Every year, Montreal celebrates this art that adorns our walls with the renowned Mural Festival, held this year from June 6 to 16. Because we want to build communities that feel good inside their walls as well as outside, it was the perfect excuse for us to collaborate with a local collective to create our own piece of art on the massive west façade of the Mellem Ville-Marie.
Behind the brushes and strokes of paint several feet in the air is TYXNA, a local artist collective that stands out both near us and beyond our borders. “At the forefront of the artistic experience, their shared passion for exchange and union motivated their gathering around a collaborative entity. Eager to create a special relationship with the viewer, TYXNA is the result of team reflection that offers immersive and sensory murals based on urban art and digital art techniques aimed at taking the public elsewhere. Offering a window into innovative work that interacts with its environment to question it and provide avenues for reflection.”
With over 400 projects to their name, the members of the TYXNA project are key players in a booming scene in Montreal.
“Our artistic reflection is rooted in the vision, viewpoints, and vibrant perspectives of the neighbourhood. Like a living mural, its history intertwines agriculture and industry, beautifully embodied by the locomotive and the farmer. At the heart of our work, the trunk of a tree, marked with its rings of life, tells of past and future eras, a silent witness to the passage of time. An aesthetic mosaic, where fragments of nature and urban elements blend, finding balance between modernity and ecology.”
The TYXNA collective, on the Mellem Ville-Marie mural
A mural celebrating a neighbourhood in transformation
The TYXNA collective tracing the mural to scale
From the lift, taking in the air and enjoying the neighbourhood panorama
Detail of the upper half of the mural, paying homage to the neighbourhood's railway history
No artwork is complete without a signature! Bravo to the artists!
With this aptly titled piece “Strate", we evoke the rich and dynamic, sometimes forgotten, history of a neighbourhood with agricultural, industrial, and then residential vocations in the heart of the metropolis. A neighbourhood as a playground where the Mellem Ville-Marie has settled, now illustrated on a four-storey-high wall (no less!) for the enjoyment of residents and passersby!
Four storeys high and nearly 100 hours of work, perched on a lift in the air, to depict a neighbourhood in full transformation.
Key numbers of the Mellem Ville-Marie mural.
Enjoy an unobstructed view from all sides!
A clever trompe-l’oeil to enjoy the mural in its entirety: located on a lot adjacent to the Mellem Ville-Marie, we also decided to invest in a large billboard with a visual trick to make it… disappear. Because an artwork of this magnitude should be admired in its entirety with an unobstructed view, right?
It’s time to go and observe it in all its splendour at the corner of Ontario and Hogan Streets, and don’t forget to share your best photos by tagging us @mellem_vivre and @projet.tyxna on Instagram! And if you feel inspired to join us in building dynamic communities that enjoy their walls inside and out, plan your visit right here.
