The Long Weekend is a collective of Winnipeg artists, filmmakers,and designers who, working under the aegis of Paul Butler’s enduring Collage Party practice, have produced movie posters that imagine an alternate history of cinema. The Collage Party, started by Butler in 1998, is an experimental studio where artists are invited to work alongside each other in a social setting, often for days on end. The posters that comprise Coming Attractions depict a fanciful Hollywood realm, one presided over by movie moguls who never quite finalized their plans for global domination, never quite mastered their formulas for churning out blockbusters, never once dreamed of rewiring and homogenizing the public’s perception of itself.

Covering the street-level windows of TIFF Bell Lightbox—the epicentre of the Toronto International Film Festival—Coming Attractions creates the appearance of a welter of one-sheets plastered in the style of advertisements found on construction site hoarding. The montage of posters creates a direct confrontation between The Long Weekend’s specifically contrived film world and the corporate hegemonies of the real film world. These movie-industry détournements, fashioned from advertisements and illustrations cut and recontexualized from old books and magazines, were created in the convivial freedom of near-utopian Collage Party environments. But The Long Weekend has no utopian vision, no illusions about their political impact, no nostalgia for avant-garde movements of the past. The simple act of artmaking in the present is its way of engaging with questions that preoccupy its members, both individually and collectively.

Presented in partnership with TIFF 

Curated by Bonnie Rubenstein