Queen Street Art Galleries

Queen Street West is one of Toronto's trendiest art communities, thriving with a youthful contemporary art scene. On any casual walk through this gallery district, you're bound to find some interesting things to look at. A forewarning in advanced however, everything here is not exactly G-Rated. Just saying. Haha.

C1 Art Space is both a local art gallery and school actually located on Ossington Avenue very close to Jonathan+Olivia. Ossington actually has a number of interesting art spaces and vintage shops to check out. Anyways, C1 is a nice place to find mixed media art type things and such.

*new* gallery is an artist run gallery that offers a wide variety of contemporary visual art. It actually originated from Toronto's Distillery District.

This is the Ontario Crafts Council. They help to promote many of Ontario's finest craftspeople.

And this is Paul Petro Contemporary Art. The gallery just finished up a group exhibition entitled "Making Scenes." It explored the ideas of domesticity, the material world, and female consciousness.

StyleGarage. Your contemporary furniture stop.

This is one of the most important places on Queen Street, MoCCA. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

They have free admission for the rest of 2010, so definitely head on down there and check it out!

Below is Chippy's Fish & Chips, one of Toronto's best fish and chip stops, and right next to it is The Paper Place. Your best bet for finding unique Japanese papers. They have an exhibit going on right now entitled "six by eight" where a number of 6x8 artist designed cards can be seen on display. They have all sorts of things going on like origami displays along with various workshops on crafts such as screenprinting and letterpressing.

The Spice Trader & The Olive Pit, specializing in unique and organic spices.

And here we have the Candy Factory Lofts. This building is over a century old and used to be the factory of Ce De Candy Company which produces what in Canada we call Rockets and what they call Smarties in the U.S. It has now been converted into an interesting living space with "real hardwood strip flooring, some exposed brick, mezzanine bedrooms, exposed fir columns and beams, exposed wood ceilings, floating spiral ductwork and granite counters, just to name a few." All this not to mention an incredible location right in the thick of Toronto art galleries.

There are really many many more art spaces and interesting creative retail experiences to enjoy in this art and design district of Toronto.

If you're a contemporary art enthusiast, this is a lovely place to stop by and just take it all in.

leeahh

I had this post prepared a while ago, I was just too lazy to put the photos down here, sorry. Ok, here goes... So lately, I've had a growing appreciation and love for vintage photography. Call it a hipster fad, i couldn't care less. I absolutely love the dreamy photos lomos like the Holga or Diana can produce. I recently stumbled upon Leah's flikr account. She's someone I met on YouTube. Her photos are absolutely stunning.

BlommeART

Yessssss. Canadian art forthewin. Mr Brandon Jan Blommeart straight out of Calgary. I find his series of trash monsters AWEsomeNESS. His work extends from painting, drawing, sculpting, sound design and recently... short animations. Thank you 1867 for the incredible art finds from our home and native land.

(and P.S. I DID NOT rip this from Kanye's blog, I prepared this post well before he posted it. I ripped it of 1867 ...lol, which I linked to above, and Kanye probably ripped it off from there too. The 1867 Collective does an incredible job of covering every angle of Canadian art. So yeah, that's where you should go to check out awesome art BEFORE going to the Kanye blog.)

Ron English Exhibit

Ron English's masterful display of pop art is making its way to Milan this July.
















































I love Ron English's work. Remember when Bobby Hundreds did a post on this guy.

Kyle Webster For The Hundreds

Visited The Hundreds site today? Probably. So you've probably noticed the new home page waiting to greet you, unless you usually jump straight to Bobby's wordpress blog. A collaboration with Kyle Webster... This kid has an impressive background as a design illustrator with a stunning list of clients. The New York native has spent time in Pakistan, Singapore, Cyprus, and Taiwan. He's illustrated for 3 limited edition tees coming out in black and white, giving much due respect to some of The Hundreds' favourite music icons.

Morrissey

Bjork

The Pixies

Here's some recent illustrations he's made for the Washington Post... incredible stuff.

Nike's Beautiful Losers Exhibit

There was ten days of stitching, painting and constructing to put together this giant zipper display at the Nike 255 Elizabeth space. This Manhattan exhibit houses a flurry of colours, gargantuan props, and a little twist of brilliance that have all caught the attention of the many passerby-ers. All this brought to you by Eric Elms for the Aaron Rose and Beautiful Losers exhibit.