The best of Art Toronto
Art toronto
Oct. 27 to 30, Metro Toronto Convention Centre With hundreds of artists’ work on display, Art Toronto— a sprawling, weekend-long cornucopia of creativity—can be a little overwhelming. Here, a guide to five shows you won’t want to miss.
Bunker 2 ContemporAry Art ContAiner
Galleries are often white, featureless spaces that draw attention to the art, not the wall it hangs on. Bunker 2 gallery, on the other hand, is an attraction in itself: it’s housed entirely within a repurposed shipping container. The team behind the gallery is setting up shop at Art Toronto, where they’ll showcase daily performances and projections that critique the financial side of the art world.
FLoAt muSeum
American video artists Kate Parsons and Ben Vance are on a mission to find and commission the world’s most mind-blowing VR art. At Art Toronto, they’ll show off some of their discoveries in the Float Museum, where attendees can don headsets and step into otherworldly realms filled with alien plant life and undulating orbs of colour.
And the Sky iS Grey
The fair’s centrepiece is a group show that depicts the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. Through photography, painting, sculpture and other media, 10 L.A. artists depict the grit, scandal and general weirdness of the City of Angels. Show curator Santi Vernetti is also tapping a number of Californian artists to build a sculpture garden lounge and art bar in the middle of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Steve driSCoLL rAymond BoiSjoLy
The Haida-Québécois artist earned a spot on the shortlist for this year’s prestigious Aimia AGO Photography Prize with his impressively versatile body of work. He assembles probing word-and-picture projects about Canada’s colonial past, creates warped portraits of pop icons like D’Angelo and Buffy Sainte-Marie, and fashions Indigenous symbols out of aweinspiring images of the cosmos. Last spring, Toronto artist Steve Driscoll pumped 7,500 litres of water into Dupont’s Angell Gallery, turning the space into a slice of Algonquin Park, complete with a 13-metre boardwalk and his massive nature paintings. Even without the mini-lake, Driscoll’s styrene panels—filled with trees and aurora borealis rendered in psychedelic hues—are worth a look.