There are two camps when it comes to the postering of utility poles: those who love it (and think it's a quirk of a vibrant community) and those who hate it (and attempt to legislate against it). Yet, for the latter crowd, it's still not difficult to find charm in this tiny painting tucked away in a downtown alley known as Alexander Place. It was posted mere steps from this anonymous notice—both examples of......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. By SpecterIN AN ALLEY BEHIND THE HORSESHOE TAVERNPHOTO BY SPECTER.......

Someone is blurring the line between art and industry on Merton Street just east of Yonge. That's where you'll find this fairly typical valve and meter assembly supplying natural gas to a local office building. But is that all it does? Closer inspection reveals a gallery-like description suspended from one of the pipes: Title: "Quo Vadis" Sculptor: Warga Baskerville Medium: Steel PipeIndustrial artifacts and designs can definitely have a beauty all their own, but......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. Artist Unknown.AT WILLISON PLACEPHOTO BY SOPWITH.......

Photo by MarkyBon. The CONTACT Photography Festival: it's back, and it's everywhere. Now in its twelfth year, CONTACT 2008 has over 675 artists at 220 venues from May 1–31, making it the largest photography festival in the world—an entirely believable statistic if the amount of CONTACT shows being touted on Facebook Events is any indicator. This year's theme is Between Memory and History, which explores the complex relationships between photography and the human experience,......

Showcasing reflections and refractions, shadows and sunrays, there's a party this Thursday to celebrate light and darkness in all of its forms. Windows to Mirrors is the release party for Blocks Recording Club's new, innovative DVD of shadow play and projection performance art. Last year, Final Fantasy himself headlined the projectionists expo, but this year, they're keeping it light with a couple djs and performances. Animal Monster and Data Stalker plan to keep partygoers......

The Drake was a buzz of activity and hors d'oeuvres last night—pretty much what you'd expect of the swanky venue, but this time they were celebrating with a good reason: talented Canadian and international artists! The inaugural presentation of the Grange Prize for Contemporary Photography was awarded to Winnipeg native Sarah Anne Johnson. The Grange Prize was launched in February of 2007, and last night a year's worth of work finally came to fruition.......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. Artist Unknown.ON THE TORONTO WESTERN HOSPITALPHOTO BY SOPWITH.......

Torontoist photographer John Beebe is exploring the city's most interesting laundromats, one by one by one. Tune back in every other week for another clean, dry, freshly-pressed edition. Nothing like a little pop art to make doing laundry less of a chore. Torontoist found graphic entertainment at the Laundry Lounge (527 Yonge Street) as we set out to document the character and characters of our city's laundromats. If you want to drop your dirty clothes......

On the West bank of the Lower Don River, just South of Queen Street at the Eastern Street bridge, a shrunken cruise ship sits beneath a behemoth buoy. Is it waiting to be rescued, or for you to come aboard and join the party? Who knows. Advertised via fancy insert in The Globe and Mail's Saturday edition a few weeks ago, the 25-foot-long cruise ship is an installation by Québécois art collective BGL and......

In May 2006, artist/curator Jessica Rose and dancer/choreographer Jenn Goodwin were both working for the city, organizing Toronto's first Nuit Blanche. The pair began going on runs around City Hall on their lunch break to blow off steam. Since then, Rose and Goodwin have organized runs around various art centres around the city as The Movement Movement: a community art project where marathon meets performance. On Monday, April 21 at 8:00 p.m., The Movement......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. By EYES and UBERON THE LEASIDE BRIDGEPHOTO BY POST.......

Is invisibility a type of discrimination? This is the question posed by the ROM's latest exhibit Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember. Billed, shockingly, as the "first of its kind in Canada," it's clear that disabled people as a minority group have not had their voice properly heard thus far. "Today, we're making history," said Sheldon Levy, president of Ryerson University, Wednesday at the ROM. Their School of Disability Studies is the......

Right now, as you're reading this—assuming you're reading this before 7 p.m. Friday—Whippersnapper Gallery (587A College Street) is open for the third edition of "Sleep is for Dead People." The event stretches twenty-fours, from Thursday to Friday evening, during which twenty artists all stay and create work at Whippersnapper, with the public invited in to watch the magic slowly and sleepily unfold. Among those present are Istoica, who will be taking photos throughout the......

Attention, stalkers of local multihyphenate Tyler Clark Burke: either you'll have to figure out how to be in two places at once this weekend, or you'll be flipping a coin. Heads: from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, TCB fetes her new exhibit, "A Murder of Vs," at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects (also known as a "gallery," located at 1086 Queen Street West). The artist promises "paintings and sculpture and prisms" (oh my!)......

The inimitable Torontonian cartoonist John Martz has recently completed the impressive exercise of drawing every face (more than 1000 in total) that appears in his mother’s 1968 high school yearbook. The final results are available for purchase on his website, and can be also be viewed on Flickr. John writes: “Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon......

Alternative education, anyone? This Thursday is the opening of the ROM's latest exhibit, Out From Under: Disability, History, and Things to Remember. A joint project with Ryerson University's School of Disability Studies, the thirteen-panel installation tracks the hidden history of disability in Canada. Each panel is given a one-word title, and a corresponding object that acknowledges the past contributions of Canadians with disabilities. Dressing contains sixteen identical sweatsuits, the typical uniform of the inmates......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. Artist Unknown.AT GRACE AND HARBORDPHOTO BY REK.......

For family fun, you can't beat the sheer adorableness of kids wise-cracking from an open mic. That'll be just one of the activities happening this weekend for kids in the latest edition of the always amazing Bunch Family Salon. Adam Growe, a headlining comedian and father of three, will be on hand to mentor the aspiring comics, in keeping with the annual event's goal of bringing major players from the local arts community—last year's special......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. By Teeth.AT SPADINA NEAR DUNDASPHOTO BY JOULGER.......

In the age of virtual everything, Don Taylor uses his hands to keep books alive that were written hundreds of years ago. Torontoist visited Taylor's studio on John Street, where he reinvigorates aging texts and creates stunning new bindings that are works of art in their own right.......

The sheer volume of free art film screenings in the city is enough to make even the most consummate buff's eyes glaze over, but this Thursday at DeLeon White Gallery, those same eyes might just pop out of their sockets. RATTLE A CAGE! part of "Salon Thursdays" at DWG, will present art films by artists—selections from those whose primary medium is not necessarily film. R. Bruce Elder, Angela Joose, renowned performance artist Istvan Kantor, and......

Find out what happens when musicians trade guitars for paint brushes this Friday, April 4 at the opening of Whippersnapper Gallery's latest exhibition Colour is the Keyboard. From 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. that night, visitors are invited to view artworks by Buck 65, Justin Peroff (Broken Social Scene), Will Zimmerman (Shout Out Out Out Out), Dallas Wehrle (Constantines), and over a dozen other rockstars in Whippersnapper's second floor studio (587A College Street). We're......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. Artist Unknown.IN AN ALLEYWAY OFF KENSINGTONPHOTO BY SOPWITH.......

If you're thinking about Space Invaders right now, you probably spent too much time in the arcades of the early 1980s. But according to homeowner Eugene Popov, the inspiration for this colourful garage door wasn't a youth spent feeding quarters into game consoles; it was a few years living in South Africa. He took the motif from the Ndebele people of northern South Africa, who are renowned for their distinctive traditional house painting with......

This Thursday, Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts unveils its third annual showcase of work by the graduating students of its New Media program. This year's STÆTIM New Media Festival, which features 35 projects that use computer technology to create “interactive and immersive experiences,” includes Jordy Lucier’s “Soft Corps,” which uses felt weapons to underline the entertainment industry’s role in distorting our attitudes towards real violence. Other interesting projects include Ross Lavery and Tyler Robb’s......

Meet Robert Mckinnon. Electrician by trade and artist by passion, Mckinnon has chosen a particularly unique medium for his pieces: Rubik's Cubes. Mckinnon starts with a pre-existing photo or image, blows it up in Photoshop and creates a heavily-pixelated image, then rearranges each individual cube to match them all to that image. Creating a Rubik's Cube mosaic is actually not as hard as it sounds, Mckinnon told Torontoist: all you need to be able......

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute. Artist Unknown.AT COLLEGE AND AUGUSTAPHOTO BY SOPWITH.......

No longer content to simply paint kitschy nature porn, Canadian artist Robert Bateman is tackling performance art. In a two-minute video for environmental group No Tankers, Bateman paints a black wash over Orca Procession to demonstrate the detrimental effect of oil spills. But Bateman was not defacing the original, he was defacing a reference copy valued at around $1,950. The Star reports: "Bateman afterward rushed into the shower with the print to wash the......

Fans of the French electro scene are having the best week ever. First, DJ duo Justice arrived in Toronto to play a sold-out concert at The Sound Academy on Monday, and now their friend/artistic collaborator So Me is opening an exhibition, Portraits, this Friday, March 21 at Studio Gallery (294 College Street, above the Savannah Room). So Me is Bertrand de Langeron, the man behind Justice's outstanding music videos for "D.A.N.C.E." and "DVNO. He......