We are those people with the office-supply fetishes, but we're pretty sure we're in good company. Perhaps you are also among the ranks of people who could easily spend an afternoon at Staples fondling the pens and weighing the respective merits of different styles of wall calendars? The authors will readily admit to a certain fascination with office accoutrements, and as any good stationary fetishist knows, the Post-It note is in a category unto itself.

Thankfully our breed includes Montreal artist and Post-It note wizard Immoney Men. On a warm summer evening we headed down to 809, the Kensington garage-cum- indie-arts-space to check out his exhibition Taking Care of Business, an installation that taps into the Post-It Note's expressive potential. Gallery co-coordinator Tyler Los-Jones' willingness to serve up beer, loaded veggie dogs, and corn-on-the-cob while touring us around the small space signaled a welcome return to old-style artist-run hospitality. Make no mistake: this is the stuff that community is built on.

As the unassuming sticky note continues to spring up in increasingly unusual and comedic situations (cranky notes to messy roommates, elaborate pranks devised by bored office workers, art exhibitions, and home décor) - it continues to acquire value not only as a handy tool, but also as an object imbued with a growing collection of pop cultural references.

Taking Care of Business uses the Post-It and all these peculiar associations to delve into the world of office culture and to prompt a reconsideration of the "work" that goes on there. The installation uses custom printed stickies to create a mosaic that covers the walls of the garage with images of offices themselves. The offices depicted in the mosaics could be any office - filled with generic furniture and an implied aura of boredom, stale air, and wasted cubicle hours. Men worked at installing the piece over the course of a month-long stay in Calgary. The work of printing, arranging, and sticking up the notes became his job.

A methodical and arduous task, this grid of hundreds of carefully pixilated yellow stickies also points to the kinds of things we occupy ourselves with when the pressures of office life drive us to fabricate crazy coping techniques. These diversions might mimic the appearance of work, yet our moments of advanced procrastination can also start to seem pretty artful. Think Gary Burn's waydowntown, a film where the antics of a group of cooped-up office workers becomes highly performative. In the film, shot entirely in downtown Calgary, they attempt a competitive durational 'performance' of living in their office building until their other colleagues crap out in favour of fresh air.

Men's daily task of repetitive and mundane work completed while in residence at 809 bears a certain similarity to the way we might be tempted to imagine a cubicle-based office job. However, the reality of a solitary studio practice is not entirely unfamiliar to most artists, and the precise and repetitive action of applying the notes does hint at the fact that tedious work can sometimes be pleasurable. As anyone knows who has lost themselves in a seemingly boring task like stuffing envelopes or even knitting, there inevitably comes a moment where the body takes over and the mind is free to wander in an almost meditative state. Which leads us to wonder whether perhaps art-making and office-sitting are not as far apart as we think?

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