EN MASSE was co-founded in 2009 by Tim Barnard and myself, Jason Botkin. We’d lived together while serving time at the Alberta College of Art and Design back in the 90s, and some years later, ended up calling Montreal, at least for a spell.
Montreal is an artist’s city, but we like so many, especially in the Urban Arts community, faced hard realities about the relative market value of the sort of art and ideas we were pushing...much of it landing squarely outside the white-washed walls of the arts institutions. There were few galleries that would or could support our stuff, despite the fact there had been an explosively creative Urban Arts community in the city for years. We as artists were not alone in our concerns of how to generate some new models that would help grow and support a community we cared for, and found an open-armed embrace within.
EN MASSE was originally conceived as an experiment, when the cavernous, sun-drenched space at Galerie Pangee (located at that time in the Old Port of Montreal), fell virtually into our laps. With some effort, the young gallery gave us the keys and a full carte blanche pass to develop a couple months programming in the space. We got to work immediately, driven by a few key questions:
What would happen if we mashed into one room a bunch of artists of very different backgrounds, techniques, vision, and at times, competing value systems?
Would they show up...would egos conflict...was this over-sized experiment in shared creativity a romantic fools’ dream?
Was it possible to create meaningful institutional and corporate relationships, built upon mutually beneficial cooperation, not compromise?
What do acts of artistic solidarity look like, and how could we support a powerful experience of community?
We knew intuitively that if we could create a bunch of new friends and extended relationships in a network of artists, we were going to make bigger, louder art...a gravitational force that would irresistibly draw the eyes of the greater public and market.
For 30 Dada-fueled and thrilling days, the worlds of fine art, comix, and graffiti collided at the gallery, culminating in an all-night party for Montreal's Nuit Blanche on Saturday, February 28th, 2009. Twenty-eight Montreal-base artists had been chosen for their cutting-edge graphic styles, invited to invade the space in an ecstasy of collaborative mark making.
Video by Noe Sardet (http://www.vimeo.com/enodziner) and Jason Botkin EN MASSE @ Galerie Pangee, co-curated by Tim Barnard and Jason Botkin
The ‘experiment’ quickly became an overnight success, and now, ten years later, it continues to have a broad impact on the cultural landscape of montreal and beyond, as the project has found home in many places around the world where its spirit and signature vision continues to herald artistic solidarity.
The project is an embodiment of Rafael Schacter’s notion of “Intermual Art”, or Art in between the walls, where the relationship between the inside and outside is key.
“These are artists who are emerging from the Street Art and Graffiti arenas, but who are developing practices that now both exceed and are tarnished by this previous designation. These are artists occupying the vital space between the street and the studio, between the independent and the intuitional, artists who are moving between the outside and the inside in highly conscious ways. These are artists occupying the spaces in between in disruptive, innovative, boundary shifting ways.”
https://hyperallergic.com/310616/street-art-is-a-period-period-or-the-emergence-of-intermural-art/
Over the years, EN MASSE organically grew into four major branches of activity:
To date (not including the countless murals created through our mentorship programming), the project has created over 20 works of public art internationally, in collaboration with 250+ artists from backgrounds including graphic novels, graffiti and street art, tattoo, illustration, design and the fine arts.