Results tagged “art”

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

For the past eight years, the Ontario College of Art and Design has been asking potential art buyers to put pretense aside and trust their gut in support of the school. “Whodunit?,” OCAD’s signature annual fundraiser, is a mystery art sale in which the name of the artist remains a secret until after you purchase the piece. It’s a refreshing concept in a creative marketplace so often dogged by an atmosphere of manufactured buzz and the dreaded art star.

There’s something about the quiet landscapes that line the walls of the Stephen Bulger Gallery that’s oddly disquieting. It’s easy to tell that they show vistas far from here—the vegetation and the topography carry those subtle but clear cues of an unfamiliar place—but it’s not that. The lighting seems suspended between an artificial dusk and the bleakest of mid-days, but that’s also not what’s out of place. It’s because there’s something intentionally absent from Canadian photographer Bertrand Carrière’s series “Lieux Mêmes.” They are photographs of something that is no longer there. The subject left the scene ninety years ago.

Egypt’s famed boy-king is gearing up to set off another bout of "Tut-mania" in Toronto.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

When Matt Greenwood saw this video on YouTube last year, he didn't just gawk in a rude fashion (as we did). Inspired by people's responses when confronted by a camera sans photographer, Matt sought to expand on an idea previously touched on only by self-timers. And when he happened to come across a disposable camera, idea met material and art was born.

In the two rooms of Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond Street West, you can see planes take off from Chicago’s O’Hare and Tokyo’s International Airport at the same time. The gallery’s current exhibition, entitled "Google Earth"—running from October 23 to November 28—features a handful of the millions of images captured by the aerial photography internet program.

Well, look who's offering candy to babies now. Stephen Harper ditches the friendly blue sweater in favour of something a little spookier in this politically themed Halloween montage in Little India. On Woodfield Road, the resident artist's lawn arrangement is placed perfectly for tonight's festivities—the city will be closing down a portion of the road tonight from 6–9 p.m., where a fire eater will be taking the place of cars. And while the performer is busy chomping on flames and captivating the eyes of kids, well, here's hoping the politicians don't pop out and try to eat the children.

              

This car embedded through a house on Leona Drive marks the starting point of an inspired art installation exhibition: "The Leona Drive Project," a landmark coalescence of more than twenty Canadian artists alongside students and developers, which opened on October 22 and closes tonight.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

After street artist (and Torontoist contributor) Posterchild finished philosopher flâneur Mark Kingwell's recent book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, the Vandalist curator and street art advocate noticed that Kingwell's celebration of concrete and the cities built out of it missed one reverie in particular: graffiti.

For some, the works are underwhelming and too few and far between, yet for others, it's one of the few times when Toronto steps outside its dreary box—and that's reason enough to celebrate. You may think it makes modern art accessible to the masses, but perhaps you feel that the installations could be better. Cast a vote, and then head over to last year's poll to see how it compares.

Now that we have all recovered from our Nuits, it's time to step back and take stock. When we do we find, much like we did in previous years, that Nuit Blanche is still at the stage of working better as an idea than it does in execution.

For the duration of Nuit Blanche, Torontoist hosted Blanche Slate, a concurrent projection onto the south-facing wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario and a liveblog updated right here, below. For the whole entire night, we continually threw Nuit Blanche updates—photos and text, from both our contributors and our readers—to the wall, and into this article.

    

We just got sent these photos by the Dupont and Spadina Corner Collective, of the group's early-morning romp through the Annex, which saw them paint over and add flying birds to seventeen illegal billboards in the area—a "Flock Off," as they're calling it.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Whatever you think of Nuit Blanche, in Toronto there's really no other nuit like it. The "free all-night contemporary art thing," this year happening from sunset on Saturday, October 3 to sunrise on Sunday, October 4, has earned its fair share of ambivalence over its previous three years—not because the idea itself is not a fantastic one, and not because the event itself isn't intermittently enthralling and exciting and cool, but because people are naturally critical of something that we all deservedly hold to very high standards. If you're willing to brave a disappointment or two, a lot of walking, and (this year) a bit of rain, though, Nuit Blanche remains one of the best ways to experience a different side of Toronto.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Artist Unknown

       

The Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the ROM recently unveiled newly constructed walls in the Roloff Beny Gallery on the fourth floor of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Nine brand new, soaring walls vary in height and angle to create a series of forms. Together, they produce a dialogue with the existing architecture and aim to enhance experiential variety for the visitor. The newly configured gallery space will launch on September 26 with the exhibition Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

By Ryan North and Unknown Artist

For the greater part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of those artists whose work was rejected for exhibition in the prestigious Paris Salon displayed them in the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition that would eventually become at least as famous and as well-respected as the Salon itself. For the second year in a row, Toronto's Nuit Blanche will have its own version: some of those artists either unable to or uninterested in having their work appear under the official banner of the city's largest arts night but who still want to exhibit their work that night anyway will have their pieces collected into "Les Rues des Refusés." Literally translated as "streets of rejects," "Refusés" is an alternate program of rogue exhibits, running alongside Nuit Blanche on the night of October 3 but totally unaffiliated with it.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

When you step into the Museum of Inuit Art, which is hidden at the back of the Queen's Quay Terminal on the Harbourfront, you'll probably recognize the first picture you see. This is the "Enchanted Owl." According to the museum's curator, Ingo Hessel, it is "a true icon...probably the most famous image in Inuit art if not Canadian art."

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.