Montreal’s marginal spaces seem to hold particular appeal for its artists. Last year, Karen Spencer decorated fences, laneways and parking lots with her oblique trilingual dreams; Julie Favreau and Caroline Dubois occupied a vacant storefront on Beaubien Street, turning an empty space into one of constant reinvention; and the artists of Dare-Dare took a forlorn corner of Mile End and made it into the centre of gravity for the city’s most interesting and innovative art. Now, the wayward Heather Utah has found herself in the area around the Falaise St. Jacques, where she has marked an entire corner the city with her “flags for a vengeance”: colourful quilts that mark an outpost of ambiguity, spontaneity and humanity in the rigidly-marked space of this drably suburban landscape.
Photos by Heather Utah; click here for the full set.
One comment
Don’t forget the painted manholes in Mile End.
And tell me, who does that sculpture park near the hole in the fence by the train tracks at Van Horne and Clark? Is it one of the poeple mentioned in the article? I go through it all the time when I go home to Beaubien and it’s my favorite park in Montreal. They have cut through all of the railway’s attempts to block off the passage. It’s amazing.