Ladies and Gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And at the risk of being slightly unpopular, we have decided to do something slightly different with this particular installment of our cahier. Acerbic criticism and complaint are like any luxuries. They are to be dispensed leisurely, and savored slowly, like an exquisitely made cocktail. Just as nobody likes a bad drunk, nobody likes a bad complainer. Thus, lest we gorge on the heady aromas of superciliousness, and end up slurring our words and cradling our head with the toilet bowl, we have decided to make this issue the Happy issue, and devote our bon mots to the praiseworthy, the spirit-uplifting, and the thoroughly enjoyable.

It is rare, ladies and gentlemen, that we leave our allotted slot in the criticism stakes, but we seem to be doing it quite a lot lately (for those who missed out, we ventured forth into the fetid swamp of political commentary to poo-poo certain goings-on in Montreal, the results of which can be read on our virtual venture, www.artfag.ca). So, in the spirit of such class meanderings, we find ourselves feeling it necessary to declaim on behalf of Miranda July and her new film “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” the darling of Cannes, Sundance, Roger Ebert, and thus, soon to have a wide theatrical release. It’s enough to make one believe in miracles.

A confession: we were aware of Ms July only from her audio pieces. We found them charming and childlike in their embracing of the lo-fi as a means of communicating a spiky, theatrical make-believe. We have never (thus far) seen her experimental videos. And thus, as we entered the theatre at the Cumberland cinema (which graciously hosted this event as a fundraiser for the Images Festival) we did not know what to expect. We will say, tangentially, that we hardly expected it to be the schmooze-fest that it was; we found ourselves trying to beat out the local luminary darlings to the good seats (which we did, although Mike Hoolboom’s sprightly hairdo managed to obscure a minuscule chunk of the screen).

“Me and You and Everyone We Know” traces the threads of a web of interconnected lives, and is, ostensibly, a love story. Christine Jesperson, chauffeur for the elderly by trade and aspiring video artist by vocation, stumbles upon Richard, department store shoe salesman, dreamer, and recently separated father of two, and the dance begins. In the meantime, Richard’s elder son Peter is bravely attempting a navigation through the choppy waters of early adolescence, and his younger son, 6 year old Robbie, is blithely meandering through life in general, and keeping up his end of a scatological on-line romance. Next door, young Sylvie is meticulously preparing for her adulthood, amassing a stock of tchatckes that would fill a Barbie Dream Home many times over. And, to top it all off, Richard’s other neighbour and co-worker, the slightly sleazy Michael, is entertaining an illicit, and very public, flirtation with two female classmates of Peter’s.

Admittedly, this all sounds like a recipe for a Todd Solondz film, but these are only the sketchiest summaries of plot-lines, and as is the case with any good film, the plot is just about the least important player. The film never descends into thorny misanthropy. Instead, it ambles along gently and evenly; even the more difficult scenes to watch blend seamlessly into the pedestrian rhythm of mundane life. Most importantly, the waters of this film are deep, and each fathom of discovery brings its own rewards.

As a love story, Ms July has crafted something warm and affecting, only occasionally cheesy, and never trite. She has captured the nuances of longing in a manner that feels unquestionably true, from Christine’s private rituals to induce her phone to ring (finding the letters R, I, N, and G in the random page of a book) to Richard’s bungling attempts to clean his apartment on the eve of a first date. As a slice of lower middle class American life, the film feels equally authentic; the actors are as natural as an involuntary gesture, and Ms July has an ear for the cadences of vernacular. As a needling of the Art World, the film is caustic enough to be organically funny while swerving clear of vindictive self-pity (the museum curator Nancy Harrington comes off with some of the best lines in the film: “E-Mail wouldn’t even exist without AIDS!”).

The most valuable theme of the film, for us, is this: at its core (or at least, one of its cores) this film is about dreamers, people who populate their lives with wonder and grandiosity in some form or other, and what they do in order for their dream world and their real world to live side by side. As such, the film is littered with these marvelous moments of sublimity jostling against mundanity: a pet-store goldfish in a bag of water is worthy of a highway motorcade; the difference between a long and a short version of a story is the difference between the metaphoric and the literal; the best place for a framed photograph of a bird is the branches of a tree; the length of a sidewalk is a surrogate for the span of true love; the rapping of a penny against the pole of a bus stop is the agent of the sunrise. And each character negotiates this precious, sad exchange in their own way: Christine continues to see things through the lens of her art; Richard waits for sublimity to come to him, biding his time by selling shoes and doing penny ante tricks; sleazy Michael simply starts and hides when confronted with his own fantasies. The hope of the film lies in young Robbie, who has not yet learned that “real life” must be divided along these lines. The moral comes in the form of Sylvie, who has learned this division, and reacts by keeping her domestic-goddess fantasy intensely private, bringing it to life only within the confines of her ordered room; doing otherwise would put both reality and fantasy in jeopardy. Stretched along her bedroom floor, she sets out the finer points of her dream-life to Peter, who expresses a desire to drift forever in this make-believe world. Sylvie wisely, tragically counters: “But if you lived up there, then all this stuff, the stuff in my room, would fall down on you, it would crush you, and you’d die.” If there’s any better epigram of the tenuous relationship between life and art that’s come along in the last little while, we haven’t yet heard it.

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It is time, once again, to heap praise on the Katherine Mulherin gallery. The cause for celebration, this time around, is new work by Margaux Williamson, a gal on the move (if we are to judge by her scads of well-deserved good press), having already garnered for herself the auspicious designation of “promising young painter.” Her new show of paintings, “In The Woods,” leaves behind her muted, tar-brown creepy alien children of yore - a Good Thing, as they were in dire risk of becoming a trademark - and moves on to wilder, more rustic (but no less eerie) territory. Along the way, Ms Williamson seems to have picked up an almost Nabi-esque knack for exploiting intense, slightly off colours (viz. the exquisite, nigh-electric hum produced by the juxtaposition of a creamy lime and a deep forest green in “Collaborators”), and, to connect the dots in a more contemporaneous fashion, she seems to be working just this side of Peter Doig.

As such, the work is largely figurative, but only in the categorical sense. Most of the paintings are bizarre concoctions indeed, feverish amalgams of figures, objects, and settings that have loose to no relationship to one another. Do not mistake us: these paintings are anything but jumbled and haphazard – well, in point of fact, they are, but in the most attentive and controlled way. This deft handling of paradox is symptomatic of a mind driven by a particular peculiar vision; as an artist statement, Ms Williamson provides us with a dream: a lunatic asylum and a plastic surgeon’s office are separated by the titular Woods, populated by the lonely, the troubled, the horny, and a possibly pedophilic ice cream vendor with a tenuous grasp of time. And so we find ourselves on strangely familiar terrain; these are the same Woods we all wandered through as children, led by such dubiously reliable guides as the Brothers Grimm, or following oddly blithe characters on their strange, sour adventures. Ms Williamson’s woods, just like folk tale woods, are a jumble of associations and allusions, a loose network of places, people and things that obey nothing but their own internal logic; witness the doubled-over boy lacing up his boots, hovering in a topsy-turvy courtyard where the architecture is capped by what looks to be a mountain range (“Into the Woods”), the eerie, Lego-stacked limbo-space of “House for a Head”, or the sweaty, tawdry sexuality of “Hot for Teacher” (a personal favourite, natch).

But what makes Ms Williamson’s canvasses great paintings (instead of merely great images, which they are) are their surfaces. Slick and varnished, they lend everything the glittering sheen of sticky treacle, highlighting the already lush sensuality of Ms Williamson’s brushwork. And that is the real cause for celebration, here. Just as the proverbial Woods-bound ingenue of lore, Ms Williamson’s brush marks are searching, probative things, by which one navigates one’s way through the painting. It is that relentless painterly inquisitiveness, the restless translation of sight to gesture to paint that is the forte here. This is also, for the most part, why the weaker parts of some paintings are so easily forgiven. There are, here and there, bits where the rigid formalism that keeps these jostling, collaged vistas in check falters and stammers. But these slips and stutters are few and far between, and besides which, they seem organic, part of the journey, and as such, we are willing to follow her through the odd patch of uncertain terrain, confident that she’ll make her way back to the beaten path, which she invariably does. Our eyes then continue on to delicately tuned smears of colour, serpentine, wormlike, meandering through surfaces and textures and responding accordingly; some passages are marked by a juicy fatness of paint, others by layers of colour so thin, they seem like wan hazes of pigment. This formal depth, density and deft variety only heightens the off-kilter thematic radiance of the series; simply put, Ms Williamson leads quite the backwoods tour, and the pleasures gained from braving it are rare and marvelous.