Osheaga Arts’ Musique sur Papier: Posters that go way beyond the promo

Gig posters have long served as the promotional and nostalgic reminders of a great show, a great band or a great night. They hang on our walls well after the event has passed and the memories have faded. But oftentimes, we forget the skilled handwork required to produce some of the beautiful pieces of merch we pick up by the venue’s exit. Not so at Osheaga Arts‘ Musique sur Papier exhibition in the gallery-basement of Le Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

Until July 20, Osheaga Arts is featuring some of the amazingly creative poster-work of seventeen studios taken from dozens of past gigs in the U.S. and Canada. The exhibition is a smart reminder of just how imaginative these prints can be – namely just how completely separate they are from the music they’re promoting. Whether it’s Bright Eyes playing in Pittsburgh or Pixies here last year at Metropolis, all of the roughly 70 posters displayed show off supreme silk-screening talent and imagination.

Certainly, event curator Pat Hamou—himself a featured artist at the expo—wants to highlight this oft-unappreciated process: in the middle of the floor space rests three woven meshes with their accompanying rollers, and from the ceiling hang the negatives of some of the actual posters on laundry lines—as if the artists were just now drying them off. 

 

Arranged by the studios that produced them, these works showcase a myriad of different approaches to the traditional ‘gig poster’—and it’s fantastic to see each group’s take on a band’s music side-by-side. For one, there’s the more minimal work of Jason Munn (The Small Stakes) with incredibly clever promos for The National post-High Violet in Paris, The Walkmen in Chicago after Bows + Arrows, and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie fame at Noise Pop 2011. Right by those hang Burlesque of North America’s highly ’60s look for Arcade Fire during The Suburbs release tour. A medium that largely emerged out of  ’60s Psychedelia, these prints don’t dare leave an inch uncolored. The same goes for local studio Seripop and their completely off-the-wall pieces for past No Age and Hollerado shows here in Montreal.

In a few weeks, Osheaga itself will come to town, but until then, Musique sur Papier is more than just whetting our appetites in anticipation. In fact, these posters—which, we note, are also going for sale at the gallery—give you that tactile, textural feel which is impossible to get from the actual music (certain drugs notwithstanding). All in all, this is an event that goes far and beyond mere promotion.