhibit – April 27-May 21

Artists : Alexandre Fortin, Élisabeth Eudes-Pascal, Francine Metthé, Françoise Legris, Jean Mailloux, Judith Klugerman, Lucie Palombi, Maurice Murphy, Paule Mainguy, René Donais, Roberto Godoy, Rolande Pelletier, Talleen Hacikyan 

Ex-Libris is a Latin term for an artistic vignette glued inside a book. In Europe, the ex-libris became very popular with the birth of printmaking.  

This vignette took the form of a print mentioning the name of the owner of the book. With this title, members questioned the theme of the book, its multiple forms and its many links with the printed arts. Dictionary, novel, essay, zine, poetry compilation, comic book are all examples of sources that can be applied to a wide spectrum of artistic practices. 

The book can also be interpreted as a printed object. The cover, the format, the pages, the typography, the binding are all material aspects that can feed formal research and be integrated into your display. 

ARPRIM : First Impressions – May 28-June 18

This event was an exhibit of the finalists for the Albert-Dumouchel Award for young artists. Additionally, there was Culture graphique, an exhibit and sale of works by students from UQAM and Concordia. 

Artexte Collections Guided Visit

Attendees were invited to discover the Artexte collection with Jessica Hébert (Librarian) and Jonathan Lachance (Documentation Technician), and the many forms of printed art that can be found in its stacks. Artists’ books of all kinds, fanzines, posters and more were on display. Afterwards, attendees could explore Blackity, Artexte’s hybrid exhibition curated by Joana Joachim, in company of Mojeanne Behzadi (Curator, Research and Programming) and Anabelle Chassé (Gallery Assistant and Communications) for a friendly guided tour. 

Participatory workshop for intaglio and lithography – May 13

Atelier Circulaire opened its doors to the general public for a 5 à 7 devoted to the discovery of two little-known printing techniques: intaglio and lithography. In the magnificent space of the studio, equipped with unique equipment of exceptional quality, visitors will be able to demystify the secrets and mysteries that surround these centuries-old techniques in the presence of experienced printers, Paule Mainguy and Carlos Calado. On site, the printers will make prints while explaining the process, in order to share with visitors the still alive interest in these mediums allowing the multiplicityy of the work.