Results tagged “ocad”

ART: Art lovers will be wondering "who art thou?" at the annual Whodunit? Mystery Art Sale, featuring artwork donated by OCAD students, faculty, alumni, and established artists. Hundreds of pieces will be available for sale, all the same size (5½" x 7½") and the same price (seventy-five dollars). The catch is that the names of artists are withheld from buyers until after the piece is purchased, adding an element of mystery and surprise. The public preview starts today in person and online and runs through Friday evening, leading up to what promises to be a day of frantic buying at Saturday's sale. (Torontoist will also have more from Whodunit? later this week.) Following today's preview opening, OCAD is hosting the Gala Preview tonight. The gala will feature a silent auction of small-scale mystery art and a live auction of full-scale work from a group of local artists, many of them OCAD alumni and medal winners. While previewing works available in the public sale, guests will also enjoy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at tonight's event. Get prepared for some holiday shopping this weekend (even if it's for yourself) while knowing that you are supporting OCAD, with proceeds from this year’s sale going towards the purchase of specialized equipment for emerging artists. Ontario College of Art and Design (100 McCaul Street), public preview 12–6 p.m., FREE; preview gala 6:30–10 p.m., $150 (available online).

ART: There's something truly compelling about art that successfully blends text with imagery. Words hold such powerful connotations for all of us and are capable of adding layers of narrative to a work with a mere jumble or string, a curiously chosen sentence or phrase. And words carry an aesthetic of their own—whether scrawled, typed, or doodled, and depending on their colour, size, or font face. In "Text-Based," ten artists share their unique perspectives on language in art, bringing text into the creative process and rendering it integral to the overall message of their pieces. Each artist featured in the exhibit (including those who comprise the ArtEXCHANGE project) reveals a different relationship with words and text—covering a vast spectrum: poetics, narrative, symbolism, revolution, spelling, grammar, and more. Brayham Contemporary Art (1318 Queen Street East), 7 p.m., FREE.

Aha! we thought, when news of the TTC's long-anticipated project to put art on our beloved Metropasses landed in our inbox: they get it! By issuing a public call for submissions of interest, the TTC was demonstrating not only a sensitivity to the small aesthetic details that can brighten our day, but giving Torontonians the opportunity to actively engage with the transit system on which they are most often merely passive riders. Maybe, we even dared think, Valentine Makhouleen's nifty designs might actually be put to use.

The Ontario College of Art and Design’s two gallery spaces are intelligent by simple virtue of their physical locations. One, the OCAD Student Gallery, is located at street level in a store-front on Dundas Street West. This takes student work, typically contained within the walls of the university, out, around the corner, and right to the public. The OCAD Professional Gallery is the inverse. Housed on the second floor of the school, it brings the work of established artists into academia, and also invites the public into this realm with programming that seeks to engage a broad audience.

Despite all that Toronto has to offer, it is not a perfect city. Operating under the assumption that Toronto is “unfinished and full of possibility,” consulting firm OpenCity Projects uses bold design in order to create more meaningful experiences for people in the city. Its most recent endeavour, fittingly titled “Icebreakers,” tackles the communication gap between people who live in, work in, and visit Toronto.

The Ontario College of Art & Design’s tag line confidently declares, “Imagination is Everything.” This may even be true. Within the university’s walls, it may be the most important thing to have in great supply. On the outside, not only is it not everything, it’s simply not enough. At school, the goal is to make art. When the end goal shifts to making a living by making art, the process and the path become significantly more complex.

The TTC's newfound propensity for remodelling isn't limited to just their stations, shelters, routes, and vehicles: the transit organization is now in the midst of exploring how to open up the Metropass to local artists and arts institutions in time for the summer.

OCAD keeps pumping out interesting art contests. Back in March, the school ran its nifty bike stand design competition, and just last week, it announced the winners of its collaborative industrial design competition with 3M Canada. For the latter, third-year Industrial Design students were asked to create new Scotch tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispensers.

Looking for cheap gallery space? Try Second Life. On Monday, the Ontario College of Art and Design celebrated the second anniversary of its Second Life campus in the interactive web world created by its members that you can explore using the avatar you create in your image (or what you wish was your image). The interactive space is the virtual home to their Hybrid Media Lab and allows students in the Integrated Media Program to collaborate with other artists virtually.

Back in March we posted about a bike stand design competition open to OCAD students, and this afternoon Mayor David Miller appeared at the college to announce the winners. The first-place prize was awarded to second-year Industrial Design student Justin Rosete and second-year Drawing & Painting student Erica Mach for their simple yet dramatic design consisting of wood and metal. Not only did they score $6,000, but their design will be built at 226 Queen Street West as part of plans to revitalize the property.

Faye Mullen led us into the smaller of the two rooms that together make up minnow & bass gallery, a self-described "migratory" art space she opened on March 20 on the southern fringe of Kensington Market, at the eastern corner of the intersection of Dundas Street and Augusta Avenue.

       

We’d only been at Gallery 1313 for a minute or two when a warbling voice cut across the din of the crowd.

You know, for all the talk of the wonderful and awful things that Toronto has planned and is planning for its future, it's easy to forget that far too often one group's ideas are neglected from that dialogue altogether, shamefully excluded or pushed to the margins of any discussion, dismissed as idealistic, puerile, or childish. That group? Kids. Really awesome kids.

          

It seems strange to hook up your lean green biking machine to the pollution pumper itself, but a new kind of gas pump in Toronto might be greening up the urban landscape.

WINE: Prepare to enjoy fine wine, food, and persistent denial of the coming world economic collapse and food shortage as the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo opens today. Strap on your BlackBerry, put on your suit, and get drunk the luxurious way—by drinking tiny glasses of expensive wine as you pretend to be interested in a random brochure on stainless steel grape skin processing in Southern France. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building (222 Bremner Boulevard), tonight from 2–10 p.m., Saturday from 12–10 p.m., Sunday from 12–6 p.m., $15.

Shove over, Bosh. There's a new game in town, and its million-dollar players, though rather shorter of limb, are limber enough when raising those little numbered cards (with much bigger numbers behind them, of course). Lately, though, wealthy, aging boomers are feeling a bit busted, and it's not just the old rheumatoid arthritis; the r-word, now murmured around the world, is said to be stiffening bidding joints in the til-now uber-competitive scene of—did you guess?—international art auctions.

THEATRE: Puppeteer troupe The Old Trout Puppet Workshop will be presenting their project Famous Puppet Death Scenes at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. The Dora-nominated production explores what happens when extremely well-crafted puppets get annihilated. The show runs until October 16. Young Centre for the Performing Arts (55 Mill Street, Building 49), 8 p.m., $20-$30

MUSIC: Tonight's No Shame music showcase is over at the Silver Dollar Room, and will serve as a Pop Montréal preview for those lucky enough to attend the festival this weekend (and presumably as some sort of compensation for those who are not). Toronto favourite the Rural Alberta Advantage will be playing, along with the similarly indie pop groups Hooded Fang and Mt. Royal. The Silver Dollar Room (486 Spadina Avenue), 9 p.m., $7.

WORDS: “This Is Not A Reading Series For Tots,” a new monthly literary program for children that we told you about a few weeks ago, is launching today at the Gladstone Hotel. Kids aged two to eight will get to meet the authors of childrens’ books and participate in art activities, sing-a-longs, and puppet shows. Speaking today is Matt Hammill, who will be giving a PowerPoint presentation about his new book, Sir Reginald’s Logbook. Kids will then get to do some art projects with author/artist Irene Luxbacher, who will guide the kids through some of the lessons in her Starting Art Series for children. Hosting the event is playwright/novelist Claudia Dey. Gladstone Hotel Ballroom (1214 Queen Street West), 8:30 a.m., FREE.

FESTIVAL: The Manifesto Festival of Music and Art is returning for its second year. The festival runs until Sunday and will feature art exhibitions, a street dance competition, a market devoted to the wares of young entrepreneurs, and musical performances from Rascalz and k-os. Tonight's event is a music showcase at The Mod Club featuring performances by Torontoist fave Shad, and Hey Ocean (722 College Street, 8 p.m., $12). Tomorrow, check out a special edition of Hip Hop Karaoke at Revival (783 College Street, 9:30 p.m., $5–$10) and the Manifesto Film Festival which is happening at the ROM (100 Queens Park), 7 p.m., $10.

As orientation weeks get ready to overwhelm Toronto's many post-secondary institutions, there is one question more important than the hemming and hawing over academics, new friends, and leaving home: who will have the best Frosh Week concert?

Summer is a time to get intimate with the gritty streets of our little borough, and this is exactly what industrial design students from OCAD have set out to do in their exhibit TORONTO UNBOUND. Together with the design school and the City of Toronto, OpenCity Projects has put together a creative lab to come up with design ideas for Toronto's neighbourhoods, to help foster communication between the members of that specific community and to make those spaces more accessible for other city dwellers.

And it's Birdcage Vs. HPSCHD—two original compositions from that great American musical inventor and electronic musician John Cage. Both pieces feature classic Cage components like chance-controlled melody and rhythm, and environmental sounds. But who will come out on top? A one-hour piece featuring tapes from aviaries, oral fragments of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and ambient street noise, where a computer randomly selects which sound will be played? Or, a three-hour bombastic show of musical intensity, featuring seven amplified harpsichords playing computer-generated versions of Mozart, among other composers, mixed in with the sounds of 51 trumpets' off-key blasts, overlaid with images and colours from slides of space borrowed from NASA.

Remember when the town crier would stand on Yonge Street and shout his hear-say and hear-ye, passing out copies of the daily news for a penny a pop? Yeah, us neither. The fast-spreading news of today is a far cry from days of old (take us for example), and we'll bet you didn't see what was coming next. But tomorrow at the corner of Queen and John, you just might.

Last Thursday, we wrote about OCAD's awkward new name—OCAD University—and asked readers to come up with some alternatives. The school, a university since 2006, wants to ditch its college reputation without, well, ditching the "C" in its acronym that stands for "College."

In what might not be the wisest move, OCAD—the Ontario College of Art and Design—wants to be called OCAD University. Yes: Ontario College of Art and Design University. Sort of.

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.

Since January 2006, quirky black-and-white brushstroke illustrations have graced the back page of the The New York Times Magazine. The work is that of Toronto-based designer and OCAD teacher Bob Hambly, who just completed his 500th illustration—a bus—for the prestigious Sunday newspaper supplement.

Each week, Torontoist shows off the most interesting, creative, and cool submissions to our Torontoist Flickr Pool. We're especially partial to photos that show our city in a new light, highlight a recent event, and remind us why we live here. Join the Flickr pool and show us what you've got.

At the Interior Design Show this past weekend, British innovator-icon Tom Dixon lamented the impossibility of creative rebellion in today's art and design world. In the eighties, he said, postmodern design values were near-universal, and thus easy to subvert. In the oughties, however, the aesthetic is increasingly fractured, and there is no one standard to either strive for or strain against. If anything goes and nothing is new, how are today's students to design anything truly radical?