Results tagged “mercerunion”

Many of the world's greatest discoveries were made serendipitously. From Post-its and silly putty, to microwaves and penicillin, lots of good things happen by mistake. When Brian Joseph Davis, while browsing the web at the Blocks office, misread the name "Alvin Lucier" as "Alvin Lucifer," he asked his colleague Steve Kado how he might put to use his misinterpretation. And in the world of grant money and experimental everything, a tiny misread can mean a whole new method. So begat "Alvin Lucifer."

The organizers of Nuit Blanche held a launch event at OCAD this morning to announce this year’s curators—Wayne Baerwaldt, Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design; Dave Dyment, Director of Programming at Mercer Union, Toronto; Gordon Hatt, a writer and curator who lives in Kitchener; and Haema Sivanesan, Executive Director of Toronto’s South Asian Visual Arts Centre—and allow them to outline their individual visions for the event.

If you took a census of your musical instrument-playing friends, eight of them would probably be guitar players. Which is cool, but the laws of supply and demand mean that there just isn't going to be room in bands for all these guitarists. If, on the other hand, you decided to learn the theremin, you'd be pretty much guranteed to be the only kid on the block with that skill.

Anyone up for beating the shit out of a car on Wednesday night?

Last Thursday, June 21, art and drink enthusiasts united in the back room of Mercer Union (37 Lisgar Street) where artist Dean Baldwin was serving drinks from the teensiest bar in the city. The installation was called Minibar, which did double duty as a performance piece and beverage catering for the opening night of the gallery's exhibition, Seducing Down The Door.

There are three interesting happenings in the local art scene right now. This evening Mercer Union presents new compositions by Stephen Parkinson, a local musician who creates "do-it-yourself situations...with various friends as performers, reacting to a variety of methods of prescription/notation, involving toy instruments, electronics, vintage turntables, field recordings, as well as more traditional musical instruments." Tonight's various friends include Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, Eric Chenaux, Rob Clutton, Aimée Dawn Robinson, and Doug Tielli. The event begins at 9 p.m.

The good news: tonight, there are three great literary events happening in our fair city. The bad news: you’re going to have to choose.

Nicole Brossard is one of Canada’s most prolific and avant-garde writers, with more than thirty books to date and a dizzying list of awards to match. Her work is often sharply self-referential: saturated with the impossibility of a seamless translation and the problem of writing in a language already loaded with meaning, Brossard’s work is a meditation on how to write outside of a coded imaginary. While Brossard’s oeuvre has been associated with a postmodern aesthetic (in Mauve Desert, for example, references to the Beats work alongside a critique of the foundations of Western philosophy), her writing doesn’t render itself slick to the point of ineffectual.

Torontoist Poetry Contest Reminder! At the beginning of the new year, Torontoist launched a poetry contest to encourage the penning of new poems about our fair city. To inspire you, we are presenting a series of previously published Toronto poems that will run until the final week of the contest.

No time…Must get back down to Harbourfront…IFOA in full swing…Here are some other literary events taking place this week….

The last 10 days have been a great time to be a film nut, but now Christmas comes early for book nerds as over the next few weeks two of the biggest events of the year take place, starting with next Sunday’s Word on the Street, which will be followed by the start of the International Festival of Authors in mid-October.

If we've learnt one thing in the last few years is that Mercer Union, that artist run centre on Lisgar, knows how to throw a party. It's not the people, or the location, everyone knows that to throw a good party you need really really good gimmicks (wacky themes, activities, or lots of blow). [ed. note we don't actually use any blow and don't think you should either]

Last month Torontoist posted about Brian Joseph Davis' Yesterduh project. Tonight, Davis wraps up the project with a CD release party. He's layered 60 individual recordings (Boy Reporter is one of them) of the Lennon-McCartney classic "Yesterday", gathered over a month, into one giant polyphonic Beatles extravaganza. Samples are available here.

Mercer Union, a non-for-profit art gallery dedicated to the existence of contemporary art, is once again bringing you the good life; by providing a forum for the production and exhibition of Canadian and international "conceptually and aesthetically engaging art and related cultural practices". This is something that Torontoist can totally get behind. They pursue their primary objectives through activities that include exhibitions, lectures, screenings, performances, publications, events and special projects. This year, the Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art is proud to announce their third installment of Mercer Living - a bi-annual exhibition and fundraiser. This year's theme, Stellar Living, focuses on contemporary urban style, much like the style that we at Torontoist most naturally possess. (Or aim to at least). Stellar Living brings together the unique works of over fifty Canadian and international artists, like 3rd Uncle, Douglas Coupland, Shinobu Akimoto and loads other architects and designers who have created furniture, art and design items to be exhibited and then auctioned off at a gala fundraising event on May 10th in support of Mercer Union. The exhibition, which runs from April 28th to May 9th, (but closed Sundays) takes place at Givins/Shaw Public School, 180 Shaw St. For more details, visit Stellar Living.

For the last couple of weeks the Toronto-loving boys and girls at Spacing magazine have been blogging right here. They tipped us off on the Toronto Environmental Alliance's Show Lakeside, a group show at Gallery 1313 looking at Toronto's often ignored beaches.

The Wild West is arguably the most enduring myth in the American psyche. Through hundreds of novels, films and tv programs the violent, extremely bloody and often downright exploitative settlement of the American West has largely been replaced with images of stalwart settlers, and quick-handed, decisive men of action.