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BAAB [Business is Art/Art is Business]
Because it mounts up the outside of north wall of the Art Condos building, right beside the building’s loading dock, it may not be much noticed by Art Condos owners or their neighbours.…
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Communicating by Oscar Figueroa
One of the highlights of Oscar Figueroa’s exhibition Air Plane—now installed in the Art Condos Loading Dock—is this work titled Communicating.
It seems simple enough. A desk lamp, fitted with a red bulb, is positioned on the floor, near the …
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Green Desk Inabstracto
Following the success of their sleek, blue, compact 001 desk—perfectly scaled for condo use– Toronto’s Projector Design has now released a second desk, the handsome green 002 desk, designed by Chris Stevenson and Matt Conacher.
The desk’s high-gloss sides are …
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ART CONDOS Loading Dock Exhibition
This is artist Oscar Figueroa. He is just graduating from OCADU (The Ontario College of Art and Design University).
He is a bit out of focus–because that’s how artists are sometimes.
Figueroa will soon be in greatly improved focus, however, …
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Art We Love: Lynne Cohen
Montreal-based mega-photographer, Lynne Cohen, has built an international reputation making large-scale photographs of the frightening–though sometimes beautiful and inexplicably moving–emptiness and absences of the contemporary urban environment. Here, in this recent work, her cunning use of mirroring compounds the aridity… -
The Little Bed That Could.
Given this expedient age’s tendency to throw everything away and buy new, we think it’s refreshing that TEB Interiors–whose principal, Terry Edward Briceland designed the Art Condos model suites–took on the refurbishing of this elderly settee. Seeing the object as …
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Design We Love – Venice Chairs
These exquisite, custom-made, classical Venice chairs from Industrial Storm somehow manage to epitomize both modernist severity and economy of line with with a luxurious sense of timeless, old-world comfort. The chairs come in two models (one slightly larger than the …
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ART WE LOVE: HWEON 1 by CHUNG-IM KIM
Hovering somewhere between painting, drawing and sculpture—and between pure visual art and design—Chung-Im Kim’s wall-mounted, hand-stitched felt plaque (which has been silkscreened), is a crisply vibrant work that seems simultaneously static and yet full of spinning, torque-like movement.
It sells …
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Art We Love: Julie Jenkinson – 36 Hours in Uruguay
Designer Julie Jenkinson runs the micro-shop called Verso, tucked into the rear of Inabstracto on Queen StreetWest. Last year she spent three months in South America, thirty-six hours of which were spent in Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay.It… -
ART Condos Goes Green For St. Patrick’s Day!
Art Condos–which was designed from the beginning to be a Green building–has now turned temporarily even greener, to serve as a St. Patrick’s Day greeting to all of our Irish friends and to the honorary Irish everywhere– which surely includes …
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ART WE LOVE: Two Door Mats by Gerald Ferguson
Halifax-based conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson (1937-2009) always did everything he could to avoid making beautiful paintings—but ended by making them anyhow, almost against his will. One of his ploys was to distance himself as much as possible from the actual …
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Art We Love: Shayne Dark “Bough Laden with Fluorescent Orange”
During the last couple of years, Sculptor Shayne Dark–who lives in the country near Sydenham, Ontario and who maintains a large studio in Kingston, Ontario—has become one of Canada’s most prolific and successful makers of public sculpture. Up until recently,… -
Design We Love – Trinity Bed from StyleGarage
Whatever else you bring to your condo, you need a bed–and here’s a great one: the Trinity Bed from StyleGarage.…The Trinity Bed features a stainless or hot-rolled steel frame with a slatted headboard of solid wood, available in your -
Design we love – Verso Contemporary Pendant Lamps.
As gorgeous as Industrial Storm’s hanging lights are, they are admittedly quite expensive. For those who don’t want to put quite so much into a lamp, there is this sleek alternative–at designer Julie Jenkinson’s Verso. These contemporary grey, steel, pendant …
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Art We Love – Steve Driscoll’s “CEDAR FALLS”
This prodigious, unreasonably beautiful painting is titled Cedar Falls. It’s huge (9 ‘; x 10), and glistens like a wet forest with the pigmented urethane with which it is painted.
The painting is by a young,Toronto-based painter named Steve Driscoll. …
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Aphorism of the Week – Sweater is a Hug…
We spotted this cozy legend in the bus shelter at Ossington and Queen: A Sweater is a Hug You Wear All Day. So, in a way, is the perfect condo.Okay, it’s a sentimental idea, we admit it–but that doesn’t… -
ARTCONDOS: ART WE LOVE JOY by Kai Chan.
We dropped into the nearby David Kaye Gallery the other day to see new work by the celebrated Chinese-Canadian artist Kai Chan. Chan, who was born in China in 1940 and has lived in Toronto since 1966, is the recipient …
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Around the Neighbourhood.
A baroque refuse container outside the Gladstone Hotel
A Queen Street Greeting
Cabbages and Kings
The Art of Street Life
Last Roses of Summer…
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Design We Love – Industrial Storm
These exquisitely designed and crafted hanging lamps from Sterling and Son, New York–and available at Toronto’s Industrial Storm–feature glass canopies and metal liners. The lamps come in three sizes, with diameters of 18 inches, 23.25 inches and 31 inches. …
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Art We Love – Thrush Holmes
The lyrically named Thrush Holmes (yes, it’s his real name!) is not what you’d call a repressed painter. This gigantic work–about as big as a Still Life painting ever gets–is 84″ x 180,” and is emblazoned with the artist’s trademark …
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Art We Love -Verso’s Battered First Aid Boxes
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Art we love: Roland Brener’s Swinger
Among the many remarkable works in the current summer exhibition at the Olga Korper Gallery is a piece by the late Roland Brener (1942-2006) called Swinger. Swinger began in 1999, as a hand-built, laminated plywood figure of a standard-issue businessman …
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Design we love: Lotte lamps at INabstracto
We dropped in to INabstracto a few days ago to chat with owner Kate Eisen, and it was only when we were leaving that we noticed the delicious still-life she had made from grouping five Lotte lamps together on a …
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Design we love: Julie Jenkinson of Verso
Designer Julie Jenkinson has just opened her own small and charming design shop at the rear of Kate Eisen’s INabstracto. The place is wittily called Verso (as in “what is on the other side of the page?”). We spoke …
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Design we love: Kate Eisen of INabstracto
Kate Eisen’s store, INabstracto: Mid Century Modern Furniture & Design, is as much a design museum and gallery as it is a retail outlet for historically significant design objects. We talked to her a few days ago about what INabstracto …
