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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The National Gallery of Canada very kindly invited me to Ottawa – expenses paid – to see the current exhibition, which is called ‘Builders’, and is the second Canadian Biennale. (Did you know there was a Canadian Biennale?) According to curator Jonathan Shaughnessy, the show’s title is inspired by the idea of artists as not only players in the game,
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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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I visited the annual exhibition of five finalists in Canada’s $50,000 Sobey Art Prize today, which is about to open at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Oct 24th and will continue to December 30th. (A launch party will be held on October 27 from 8-10pm.) As always, one artist has been shortlisted from each of Canada’s regions: West Coast/Yukon; Prairies and
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I was awed by beautiful San Francisco last weekend, when we went for Thanksgiving. What a city! We went to the SF MoMA, where we saw the Cindy Sherman retrospective that we missed in New York. A great show by one of my favourite artists, but it was almost eclipsed by the amazing architecture by Swiss architect Mario Botta. An
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Micheal Laverty writes about his soon-to-be-published satirical first novel, about a “21st century troupe of court jesters – a collective of artists dubbed Apollo’s Army.” Micheal Laverty graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor and completed the School for Writers program at Humber College. His writing has appeared in various journals including The Fiddlehead and
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It’s been seven years since Toronto’s first Nuit Blanche. I’ve been to five of them and this year will be my sixth. Overall, we can probably agree, they’ve been pretty great. The experience of being out all night – despite the often dodgy weather – seeing Torontonians absorbing visual art en masse is fantastic. Toronto City Hall, during a previous
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Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...