Uninhabited Spaces

On this cloudy and blustery day, with the wind blowing us around, we decided to do start our afternoon with brunch at Cafe Bernate and then do a crawl of the gallery district centred around Ossington and Queen Street West. We began with seeing Transformation , a show of works by first-generation OCADU students. Next was Angell Gallery , always a must-see venue for its engaging works. We hit another three galleries on Queen Street West before heading to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) for a truly facinating exhibit called Necropolis . According to MOCCA, Necropolis is an "immersive multi-media meditation on the nature of video and its strong affiliations with death culture". Visitors have to walk up inclines and down declines inside a totally blackened hallway that winds through the museum space. Lit only by each piece in the exhibit the viewer is confronted by a mixture of sensory deprivation, sounds, and television and video screens. Tired of the wi...

Daniel Lanois at The Great Hall. Image Copyright Stacy Kelly, 2012 Mark and I just returned from seeing iconic producer and songwriter Daniel Lanois live in the basement at The Great Hall. Lanois was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame on Thursday and he planned to follow that honour up with two concerts in Toronto. Tonight's was the first and all I heard as we left the building was "That was awesome!" repeated over and over again. Awesome indeed. I took this picture of Lanois with Brian Blade , surely one of the finest drummers on the planet.  Brian laid down some incredible grooves that left the audience in head-shaking-foot-stomping rapture. I have never been so close to such lengendary performers, so I was in a state of shock for a portion of the evening. Most people know Daniel Lanois as the justly celebrated producer of  artists such as U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris and others, but he has also crafted a catalogue of his...

The office building that houses my office appears to be in the epicentre of location filming for various TV shows. Since I arrived in October at least three productions have been filmed along the streets outside and behind my building, and interior shots taken in neighbouring buildings.  This morning an announcement was posted on our front door informing us that a Showcase program called " King " will be filming this Wednesday and Thursday. In the Fall the popular Bravo show " Suits " and the CTV show " The Listener " were also filming right here in the neighbourhood. Fun!

From: MastersInIt.org

This past week was easily the busiest for us since moving to Toronto. We had all sorts of events back-to-back in what was a very packed set of adventures. Our first activity was attending a Queen's Alumni event on Wednesday evening at the swanky National Club on Bay Street, featuring guest speaker Peter Milliken talking about his experience as the Speaker of the House of Commons. It was a very nice event and, being a political junkie, fun to hear about the ins-and-outs of life on Parliament Hill. Thursday night found us at an art exhibit opening of Rose Hirano at the Wellington Street Art Gallery . Ms. Hirano was a thoroughly engaging speaker as she talked about her process and inspiration for the incredible reduction woodblock prints she was exhibiting.  It was a treat to be able to learn from such a gifted artist. Her works have always spoken to both of us and we admire her multi-inking process, in which she prints from light to dark values using a single piece of wood. ...