With remarkable precision and attention to detail, Ed Pien creates a shimmering, hypnotic undersea realm in his current exhibition entitled “Under Water”, on now at François Ouellette Art Contemporain. “Under Water” showcases eight of Pien’s recent papercut works—astoundingly intricate cutouts of 3M reflective film and shoji paper that depict marine life deep beneath the waves—and scores of ink and gouache drawings from his “Deep Water” series.

I took a friend of mine, Jessica, who’s just moved here in the last few months from small-town Ontario, to Alexis O’Hara’s La Couvée at HTMlles 10: Risky Business festival last Thursday. As we left in a dizzied state, I told her this is what Montreal was. Things like what we’d just seen; that is what makes this place so different from anywhere else; this vast openness to diverse, endless art forms. She’d told me she wanted to go home, and that she loved the big city, but there was something missing here from what she knew at home.

Admittedly, as a painter, I may be a little under-qualified to comment on this show. Yet I’m going to urge you, dear readers, to go and see it. Yes, urge. Because, despite my relative techno-illiteracy, something in me is dimly aware that this show is capital-I Important. I say that without irony. Ryoji Ikeda, the cool, minimal Japanese-born, Parisian-based composer/visual artist whose two-part show continues through November 18 at DHC/ART, is addressing some of the major questions of our times, using an incredibly—some might say ‘unbearably’—sophisticated language to do so.

While I would rarely suggest that Montréal’s pulsing art scene should be taking cues from Toronto, Hogtown’s Nuit Blanche this past Saturday was a great success thanks to people who never get their due credit… the curators. The event went out of its way to demystify the curatorial process by dividing exhibits into various zones, each with its own curator and thematic focus. While the star artworks of the night were found at Museum for the End of the End of the World curated by Janine Marchessault and Michael Prokopow and presented at City Hall, I ventured a bit farther east to spend the night in Zone C.