The Before Poster Series

Before posters 

The arts in a poor community 

When I moved into the downtown sector the plateau Montreal was a very poor community 

Although the community was very poor it was densely populated. There were a lot of dry goods establishments mixed with a fair amount of family tolerated prostitution. The police sergeant had taken it upon himself to clean up the area so there were a lot of sponsored artistic establishments Mostly beginning dressmakers. These were young designers that needed a lot of cheap space and fast and they were willing and able to physically fight for their career.  They had many ethnic grocery stores that promoted regional fruits and vegetables  four different kinds of cooking needs. You had Portuguese you had English you had Chinese etc. These culturally diverse grocery stores exist to this very day. You also had a lot of temporary space that could be rented very cheaply for performance. It is from these performances can I take inspiration for a current series of work that I am producing. 

to advertise these performances a series of very quick very rough posters were created. 

Before posters series 

·         These are inspired by performance posters 

·         They are done quickly and cheaply  

·         They are in black-and-white and printed on regular paper  

·         They are also inspired by the metropolis posters  

·         They are inspired by the working-class community around myself: there is a lot of concrete and steel

  

·         Their low-cost makes me able to produce many of them and at the same time 

·         The before posters advertise a show that does not exist or a website that is not finished  

·         They advertise an artistic happening but the actual artistic happening or only the poster themselves are created.  anything afterwards does not exist.   

·         In other words, the beauty of the posters themselves are the legitimate and only work of art.  

·         This is to echo the beauty of those simple black and white posters that were created for the original shows. 

  

·         They were distributed to the public by putting them on with glue on the telephone poles. The places were poor and in the shadows and pasting the works was illegal. But authorities would finally come to these places so the posters would stay there until someone came to put them down.   

·         This is why they were made quickly and cheaply. What they were created by very talented people and often they were very beautiful.   

·         These posters are the inspiration for my series of before posters.