This year’s CONTACT photography festival kicked off with a bang at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto. I was pleasantly surprised by this year’s show, Collected Shadows: Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC). An arrangement of images on the deep purple wall at MOCCA: Image: VoCA I had never heard of the AMC, even though it is Toronto
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This is part two of my blog post about Grow Op, the exhibition on this weekend at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. Artists and designers have created installations – one in each room – on the second floor of the hotel, in the same way as they do for the well-known alternative design show, Come Up To My Room. I always discover
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I stopped by the Gladstone Hotel‘s latest design exhibition last night. Curated by landscape architect Victoria Taylor, it’s the inaugural year of Grow Op, a landscape-based exhibition of experimental works that seek to ‘uncover new ways of expression and meaning through projects that represent a wide range of approaches from the prosaic to the poetic, the elemental to the ephemeral.’
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I’ve been freelancing in design circles again – here’s a piece I did for the Toronto Star’s Luxury Homes supplement. It’s on the new luxury lower-rise condos that are popping up around established downtown Toronto neighbourhoods. This kind of luxury means fewer neighbours, bigger units often overlooking a park, and convenient access to amenities. I focused on three: ABACUS, ORIGAMI
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The Kingston Prize is back! The national biannual prize for portrait painting, which I wrote about back in 2011 HERE, is again accepting submissions from artists. Michael Bayne, Kingston Ontario, Orange Grandma, oil on wood panel, 15 x 10 cm. Winner of The Kingston Prize 2011. Image: kingstonprize.ca The $20,000 prize is awarded to a painting of a specific Canadian
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If you don’t often walk along Queen Street from Bathurst to Gladstone, you would be surprised by the amount of new development in the area. Over the last few years, small brick single or two-storey buildings have given way to larger, glass-fronted retailers anchoring mid-rise condominiums. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. Image: terminartors.com Among the community, there has
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I stopped buy the Gladstone Hotel this afternoon to preview the works in this year’s tenth anniversary of Come Up To My Room, Toronto’s ‘Alternative Design Show’. It’s celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and it’s always been a nicely condensed little show in which designers pair up to collaborate on room-sized installation on the hotel’s first floor. Andrew Ashbury
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For anyone who missed it, here are a few photos from the inaugural exhibition at Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre. Titled Archival Dialogues, the exhibition brought together eight Canadian artists who were asked to make work in ‘dialogue’ with a chosen perspective on the famous Black Star Collection of about 292,000 photojournalistic prints from the 20th century, which was donated to
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I was reading an interesting essay had been recommended to me by Toronto artist Iris Haussler: The Way of the Shovel, by Dieter Roelstraete. In it, he discusses the fact that many artists are engaged in a “retrospective, historiographic mode—a methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the
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This past weekend, at the invitation of artistic director Ilene Sova I visited Walnut Studios, a grey, graffiti covered building just off lower Niagara Street in Toronto. The studios are divided up into about 50 artists spaces, where painters, mixed media artists, street artists, jewellery makers and even fashion designers hone their craft. Artistic Director Ilene Sova. All images: VoCA
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Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...