Here’s your one-stop-shop for the visual arts in the GTA and beyond! This week’s newsletter features exhibit listings from across Southern Ontario, and highlights from our newsletters.
But first, we want to learn more about you — tell us which visual media and exhibits you want to see more of on TORVA!
Jurassic World: The Exhibition | Mar 28—May 05 | TORONTO — Don’t miss Jurassic World: The Exhibition in Mississauga, an immersive experience bringing you face-to-face with life-size dinosaurs. Walk through the Jurassic World iconic gates and prepare to be left in awe as the ground-breaking movie franchise is brought to life.
All About Shoes: Footwear Through the Ages | Mar 28—May 23 | TORONTO — Take a fascinating journey and experience the many facets of footwear – its evolution and symbolism through the ages – the methods and materials of its manufacture ~ its place in our lives and imaginations. This semi-permanent exhibition also features a look at the development of fashion footwear by the decade. Finishing off the display is a celebrity shoe area highlighting some of the world's most celebrated.
Jason Lujan: Utopian Aesthetic | Feb 16—May 19 | BARRIE — Utopian Aesthetic addresses the process by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication. Sidestepping identity to focus on transnational experiences and aesthetics, the work relates the ways in which culture is exported and diffused into nations. The possibilities and limitations of the exchanging of ideas, meanings and values is centered while questioning concepts of authenticity and authorship. Lujan draws attention to transitive zones where processes of the unfamiliar become familiar, and the familiar becomes destabilized beyond expectation.
DECADE: 10 Years of Creation at Youngplace | Feb 22—May 12 | TORONTO — In a building designed by architect C. H. Bishop, the Shaw Street Public School opened in 1914 and was closed by the Toronto District School Board in 2000. To acknowledge and celebrate the role the building and its tenants have played within the cultural ecology of Toronto over these past 10 years, Koffler Arts is excited to present DECADE, a group exhibition by eight contemporary artists currently or recently working in the building.
Bloom | Mar 09—Apr 27 | TORONTO — The exhibition explores nature and it’s cycles of rebirth and renewal through a female lens. Celebrating it’s beauty, strength, and resilience. Going beyond the beatific, the exhibition takes inspiration from the splendor and diversity of forms found in nature, pervasiveness of natural world, and it’s relationship to the body.
Jennie Jieun Lee: Strawberry Nose | Mar 22—May 04 | TORONTO — The actions around the creation of the works in this exhibition is centered around the concept of the ready-made, a term first coined over 100 years ago by the artist Marcel Duchamp. His most notable work, a facsimile of a urinal aptly titled Fountain, was made from porcelain using a slip-cast mold and marked a defining conceptual moment in the cannon of art history.
Prelude | Feb 2—Jun 1 | OAKVILLE — Tarik Kiswanson—the winner of the 2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize—produces sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are central themes in his practice.
Bertram Brooker: When We Awake! | Feb 10—Jun 2 | KLEINBURG — Bertram Brooker: When We Awake! examines the career of Bertram Brooker (1888–1955), the first Canadian artist to exhibit abstract paintings, in 1927. Curated by Michael Parke-Taylor, the exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Brooker’s oeuvre in almost half a century, gathering his diverse work in painting, drawing, and sculpture and highlighting his activities as one of the country’s leading art critics and journalists.
42nd Annual Juried Art Show | Feb 3—May 14 | BOWMANVILLE — For over 45 years, the VAC has produced a variety of locally engaged exhibitions and public programmes that offer the community members an opportunity to learn and create through contemporary art. The Juried Art Exhibition returns this winter, bringing together a collection of artwork from a growing circle of creators from across the Durham Region and Greater Toronto Area.
Check out some highlights from our Visual Arts Newsletters, and subscribe for free!
At the base of a stairway cut from a stone wall in the village of Cully, Switzerland, is a glass enclosure resembling a large mid-century pill, balanced on a thin steel plinth. Inside, at the time of writing, is a diptych of symmetrical ears in acrylic under glass. In the right ear (our left) is a butterfly at rest beside the canal's entrance, with wings like inverted auricles. Third Ear by Sarah Margnetti is 16 x 24 cm, but because of its miniature setting in the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (KMD) at The Forestay Museum of Art, it imposes itself on any passerby who stoops to view it. —Read more
As a beloved folk artist, Maud Lewis’s story is both charming and enigmatic in the same way that her art, though deceptively simple, can prompt the sort of deep and complex engagement often reserved for more overtly ‘challenging’ works. Lewis’s paintings are immediately inviting, cute even, with their fields of flat bright colour and expressive animals. These aesthetic choices, partly influenced by the artist’s arthritis, often hold a profundity that’s easy to dismiss. —Read more
As an art form, hairstyling weaves between a visual and performing art─insofar as a bit of performance is needed on the customer’s part in those instances when they’re less than happy with the final product. Jessika Guy — owner and hairstylist at The Green Hair Spa in Stratford — aims to achieve a harmonious outcome through the same dialogues other artists use for collaborative projects. While her client’s hair is the not-so-blank canvas on which she expresses her artistry, she sees them more so as co-creatives of a shared vision. —Read more
As a media artist and experimental filmmaker, Colby Richardson has forged a path that defies conventional categorization. Embracing the ubiquity of everyday devices, he imbues them with unexpected purposes and transforms them into artistic instruments. From harnessing the native functions of iPhones in capturing video to unleashing the transformative power of Microsoft PowerPoint, Richardson breathes new life into familiar tools, revealing their hidden artistic potential. —Read more
Walking home from work on a summer day in 2019, I noticed a group of people gathering around a clothing shop. To my surprise, they weren’t looking at the window display but at the ground. Once I pushed through the crowd, I saw what everyone was gawking at — a bright blue geometric painting of a diamond. It was unexpected, charming, and brought strangers together to experience something beautiful. That’s exactly what Claire Scott, the artist behind the piece, aims to do; using art to give people of all backgrounds memorable and immersive experiences. —Read more
On either side of my work desk as I write this, hangs a print from a unique series by Hong Kong artist Norris Yim: Nameless No.1 and Nameless No.19. The Nameless series is essentially a vast collection of faceless portraits, and while that might sound like a contradiction, these paintings invite the viewer to unpeel their ambiguous brushstrokes. Long before N95 masks became the ubiquitous uniform of the pandemic-era, Yim has been exploring the figurative masks that we don in order to navigate the social and political spaces we occupy. What is remarkable about these portraits is how completely married the mask and the face behind it appears to be, and yet, the real face remains enticingly concealed and recognizable. Yim joins Cannopy Magazine to discuss on a series that is pivotal to his artistry and reflects the turmoil of his city’s political sphere. —Read more
Check out this highlight from our Performing Arts Newsletters, and subscribe for free!
Initially, the prospects of an art magazine that catered both to the visual and performing arts seemed dim, but there are artists whose output regularly reminded me of why cultivating a more omnivorous appetite in the arts is important. Kalya is certainly one of them. Her illustrations of a few of the jazz artists we’ve interviewed for our Ellington series (including Samara Joy) carry an extra specialty as they’re the few instances where an artist is engaging her expertise across two very different art forms. Last month, she released a single with guitarist André Valério, and flutist Rob Christian, titled “Hold Me Close”. Following last year’s “Algo Contigo”, it’s the second such collaborative fusions between Kalya’s retro-jazzthetic and Valério’s bossa nova and samba-infused compositions. —Read more
Check out this highlight from our Alternative Arts Newsletters, and subscribe for free!
In his latest studio recording, titled Revelator, we find Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent in the middle of a scene that’s unprecedented in the entirety of his discography:
I stand in the yard and watch the evening come down
And I shuffle the cards when all the idiots come around
These two lines are found halfway through the title song of Revelator, and describe a pointedly domestic scenery. It’s the kind you might not bat an eye at driving through any one of Nashville’s homely neighbourhoods, where Houck now lives with his family. For an artist whose lyrical universe has invented such fantastical imagery as “quotidian beasts,” wolves that “blaze with light,” mermaid parades, terrors in canyons, bones made of steam, cauterised veins and so on─simply standing flat-footed in a yard, waiting for sunset, is a new frontier of sorts for the Phosphorescent project. —Read more