Everybody Else is Wrong

Everybody else is wrong is an unscripted portrait of thirteen Montrealers talking directly to the camera about music, love and loss. Each was asked to bring a homemade compilation cassette, a mixtape, from or for someone they loved, requited or not, and then to talk about what the songs meant and why they mattered. Forsyth & Pollard use the tape as a trigger to spark each subject into talking candidly. The half-hour film weaves back and forth between them, mixing separate accounts into a single narrative, so that the particular songs matter less than the truths the songs reveal.

The film was cast, shot and edited in Montreal just before the exhibition opened. It constituted half the exhibition. The other half arrived in the post. Visitors and readers were asked to make a tape for someone dear, write the track list out by hand on the inlay card and either bring it to the gallery or send it in, and the walls filled with cassette inlay cards across the three weeks the show was open. La Presse printed a blank Scotch BX60 inlay at full size so its readers could fill one in and cut it out. Each card arrived as a handwritten list of song titles, carrying a message, and often a confession.

Everybody else is wrong was the first exhibition at Pavilion, a temporary gallery in a former video arcade at 1206 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, and the artists’ first solo show in North America. It opened on 7 February 2004 with Wolf Parade, Ten Commandments and DJ Alex Lemieux, and the space kept programming alongside it for the length of the run: the Hidden Cameras with Arcade Fire on 13 February, a record release for the Toronto label Fame-Fame the night after, one-man noise acts, and a guy who sang Richard Marx a cappella when his gear crashed. The show closed on 28 February with a party billed as the Collapse of Pavilion. The gallery closed with it.

The title is a song by Epic Soundtracks, and a phrase the artists took as an encapsulation of the us-versus-the-world feeling of young love. Everybody else is wrong is the second work in the series collectively titled Precious Little, after Fucked up lover, made for Hobbypop Museum in Dusseldorf in 2001, and before Anyone else isn’t you, made for The Hospital in London in 2005, and Make me yours again, made in Auckland in 2007. The whole series was shown together at MIC Toi Rerehiko in Auckland in 2007, touring to The Physics Room in Christchurch.