Stuff, Self, and Everything In-Between: An Interview with Billy Mavreas
by James O.
Billy Mavreas is an artist, collector, zine-maker, father and life-long Montrealer. He is also the former owner of Monastiraki, a hybrid art gallery and “market of stuff” located at 5478 boulevard Saint-Laurent. After more than 20 years of operation, Monastiraki closed in 2021 leaving behind a creative vacuum. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Billy in March to talk about his identity as an artist, the changing Mile End neighbourhood, and the ways in which stuff can both enrich and burden our lives. For more information about Billy and Monastiraki visit his website.
by James O.
Interview with Billy Mavreas, owner of the former Monastiraki shop at 5478 Saint-Laurent, March 18th, 2024.
BM: I am gonna doodle while we're talking, okay?
JO: Please do. So maybe to start, who are you, Billy?
BM: My name is Vasilios Billy Mavreas. I'm born in 1968 in Montreal, Quebec to Greek immigrant parents.
JO: I first came to know you through Monastiraki, which was this shop on Saint Laurent, corner of Saint-Viateur and Saint-Laurent. Could you tell me just a bit about Monastiraki?
BM: I guess I’ll start with my family. My uncle, on my mom's side, is a collector and an artist who hooked up with a picker who knows how to find estate sales.
Back then, he was also running a Greek community newspaper. This was a time when you could have an old-school community newspaper print shop on a street level. With digital, the community newspaper folded. It was called the Hellenic Postman in English, Ellinikos Taxidromos in Greek, and Courier Grec en français. He went digital and got together with my father. They were in that space at 5478 Saint Laurent. They were there for a couple of years before my father asked me to come into the business. There was a vacant apartment upstairs and he sweet-talked me into kind of coming back into the family orbit. As a good Greek boy, I had just moved out of my parents' house at 27, and I got sucked into the family building at 30. Three years, that's it.
When I took it over it was mostly just an antique shop and it was very, very full. Some of the printing furniture came with their office, some machines, printing blocks, art supplies, that kind of shit was in the space. It was crazy and it was very hard for me. It took me eight years before I made it my own and that was only with the help of friends. I was quite depressed in the early years of the shop. I was young, around 30 years old. And I was surrounded by a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't necessarily like. What happens is that you develop an appreciation for everything, but you also can't get rid of things in a way. And I was making terrible money. An accountant friend was like, how are you doing this?
I came out of the alternative comic scene in Montreal in the 90s and I had a fun community of French and English alternative cartoonists. I started asking them for paintings and things to put on the walls. Artists would come in and they were friends of mine and we'd put some art on the walls. And I was taking something like 30% of sales at the time.
The art was just mixed in with everything. With the lamps and the vases and the ashtrays and the bottles and the junk. And it was kind of mayhem.
One day my friend Jennifer McIntyre came up to me and said, I want to open an art gallery. And I said, I have an art gallery! We essentially pushed everything from the window in the shop 10 feet back. It's a lot of stuff. We created this space in the front. We had a monthly program where we invited artists, we printed up flyers, we had a vernissage, we had friends come out, and that was fun. We did that every month.
JO: I first came upon Monastiraki in the later years, like 2019. But even then, it felt very much like a place where there's multiple methods of work and stuff happening all in the same place.
BM: Absolutely. It took me a long, long time before I realized what it could be. There was a sweet zone in the last few years where I was really getting it. Now I was old enough to not feel that I was trapped by it. I started understanding that it's mine. It took me a long time to put my own art up on the walls in the front.
Yet having the space that's a laboratory, that's malleable, that's interesting, that is open for collaboration was... It was wonderful. And I had huge plans, very slow in coming because I don't manifest very quickly. But I had all kinds of plans before the shutdown, before the Covid lockdowns happened. With the closing of the shop and with selling the building, I had to clear this space, which was a formidable task and I couldn't have done it without shopkeepers, Mick, and my partner Emilie.
JO: I first came to know your work through buying your zines. Maybe not everyone knows what a zine is. How would you define a zine, and how did you discover that medium?
BM: A zine is a small, mostly handmade photocopied booklet. It comes from fanzine, which comes from fan magazines, which comes from science fiction subcultures in the 30s, and then later in the punk scene. You know, anybody who's not seeing their passions reported on in the newspaper is going to create their own newsletters and pass them around.
I was very active in the mail art scene and that happened because a friend of mine would say “I have a friend in Toronto, send him some stuff for his zine” and I knew what zines were because I was making little photocopies already in university. I would draw my weird Discordian drawings and I would get them photocopied at the copy shop across the campus, and I'd sell my four postcards for $2 to my friends so I can get some coffee.
Also there aren't very many shops where you could drop your zines anyway. Almost none, you know. I come from a time when there was none.
This is something that's interesting I think for younger generations, that they don't understand that there's an infrastructure that has been built. There was no infrastructure before. There was no zine fair in Montreal. We started one because we were tired of going to Toronto all the time. Nowadays you could just make a zine and you could sell it on your Instagram page or zinesters have 100,000 followers or something crazy like that. Not everybody, because there's many people that are doing this.
JO: Zines are really popular now. I mean, they've always been, but especially for my generation, it's like almost a buzzword. I don't know, how does that make you feel?
BM: I think it's great! It's interesting. I didn't go to art school — I studied literature — but I knew about, you know, underground methods of sharing your work. I also knew about the stigma around self-publishing from the literary community. A lot of the literary community, they have problems with it or they have had problems with it, but not cartoonists.
Alternative cartoonists have always been a thing, and because I was active in that world I gravitated towards this DIY thing that's all over the place and it's not even called something yet, right? It became formalized as a culture, as a subculture, and I see now that there's a collapsing that happened between what's happening on the street with zines and what's happening in the art schools. Whereas before there was a very distinct divide, you know? You're either, you know, tattooing, customizing cars, drawing psychedelic horror comics, or you know skateboarding, there's that, and zines, and then there's art school.
And science fiction and fantasy, those subcultures and fandoms are way more apparent and everyone makes zines now. Somebody can make a zine once and they don't have to continue making zines. It's kind of like, "okay, I've made a zine this year, I'm making a cassette next year.” There's all kinds of things happening, you know? And I think it's great, and I think the internet has helped that because people are finding ways of expressing themselves and sharing their gifts.
It's incredible. It could also be very overwhelming for somebody who's trying to start out because there's a glut of everything. And everybody's posing and they're shaking their ass in front of the giant abstract painting and they're, you know, in beautiful TikToks or whatever. It's hard to deal with it all. You know, so now we have to be video makers too.
JO: When you were younger, you mentioned feeling trapped by the space and the things in Monastiraki. How did that influence you as an artist, being surrounded by things that maybe you have an uncomfortable relationship with?
BM: It was complicated because a lot of my art has always been about finding things. And a lot of my identity has always been about finding things. And I've been a conscious finder, looker and finder, since childhood. Broken toys and little things. As a teenager, I had clusters of rusted metal hanging off my jean jacket and key rings and things like that.
I think what was the most difficult for me was being stationary at the age of 30. I have always had groups of friends but it's not like me and my friends would make zines together. It wasn't like that. My friends would just hang out and we'd smoke cigarettes in the store or drink beer. It didn't have that active living force that it came to have later on when I kind of woke up a bit.
I've been making things since way before I had the shop. Zines and posters and whatnot. I used the shop as a place where I would just make things. I was always drawing there, but it took me a long time before what I was making was being showcased in the shop, a very long time.
I remember one of the early things was I found a dry dead fly on the radiator and I put it in a little dime bag, a little Ziploc, and I pinned it to the wall. That was kind of the first realization that anything could happen here. Anything could happen here. Why am I stuck with this stuff? Who cares about this lamp? Trying to get rid of things, trying to change things.
JO: You mentioned you have dreams about this, but how has the cleanout of the shop and your move impacted yourself as an artist or a zine maker? And how has your work changed because of selling the building?
BM: My work has changed because I developed a different relationship with stuff. I've always loved stuff and finding things and keeping things. Everything is totally imbued with and resonates with beauty or potential.
We had moved out of the building a few years before the shop closed because our child was getting older and we needed divided rooms. I had been living there for 20 years and the acoustics were terrible. Every single broken bottle or closing car door was a nightmare. You heard everything.
So there was this kind of bitter sweetness of having this wonderful building potential, but not being able to just kind of settle down and live in it. The building next door is basically a pirate ship crawling with bed bugs. You know, there were all kinds of crises next door; ambulances, cops, or firetrucks almost every day. Kind of what I call the real Mile End. Not whatever it is now, $20 sandwich shit. I had been fist bumping with these gnarly, gnarly men, and so was my kid. It's tiring but I love it. I love being kind of connected to all ranges of community, and I think it's very important for everybody but especially for artists to have a wide social network.
But anyways, we moved out of there. Now I'm in an apartment. I'm renting a fucking storage space in the neighbourhood and the prices are ridiculous. And I thought it would be temporary. I don't know how temporary. It's been a couple of years already. And I have it full of my stuff. And then I say, well, what stuff? And why am I putting it in storage? So I'm going in once in a while and I'm taking out certain collections and I'm taking them home. But what's coming home? What's part of my studio? What's not part of my studio?
In the last little while I have formatted things a little bit more than I ever had before: now I primarily work on 8.5 by 11 sheets of paper. I take existing art that I've already made in that format and I collage and draw on top of it. I am trying to meld all my practices, graphic practices, into one overarching project. I'm constantly reworking my own work so that I'm not creating new work on a new sheet of paper. A fresh sheet becomes a burden.
I'm very keenly aware that as a collector, I don't wanna burden my child with this stuff. I know that I have to constantly reduce my things. It's also, when you're 55 and you're a collector, you start thinking about what's the end game here? What's the exit strategy? Even my art. If I have stacks and stacks of unpublished possible zines, let alone zines that I have 10 copies left of or whatever, like what is this for?
JO: It sounds like your perspective has shifted as well. You moved into Monastiraki as a place that was full of stuff from your uncle, from your father, and in some sense wasn't your own. Now you're working towards making work in the present for yourself but also really thinking about the future.
BM: Think about the future so that we don't get burdened by it. Also what happens is that, let's say, you go on vacation and you collect a really nice pebble that you found on the beach and you bring it home with you. So I did that and I have my—and this is kind of metaphoric—but I have this little pouch of pebbles that I've collected. Now what happens when you have a shop like mine is that people in various stages of traveling, moving, dying are gonna come and say, "Here are my pebbles. Take my two, right? Take all my correspondence. Take all my photo albums. Take all my art. Take my sketchbooks."
So now there's this kind of memory thing that happens and memory's collapsing upon itself. I don't know what is my memento, what's my souvenir, and what's yours anymore. Everything's blended. Now it’s become this gilded cage scenario. You're getting trapped by things that are beautiful.
I don't want to be the custodian of other people's memories. Everything we have in our homes is going to be washed into the ocean, right? Like everything we have is going to be burnt, or buried, or washed away. And it's only a matter of having things for a moment, not just the moment of your lifespan, but… You know, you enjoy something, okay. You can put it in the little free library now. You don't have to keep that box. You can mail the zine to a friend. You just keep it circulating because we're not holding onto anything.
JO: And that's hard. I think that's really interesting. For me, stuff as a concept is interesting. It's a gift and a burden, like you mentioned. To be gifted with other people's memories, but then you're kind of carrying that cross. I also think it's interesting that you seem to have an ease in letting go.
BM: Yes and no. It's definitely shifted, yeah. I've had to, because a lot of the things came to me and I enjoyed them and I let them go immediately because of having the shop. So that's cool, I find this little Donald Duck painting or whatever it is and I can enjoy it for a little while, but I don't have to keep it. So there's a circulation that happens. And I wanna help my friends and other people with their stuff.
Relationships with stuff changes as one ages and changes if one has had a lot of stuff. And I think what's important for collectors is that collections should be living collections.
It shouldn't be the notebooks in the bankers box, at the bottom of the closet with the snow shoes on top and the sports gear. It should be an active thing. It should be on the bookcase somehow. It should be enjoyed. This is kind of what I wanted the future of the shop to be—this kind of laboratory of sharing and discussing and coming together.
JO: And so to wrap up, finally, what's your hope for the future?
GM: Humanity? For humanity?
JO: For you, for stuff, for humanity, whatever you want.
BM: I think the aim is this continued...reduction and distillation so that what I keep, we're not lining our coffins with this stuff.
I love things, and I want to collect things, and I want to keep on reducing and honing the collections, whether it's my art or found objects. I just want to keep on doing that. I would love to have another space. I don't necessarily want to have a business doing that. If I'm gonna make a living from this stuff, it's gonna be because I wanna work with people and make art together. Kickstarting people's inspiration.
I guess just being a little bit more discerning every step of the way. And finding one's identity, finding my identity through my collections. And because stuff is everywhere and there's so much of it—and so much of it is beautiful—it's a slippery slope and you could think that one individual can hold it all and keep it all, but then that's a burden.
I'm just going through every collection I have and I'm just reducing it to what I think is the cream, and I'm just going to keep on doing that. And it's a constant thing. Now what I think that means is that maybe I'm trying to do that to myself. I'm trying to find the gold that I have within myself and realize that I have to become a better person. And maybe I'm doing it through fucking postcards or found photos.
JO: Amazing. Do you want to add anything else?
BM: No. God. I could go on forever.
JO: Thanks so much.
Great stuff. Is it possible to see his art somewhere now?