Results tagged “canadianart”

WORDS: Pore over print of all genres at the twentieth annual The Word On The Street festival. In addition to the marketplace of books and magazines, this national celebration of literacy and the written word will feature tents and stages of readings, spoken-word performances, poetry slams, cooking demonstrations, publishing seminars, financial advice, musical performances, and children’s activities. Margaret Atwood will be in attendance to read from her latest novel, The Year of the Flood. To throw out a few more names, Elizabeth May, Dionne Brand, Camilla Gibb, Nino Ricci, and Jane Urquhart will also be participating in readings and panel discussions. Queen’s Park (780 University Avenue), Sunday 11 a.m.–6 p.m., FREE.

Most of the bronze plaques bolted to the city's historically designated sites and monuments commemorate some virtually forgotten piece of minor Toronto history—but take a stroll along Queen Street West and some familiar round medallions might particularly pique your interest. The strange plaques were part of the grand Gestures installation by the 640 480 Video Collective, which aimed to memorialize inconsequential events captured on video at ten spots around the city. Each marker was...

series from The Movement Movement. The main movers of The Movement Movement, dancer/choreographer Jenn Goodwin and artist/curator Jessica Rose, are inviting the public to run laps of the museum for public art’s sake. You could be running through Ancient Peru or perhaps Heaven or Hell. Sounds exotic! The upcoming run will be extra special as filmmaker Nick de Pencier will work with Lewis Kaye (soundster) and Dean Baldwin (photographer) to capture the run on film. The art of running through art will create art.

Overheard on the eastbound Queen streetcar at Shaw St. A young couple is talking loudly about how worldly they are when the car stops in front of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Without a doubt, this week we’d be letting cheapskate cinephiles down by failing to mention the CNISSU’s Free Friday Film of the week, which isn’t just one but three, starting at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) with the remarkably hard-to-see The Monster Squad, followed by Toronto classic The Brood, and finished off with the excellent blaxploitation nonsense The Human Tornado, starring, of course, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore). Check out the trailer, which is pretty much NSFW –- he uses an earthquake to make his milkshake!

Hardly a small victory, half of the fourteen artists featured in this weekend’s Reel Artists Film Festival are women. And of these, the five solo artists highlighted in the festival’s documentaries demonstrate distinct feminist elements in their work.

This weekend is the Canadian Art Foundation’s 11th Annual Canadian Art Gallery Hop Toronto. This weekend is also Artscape’s 4th Annual Queen West Art Crawl. Two big art events this weekend? Holy Jesus! What to do?

Artists Jenn Goodwin and Jessica Rose are known around town as the artists behind the Movement Movement, a series of art performances that involve running around art venues like the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, or the Theatre Centre and even non-art venues like City Hall.

Torontoist doesn't get excited that often about art writing, oh, who are we kidding Torontoist squeals like a schoolgirl over good art writing. So we're pretty happy to see that Canadian Art's spring issue is launching tonight and more importantly has a few articles that piqued our interest.

With the temperature inching just above freezing this weekend Torontoist might just have to bring out our bike. We miss riding it around town, dodging cabbies, avoiding horse crap (if you're Matt B.) and just feeling the cold Toronto air in our freezing faces. Ah, bike-riding in Winter.

The Toronto International Art Fair is just plain weird. People pay $16 to look at art in a dimly lit basement in the bowels of the Metro Convention Centre. Everybody looks a bit sallow, and time seems to stand still as you troll through the endless booths of $10,000 masterpieces. At 5 pm each day, Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes gives a short talk and introduces an artist and his work, and, having missed both Alain Paiement's amazing overhead photographs and Allyson Mitchell's fuzzy wonders, we arrived on the day Mr. Rhodes was presenting John Dickson's Smoking City, a cardboard rendering of a North American metropolis, made up of buildings from cities all over the continent. Periodically, this jerrymandered metropolis would fill up with smoke, and the cardboard constructions would take on a new and frightening appearance. At the very least, we discovered that 9-11 art is not our thing. And that drinks in the convention centre are too expensive.

Love it or hate it, LOLA, the 'free' visual arts mag that went belly up a couple of years back, was a boon for Toronto's visual arts scene. It got people talking, writing and going to see art. And unlike other publications (ahem, Canadian Art) didn't have to deal with institutional history, a national/international mandate, or pander to senior artists/board members/advertisers/etc. LOLA could stay local, stay fresh and stay true to its readership of local artists and art lovers.

To give a sense of the kind of craziness that Paiement's brilliant work induces, we'll share with you the wonkiest bit of artspeak ever, used to describe the artist himself by Toronto Life's own Betty Ann Jordan:

Patient as the spider, Paiement captures life’s multifarious arrangements and stubborn quiddity.