Category: Art
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Science and art: creating new immersive environments
What happens when art meets technology? Meet two companies using their specialties in photography and virtual reality to bring viewers inside the works of Damien Hirst and Zaha Hadid.
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Dezeen and Instagram team up for @design
In a world where influencers rule the day on social media. Two of the biggest influencers in architecture and design have joined forces to outsource the content. They recently did a call for contributors to be one of the founding members to be featured during Milan Design Week. One of the caveats, you actually have to…
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Branding gone wrong
Some competitions make sense. But when they don’t, boy does the community have an opinion about it. The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts; the Toronto Centre for the Arts; and the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, currently called Civic Theatres Toronto have opened up a “national public naming competition” − with a “great prize…
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Design Canada
Canada’s heritage of graphic design. Through the lens of graphic design, Design Canada follows the transformation of a nation from a colonial outpost to a vibrant and multicultural society.
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Sacred Spaces by Meredith Jay
Meredith Jay is a multidisciplinary artist who received a BFA in studio art from Concordia University. Located in Toronto, she makes sculptural installations that merge the digital and physical, as well as, sound, drawing, video and film. Through ritual and devotion Jay invokes and questions human behaviour and the collective memory.
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The Secret to a Bigger Life
I’m a little late to the game when it comes to podcasts. But I have found several channels that I just can’t get enough of. And one of them is Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations. This one was an interview she did with Brian Grazer who has produced some of the most famous movies such as A…
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Derek Jenkins: E6 Process
Derek Jenkins is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, ON. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary, with an interest in labour and the domestic. In his current exhibition the E6 Process, he showcases the invisible labour beneath moving images. It is a work about work: the unseen beneath the seen, the heard beneath the unheard. It is subterranean.
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Innovation Exchange at EDIT
Last September, I was part of a team that produced George Brown College’s exhibition at Canada’s first design biennial EDIT (Education, Design, Innovation, and Technology). The installation was made up of several parts: a video, a timeline, a VR experience.
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Tomb Raider Remake
I am a huge fan of the original Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie. What I don’t like about this recent revamp with Alicia Vikander is that they are starting the story before Lara Croft becomes the heroin we all have come to love.
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Designer Maker User
From objects to services to systems, everything in this world has been designed. Design is a process carried out by people, for people. At its heart is a dialogue between three key people: the designer, the maker, and the user. Currently, on show at London’s Design Museum, Designer Maker User invites the visitor to explore design…
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Make New History: Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017 – Vertical City
Vertical City brings together 15 architects to revisit the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower Competition that attracted 263 entries from the United States and around the world. Each entry included a rendered perspective from the same vantage point; these were later published as a report alongside a touring exhibition of drawings that stopped at various educational…
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The National Museum of African American History and Culture
If there is one new museum to see, it’s this one. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is by far the most impressive piece of architecture and culture in North America because it is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.
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Fragments
Currently on show at the Gladstone Hotel is Ryerson University’s third-year Image Arts photography students have come together in a collaborative effort to present Fragments, a visual dialogue which centers on human experience.
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Now and Then: Myseum Intersections
Last night I trekked across the city to see the opening of “Now and Then” a video-art exhibition developed by the RT Collective in collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), Myseum of Toronto and the Gladstone Hotel.
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Guggenheim: Art, Design and Architecture
Several months ago, I finally got to experience the Guggenheim in New York City. It was definitely on my bucket lists of architectural structures. After studying its architecture and interior design in school and seeing this epic building in person, all the small details and stories about came rushing back to me. What really surprised…
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On Partial View by Laura Owen
On my recent trip to New York, I visited the newly designed Whitney Museum. Not really knowing how the collections were organized, I went to the top and decided to work my way down. There was a family in the elevator with me and they also had the same plan. I told them, I was…
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Dior Darling!
As the dust settles from the Oscars, it makes me think about the strong emphasis we put on fashion. Back in January, I was invited to take a small class of U of T students through the Christian Dior exhibition currently on show at the ROM.
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Made in Canada – Shape of Water
“There are so many issues with the plot”, a friend says to me after she watches Shape of Water. I don’t have the same reaction. And after it winning Best Picture, Direction and Production Design, she may have to reconsider her comment. I really liked the dark-comedy/thriller/fantasy aspect of the movie. What I didn’t know when…
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Can I get a Witness?
Through large-format photographs, and over the course of several decades, Edward Burtynsky has chronicled the massive impact of manufacturing on the environment. Since the early 1980s, he has been documenting sites in Ontario, across Canada and internationally. Most recently, he has focused on global oil fields as well as the dramatic impact increasing demands for…
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There’s no one refugee experience
Located on the second floor of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Abedar Kamgari gathers an intimate crowd to give us a behind the scenes tour of her exhibition Journey West. We learn that this specific space is set up so a connection between the AGH’s collection and contemporary artists can emerge.
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Kapwani Kiwanga – A wall is just a wall
As we go about our daily lives, we encounter spaces designed to shape and regulate our behaviour. In A wall is just a wall, Kapwani Kiwanga exposes the mechanisms of these underlying structures through wall paint inspired by colour theory and targeted fluorescent lighting.
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Maria Hupfield – The One Who Keeps On Giving
Objects contain meanings beyond their materiality, meanings that we bring to them or receive from them. Objects are the result of an action, entail traces of human gestures and evoke reactions or memories. They have the potential to be read collectively or personally. Maria Hupfield’s artistic practice reveals the way objects can trigger relationships between…
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Latifa Echakhch – Cross Fade
In Echakhch’s process-based works, audiences are presented with the traces of an action. For instance, in Stoning (2010), the artist took bricks from a crumbling building – not a heritage site – and chiseled them into stones, recalling a method of punishment or execution. The tragedy that has befallen this place appears to have passed,…
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Johnathas de Andrade – On Fishes, Horses and Man
A fish dying in the arms of a man is what first strikes us upon entering Jonathas de Andrade’s exhibition. The film O peixe (The Fish) depicts in ten vignettes fishermen cradling their catch, the two species merged in a morbid embrace of sinew and scale. The scenes in the film, simultaneously brutal and tender, confront the…
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Animal Farm – Art imitating Life – The Trump Presidency
I’ve finished my first book of the new year…Animal Farm by George Orwell. The novel is a political satire that looks at the events leading up to the Russian Revolution and into the Salinist era. Despite the book being written nearly 70 years ago, I find some parallels to what is currently happening in the…
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2 Rooms Revisited
2 ROOMS REVISITED – an exhibition of artworks created by OCAD University faculty and graduate students from the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program during their stay at 2 Rooms Artist Residency in Duntara, Newfoundland. Artists: Catherine Beaudette, Claire Brunet, Susan Campbell, Vanessa Jackson, Rae Johnson, Colette Laliberté, Annette Mangaard, Diane Pugen, Katrina…
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Abstract: The Art of Design
Meet eight of the most creative thinkers and imaginative minds working in the world of art and design today in the new Netflix original documentary series, Abstract: The Art of Design.
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Come Up To My Room, part 2
THE LONG, TEDIOUS TASK OF WATING – Amanda Gresik Many people have experienced what it is like to go into a hospital waiting room, either for themselves or to accompany a friend or family member. While trying to pass the time by flipping through magazines and filling out forms, it is hard to not feel…
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Come Up To My Room 2017, part 1
Come Up To My Room, is a main event during the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. Located in the Gladstone Hotel, on the Queen West West strip of Toronto, this is the alternative event to the much popular Interior Design Show. Taking up the second and third floor of the hotel, artists transform the rooms into…
Richelle Sibolboro 