Results tagged “art”

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.

We can’t seem to get enough of looking at people, and famous faces are a whole other matter. Whether it’s subconsciously analyzing bone structure to gauge attractiveness, or searching for the unspoken in an subtle expression, we are captivated by images of each other, with celebrities the ultimate draw. The ROM is banking on this in their new exhibition, “Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008.” Showcasing 150 photos from the magazine’s archives, it celebrates the act of looking at people, and of looking like you’re famous. The show is half of a joint venture with the AGO, who are presenting the work of Edward Steichen during the fifteen years that he was the principal photographer at Vanity Fair. Steichen forms the link between the two shows, with his work appearing in both.

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

Steps away from the patio grazers at the Drake Hotel's café, John Kilduff chased down the late summer sun on his vintage treadmill. Dressed in a rumpled, paint-splashed suit, and dogged by a general air of exhaustion, Kilduff brought his Let’s Paint TV show to the sidewalk of Queen Street West.

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.

It’s typically the role of craft and design to bridge the divide between fine art and commodity, creativity and marketing. As part of their summer residency at YYZ in 401 Richmond, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins (collectively known as Marmco) decided to transform part of the gallery into a retail mall. “MASSIVE SALE: YYZ MALL” deconstructs any stigma around artists hocking their wares, as Marmco invited four artists to set up shop in response to the question: if they could open a store or small business, what would they dream of doing? The result is a rather intense experience, with four distinct retail spaces in tight quarters, that disallows any hope of passive viewing.

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

Zombies, beware! Shannon Larratt doesn’t take kindly to the roaming undead in these here parts. After seeing a similar paint job on the internet, Larratt, a long time zombie aficionado, decided to send Toronto’s zombies a message. "I was inspired by a girl in Pittsburgh that did up her car in a similar fashion," Larratt told Torontoist. "As soon as I saw her car, I knew I'd eventually do it—even though it took me a few months to get around to it."

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.

James Redekop loves to cycle. Between 2004 and 2009, he estimates that he's cycled for six hundred and fifty hours and covered more than eight thousand kilometres. Using the GPS data from these rides, Redekop created the Etch A Sketch–style animation above (the red lines represent five minutes of his cycling and the red arrows indicate rides outside of Toronto). But turning his riding into a cool animation wasn't always his intention.

After a building boom altered the Toronto skyline over the course of the late 1920s, construction ground to a standstill during the Great Depression. Annual spending on construction, which had peaked at $51.5 million in 1928, dropped to a mere $4.5 million in 1933. The few projects that weren't cancelled or disrupted were initiated mostly by banks and insurance companies seeking symbolic structures that emphasized institutional stability through turbulent times and faith in an economic turnaround.

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."