Pablo Picasso had his so-called blue period. Ottawa artist Stefan Thompson is exploring a green period. Thompson first made a name for himself on the streets of the capital as a graffiti artist. Working under the pseudonym Maki, Thompson populated nooks and alleys throughout the city’s downtown with a menagerie of dazzlingly rendered and brilliantly […] More »

As you walk through Peter von Tiesenhausen’s land, artwork emerges as if summoned from the ground up. Ships and nests made of willow branches appear along well-worn paths. Statues carved from logs stand watch from between the trees. In Tiesenhausen’s studio, small canvases that resemble the cracked earth of recent droughts are propped across the […] More »

When you drive into Marfa, Texas, from El Paso the first thing you come across is a tiny Prada store. No one works there and no one shops there—it’s a sculpture, built in situ by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Marfa, current population 2,121, became an unlikely modern art destination when the famous minimalist Donald […] More »

The winners of the 2010 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were announced today in Montreal. The winners receive $25,000 to support their work and recognize their contributions to Canadian visual art. From the press release: Haida sculptor Robert Davidson, filmmaker André Forcier, painter Rita Letendre, video artist Tom Sherman, photographer Gabor Szilasi and painter Claude Tousignant won the awards […] More »

Everyone can think of something that would make their community, large or small, a better place to live: a crumbling building transformed into a rec centre, activities for the elderly, public art, or an urban garden. The Aviva Insurance Community Fund is going to make some of those ideas a reality next year. The $500,000 fund […] More »

Generally if I find myself awake at four in the morning, the best thing on TV is Vince Shlomi pitching the SlapChop or Billy Mays yelling at me from beyond the grave.  But this morning, I caught an unapologetic and often uncomfortably unflinching documentary on what day-to-day life in a wheelchair is like. More »

What does “free” look like? This was the prompt sent out to a group of local Toronto artists around two months ago. The results, which were hung along the fourth-floor hallway of the Case Goods Warehouse in the Distillery District last weekend, elegantly captured a word that is part economic reality, part political manifesto, and […] More »

Toronto-based NGO Africa’s Children—Africa’s Future, which runs programs and advocates for HIV/AIDS orphans and other children in sub-Saharan Africa, has an interesting photography exhibit on right now as part of the annual Contact festival. AC-AF provided cameras to African kids, aged 12-18, and asked them to document the world around them, particularly the consequences of […] More »

<img src=”http://i40.tinypic.com/345bi8p.jpg” alt=”solargraph” title=”solargraph” style=”float:centre” As an aspiring photographer, I understand the difficulties of taking long exposure shots with my digital slr. I’ll spend a lifetime setting up the shot until it’s just right, and then, inevitably, I’ll knock the camera just before I’m finished, rendering the whole image blurry and effectively ruining the shot. […] More »

A Dutch design firm has released a new computer font, Ecofont, that they say uses less ink, and can therefore reduce the e-waste that results from depleted toner cartridges. It’s a regular-looking font except that it’s riddled with holes, and the firm, Spranq, claims this reduces toner use by up to 20 per cent. Their […] More »

A reflective morning trip to work through uncannily warm sunlight for a would-be bleak January day was followed by the happy realization that one of my favourite journals, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, out of Los Angelas CA (which was out of commission for so long that I nearly lost hope and gave up […] More »