SIDIM 2018

SIDIM - Salon du Design
30th Edition

April 26 - 28, 2018

This annual Show - Salon is a gathering place for Quebec designers and artists to present to the public their ideas and concepts, and to showcase their latest products. It is also a common ground where an exchange between various design creators and organisations takes place. The event takes place every spring. It offers an opportunity to discover new design trends and guidances.

There are over 250 products at the SHOW designed by more than 50 Quebec designers, artists and artisans. The Show is a big market where the trends of 2018 and the creativity of local creators are be brought together to offer new objects useful for everyday life.

If one like beautiful objects and is passionate about design, or is planning to renovate and refurbish their living quarters, this is the place to find many interesting ideas and objects that might attract attention and inspire. There are art objects, new design concepts of any sort, decorations, lighting, kitchen accessories, stationery, ambiance products.

The Show is open the public and design experts and lovers. The SIDIM offers the opportunity to meet various experts to ask questions, to get new creative ideas, and get inspired by the latest interior design trends.

Click on any image to enlarge it.

All photos by Nadia Slejskova

For more information, visit SIDIM website.

View all SIDIM previous posts here and also here. 

MMFA 2028: From the Hands of the Masters II

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: 
FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE
April 10 – August 12, 2018

On April 13, 2018, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) unveiled 55 drawings from a Montreal private collection that span from the 16th to the 20th century. As part of this exhibition, the MMFA also presented some twenty other master drawings from artists including Delacroix, Greuze, Ingres and Romney that were recently given to the Museum by the anonymous collector.

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE brings together works on paper by François Boucher, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Juan Gris, Katsushika Hokusai, Victor Hugo, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Amadeo Modigliani, Gustave Moreau, Berthe Morisot, Parmigianino, Camille Pissarro, Giorgio Vasari, James McNeill Whistler, and Antoine Watteau.

The exhibition also features a selection of 20 drawings by François Boucher, Eugène Delacroix, Ciro Ferri, Charles de la Fosse, Théodore Géricault, Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, le Guerchin, Charles-Nicolas Cochin le Jeune, Michel Corneille le Jeune, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacob Jordaens, Carlo Maratti, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Domenico Piola, Sebastiano Ricci, George Romney, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Orazio Samacchini, among the artworks given to the Museum by the same anonymous Montreal collector. Many of them are being displayed at the Museum for the first time.

The subjects range from studies for religious compositions to sensuous female nudes, from the Virgin to a ballerina, from male portraits to battling Japanese warriors. Also on display are a variety of landscapes, from a wintry sixteenth-century Northern European village scene to a lush tropical jungle in Venezuela, from the rocky coast of Guernsey to the fields of Normandy and an Impressionist vision of the countryside near Paris, and even the picturesque crossing of an arched bridge in nineteenth-century Japan. Still-lifes from the early period of Cubism also are presented, as is a black paper cut-out of an eagle by the renowned French author Victor Hugo.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is the repository of one of the most important graphic arts collections in Canada, encompassing prints, drawings and photographs that survey over five centuries of graphic achievement and include masterpieces by a broad diversity of artists spanning the history of European and North American art.

Click on images to enlarge them.
All photos above by Nadia Slejskova.
The last image in this article below courtesy of MMFA.

The exhibition is located at the MMFA's Graphic Arts Centre
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, Level S2 

This exhibition is a successor to a MMFA 2013 exhibition. You can read about the original FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS  here.

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), Study of a Man Gesturing on a Barrel,
Supported by Another Figure for The Raft of the Medusa, 1819,
pen and ink, heightened with gouache on blue paper.
On loan from a private collection.

Successions

Centaur Theatre /49th Season

Successions

World Premier 

Written by Michaela Di Cesare

Directed by Tamara Brown

April 10 - May 6, 2018

This is the first time that a female Italian Canadian playwright joined the ranks of two other Italian Canadian Centaur playwright luminaries Vittorio Rossi, and Steve Galluccio.

Michaela Di Cesare's play is about a family drama that takes place when the departed parent's estate has to be attended by the family survivors. Many in the audience would relate to this play since they themselves went through personal variations of the same situation.

In Successions, it is the conflict that unfolds between two second generation Italian Canadian brothers from the St. Leonard borough in Montreal. After the sudden death of their both parents, they must decide whether or not to hold on to the rundown family home, stuffed with memorabilia and worthless but sentimental junk. Their conflicting memories and emotions, overshadowed by their parent's plethora of unpaid bills, leads to a drama that unfolds - what to do with their parent’s debt ridden estate. At the end they realize they need to move forward, each deciding what they are willing to give up and at what cost to their relationship.

Successions with Gita Miller,Davide Chiazzese, Carlo Mestroni &
Tara Nicodemo, Photo Andrée Lanthier

All play's action takes place in the cluttered basement and garage of a typical St. Leonard bungalow. The home, with a palpable character in of its own, and with its hold over the brothers, makes it difficult for them to break free of their history and each other.

Michaela Di Cesare also used an interesting device: by using the house memorabilia items she brings back the brother's parents, or rather their personalities, by portraying - enacting them briefly on stage. 

Successions with Davide Chiazzese, Gita Miller & Carlo Mestroni
 Photo Andrée Lanthier

The play also elaborates in a conflict of brothers belonging to two different social spheres. Anthony Di Ciccio, the older brother, is a hard-working lawyer who is running for political office. His wife Christina put her career on hold to be his campaign manager. The ambitious couple refers to themselves as DINKs: people with “double incomes, no kids”.  Enzo, Anthony’s younger brother, is headstrong and impulsive. He is planning to embark on his latest career choice as a plumber. Whereas he is planning to have his own family, Nat, his very pregnant, a beautician and an internet savvy girlfriend, is quite content to live independently in her own condo. At the end,regardless to the social strata the brothers belong to, it is the concept of family, of a family microcosm, that synthesises all their conflicts and arguments.

Michaela Di Cesare refers to the genre of this play as "dramedy". She explained that she thought she wrote a drama. But when she attended several previews of her play, she was startled that the audience began to laugh during the scenes or monologues that she considered dramatic. It was only then she perceived the comical side of the situations she conjured on the stage.

Successions with Gita Miller,Davide Chiazzese,Tara Nicodemo &
Carlo Mestroni, Photo Andrée Lanthier

CREATIVE TEAM

Actors - Davide Chiazzese, Carlo Mestroni, Gita Miller and Tara Nicodemo

Dramaturg - Micheline Chevrier

Set & Costume Designer - Diana Uribe

Lighting Designer - Audrey-Anne Bouchard

Sound Designer - Peter Cerone

Fight Choreographer - Anita Nittoly

Stage Manager - Merissa Tordjman

Apprentice Stage Manager - Brandon Hepworth 

Successions with Davide Chiazzese &
Gita Miller, Photo Andrée Lanthier

Successions with Carlo Mestroni &
Davide Chiazzese, Photo Andrée Lanthier

Click on images to enlarge them.

All images above are courtesy of Centaur Theatre.

For more information, visit the Centaur Theatre website.

 Playwright Michaela Di Cesare and members of the production crew

Photo Nadia Slejskova

SUNDAY CHAT-UP:

In Centaur’s Ted T. Katz Family Trust Gallery

April 15th, 2018 at 12:30pm

Montreal Gazette Editor-in-Chief, Lucinda Chodan, is joined by Successions

playwright, Michaela Di Cesare

Admission to the Chat-up is free and open to the public, with complimentary refreshments courtesy of Bonaparte Restaurant.

Successions, Centaur Theatre 2018, Michaela Di Cesareis interviewd by  Lucinda Chodan,
Photo Eloi Savoie

TALK BACKS:

Following the evening performance on Thursday April 26^th

and the matinee presentation on Sunday April 29^th

audiences are invited to stay after the show for a lively Q&A with the cast and director.

MAC 2018: New Museum Plan Unveiled

MAC Transformation

On April 9, 2018, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal - MAC) has unveiled the winning project of the architectural competition launched in June 2017 for the museum's renovation and transformation. The images in this article show the design and preliminary drawings for MAC's new look.

MAC enters a pivotal stage in its development. Museum attendance has increased steadily over the last 5 years, culminating with this year’s record of over 600,000 visitors. As an important national museum dedicated exclusively to the promotion of contemporary art, the MAC in its current condition faces a desperate lack of space to exhibit its vast collection.

It was the proposal of Saucier+Perrotte Architectes / GLCRM & Associés Architectes, a consortium of Quebec architects, that captured the top honours. This proposal was selected unanimously by the jury as inspiring, luminous, and relevant, and as resulting in a striking contemporary construction fully coherent with the Museum’s raison d’être. With this transformation, the MAC will embark on a new chapter in its existence and to embrace its full potential. 

Highlights of the new MAC:

• Close to a 100% increase in exhibition spaces and rooms, including three new exhibition rooms.
• Every space, from lobbies to circulation areas, has been redesigned to showcase contemporary art.
• New and expanded educational spaces.
• An exterior façade that has been transformed by the expansion of the main entrance and the added area on the 2nd floor.
• The optimization of the Beverly-Webster-Rolph multimedia room.
• New spaces for the Restaurant du MAC, including an outdoor terrace on the 2nd floor.
• New spaces for the MAC Boutique, including a bookstore and a coffee shop.

The new Museum’s architectural vision

The proposal by Saucier+Perrotte Architectes / GLCRM & Associés Architectes builds on open and light-filled spaces to strengthen the special connection that joins the MAC to the quadrilateral defined by Place des Arts and to the Quartier des spectacles. In particular, the essential link between the MAC and the Place des Festivals will be maintained with a new transparent, light-filled expansion. On level 2, a large window will showcase the Museum restaurant, a double-height space that will open onto an outdoor terrace.

The museum will enjoy far greater visibility on the lower, Sainte-Catherine Street of the Esplanade, with the angular overhang of the expansion. Under this jutting structure, the museum square will naturally guide visitors to the main entrance, while freeing up the space necessary for holding the festivals.

From an urban planning perspective, several features will link the new MAC to its context. On the ground floor, the Museum will glow with transparency and the hustle and bustle of its public spaces, while on the Place des Arts Esplanade level the architectural proportions and expression will integrate with the existing architecture. he upper section will be composed of an envelope of folded metal blades revealing the interior spaces and filtering natural light. The created verticality will express and harmonize - in a contemporary manner - with Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier and Théâtre Maisonneuve.

A new Museum in 2021

On the current timetable, the main project phases are scheduled as follows:

• April 2018 Start of architects’ mandate
• January 2019 Temporary closure of the Sainte-Catherine Street MAC
• Spring 2019 Opening of the temporary MAC
• Summer 2019 Start of the Sainte-Catherine Street MAC construction
• Fall 2021 Opening of the new MAC

The temporary MAC

The MAC must remain active and on hand throughout the construction period in order to maintain its relationship with the city and community presence. Between the closing and reopening, the MAC will set up headquarters in a permanent location and all the while make its influence throughout the city with multi-site and ephemeral exhibitions.

The programming, while limited, is nevertheless planned to be of excellence and rigour. None withstanding that this transition period will come with its share of challenges, it will also give the MAC an opportunity to explore both new partnerships and new exhibition spaces, and will challenge to display greater creativity.

Click on images to enlarge them.
All images in this article courtesy of @ MAC

For more information about MAC, visit the museum's website.