July 1st falls on a Friday AND the weather forecast is looking good! I hope you have a chance to enjoy the day, however you choose to celebrate it. Happy Canada Day weekend! UPDATE – I uploaded this last night. This morning (July 1) I woke up to the sound of rain. Oh dear. Lesson learned, check your facts first! Maybe it’s just a good excuse to sleep in or have an extra cup of coffee while you laze around in your jammies!
Nuit Rose,
a festival of queer art and performance
On Saturday night events were held at a number of venues that were concentrated in two locations, along Queen St. West and in the Church-Wellesley village area. I hung out around two parks in the village, Norman Jewison Park which runs east of Yonge and Barbara Hall Park on Church street. In hindsight, I wish I had had more time, or had been more organized, to get to more of the events.
Red Pepper Spectacle Arts led a Light Parade that started at Norman Jewison park. A small contingent, most wearing or carrying a light-emitting object, walked through the park, along and then back down Church Street. From the – sparklers, glow sticks
to the more elaborate
below: and an eagle on stilts
below: Note to self: for night time parades take more photos at the start of the parade because once people start moving it’s more difficult to get them in focus!
below: Where else would you be able to sit on a unicorn and get your picture taken?
below: And after a unicorn pose, have your photo taken standing with a well-lit couple.
below: 360 degrees by Iain Downie, 360 stars, 60 in each of the six Pride colours in the garden.
below: Dance performance, ‘By Chance’ by Janessa Pudwell and Tanya Svazas Cronin.
We pass by hundreds of people on a daily basis who we may never see again. Sometimes we share a glance that lasts a bit longer. This piece is about the relationships that could be created if we acted on those glances. These are the fleeting chances, exchanged through our eyes that will never be fully realized. Instead these people may only appear once in our lives as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
#nuitrose | #nuitroseTO | #nuitrosetoronto
The 10th annual Luminato festival is being held inside the old Hearn Generating Station in the Portlands. There are many theatrical, musical and visual events and the location itself is worthy of many, many photos. Rather than try to cover everything in one blog post, I’ve chosen to focus on mirrors and reflections to begin with. First, there is the giant ‘disco ball’ that keeps light circulating around the massive interior of the Hearn and second, an installation by Jordan Soderberg Mills features three interesting and entertaining mirrors.
‘One Thousand Speculations’ is the name of the giant ball that is suspended from the ceiling. At 7.9m in diameter, it is the world’s largest mirror ball. It is the creation of Canadian artist Michel de Broin and was commissioned for the 2013 Luminato festival where it hung from a crane over David Pecaut Square. One thousand mirrors reflect the light from a spotlight on the floor and as the ball slowly turns, the lights move around the ceiling, walls, and floor of the Hearn.
below: As seen from the ground floor level.
below: Close up. The top level is quite close to the ball.
below: Someone, somewhere, has a picture of his friend ‘holding up’ the giant ball!
below: And the reverse angle, from the top looking down.
Lots of irregular shapes of light moving around the space.
The Luminato website describes the mirrors involved in the installation by Jordan Soderberg-Mills as “anaglyphic mirrors that play with physics, perception and colour”. Now you’re probably wondering what anaglyphic means. It’s a word that comes from the science of 3D pictures. There is no concise definition! It is a picture that consists of two slightly different perspectives of the same subject in contrasting colours that are superimposed on each other, producing a three-dimensional effect when viewed through two correspondingly coloured filters. Phew. In practice, it makes for a mirror that is fun to play with…. and people did play!
below: As seen from the upper level, three vertical mirrors and four circular mirrors.
The 6th Annual Yorkville Exotic Car Show was on Bloor Street yesterday, Fathers Day. There were 11 different groups, or corrals, of cars…. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, BMW, Aston Martin, Maserati, and many other car makers were represented. There was lots of sun and lots of people!
below: A line of Lamborghinis parked on Bloor Street.
The cars were behind ropes and the spectators had a red carpet to walk on.
below: A cute little 1959 BMW Isetta 300.
There are no side doors; the front of the car swings open with the steering wheel attached.
below: A black BMW i8 electric car with its front scissor doors open.
below: Porsche, with German plates
below: Mercedes GTS
below: Chevrolet Belair convertible, with matching fuzzy dice
below: A Porsche from the 1960’s with its engine in the back.
Not much trunk room in this car!
below: Another Porsche, a 1961 Roadster
below: Pink and pink. Standing in front of a pink Bousoughini from BGarage Ltd.
below: Morgan in two shades of blue, from the front.
below: Same Morgan, but from the back.
below: Shelby, from the 1960’s
below: Tuscan Speed Six by TVR (British)
below: Pininfarina is an Italian car design company.
below: Photos of reflections in the front of a Rolls Royce.
It seems I’m not the only one who takes reflection shots.
Yesterday the Portuguese community in Toronto held their 29th annual Portugal Day parade. It was a lively, happy occasion. Hundreds of people lined Dundas Street West between Lansdowne and Trinity Bellwoods Park to watch the parade. They showed their Portuguese colours with flags, banners, hats, soccer shirts, and lots of red clothes! Young soccer players demonstrated their skills. People of all ages wore traditional dress from different parts of Portugal as they walked and danced along the parade route. There was music too – bagpipes, marching bands, and music to dance to.
As you all know, the TTC is replacing their older streetcars with new longer Bombardier streetcars. Or at least they are trying to 🙂 Because they are longer, they don’t fit into existing “garages”, hence the new Leslie Barns facility. Located on Leslie St., south of Queen, it is the new streetcar “home”. It is where streetcars are parked, maintained and repaired. It has been in operation since Nov 2015 but the first chance the public got to peak inside the finished complex was at Doors Open on the 28th of May.
below: While waiting for a streetcar at the corner of Queen and Broadview on the way to visit the Leslie Barns, I saw this renovated TTC streetcar from the 1950’s.
below: The streetcar tour involved riding a new streetcar through a maintenance bay in the building and then around the parking lot out back.
below: Exterior, parking space for at least 100 streetcars
below: Special bays have been constructed with space for workers to access both the underneath and the top of the streetcars. Because the cars have been designed to ride low, a lot of their workings such as the HVAC and propulsion systems are built into the roof of the car.
below: It’s a big space! …. 17,510 square metres (188,500 sq ft) in fact.
below: A spic and span shiny paint room
below: A myriad of colour coded pipes
below: There were renovated vintage streetcars on display. On the left is a 1921 Peter Witt streetcar and next to it is a PCC streetcar from the early 1950’s.
below: Interior of a refurbished Peter Witt streetcar with its wood trim. The Witt cars were built for the newly formed TTC in 1921. They entered service on Broadview in October of that year. By 1923 they were operating on seven routes. The last Witt streetcar was retired in 1963.
below: Looking out the window of a PCC streetcar built in 1951. PCC stands for Presidents’ Conference Committee, which was a group of operators from the USA and Canada who got together in 1938 to design a new electric railway car. By the late 1950s, the TTC owned the largest fleet of PCC’s in the world. The last one was retired in 1995.
below: Streetcar wire maintenance truck.
#DOT16 | #TTC
Sharing Dance
Organized by the National Ballet School,
the 3rd annual Sharing Dance event was held at Yonge Dundas Square.
A chance to laugh a little and learn a few moves.
#sharingdance
This is another post about an exhibit from the CONTACT Photography Festival. I know that it’s now June and CONTACT was in May, but I wanted to post these photos. I actually took them early in May as you can probably tell by how many clothes the people in the pictures are wearing. They’re certainly not dressed for the warmer weather we’ve been having lately. I have had trouble deciding what to write in this post.
There is a parking lot at the NE corner of Front and Spadina with some billboards in it. Maybe you saw them as you drove or walked past but maybe you passed by and missed them. There are so many things on the street vying for our attention and a billboard is just another piece of street ‘furniture’.
For the month of May, an installation titled ‘What it Means to be Beautiful’ by Mickalene Thomas occupied a number of billboard spaces at the above mentioned corner. All the images are portraits of women and are “shown within the context of street advertising, where women are constantly bombarded with narrow notions of female beauty.” A sample of the billboards:
Part of the reason that I hesitated to write this post was the fact that the iphone 6 ad campaign was on at the same time. It was a campaign that used photos taken with the phone and the ads were very visual and used very few words. In my opinion, they are more eye catching and visually appealing than Thomas’s work. I found a few of them to show here (below). I know that there were many more but unless I was consciously looking for ads, I didn’t notice them as billboards are one of the things that I block out as I walk. That led to a few thoughts about what catches a viewer’s attention on the street – Faces? Colours? Contrast?
There is more going on in Thomas’s photos and collages than just visual appeal but I still question the validity of asking the viewer to look at them in the context of street advertising. Is it fair to compare her images to ads produced by, and in aid of, a large corporation? Would it have been better to exhibit her work in different form or a different place? I don’t have the answers for those questions. Do you?
And now I will go back to ignoring billboards as I walk.
‘Cutlines’, an exhibit of old photographs from the Globe & Mail,
part of the CONTACT Photography Festival
below: A small sample of the 175 vintage black and white photos from the vast collection held by the Globe and Mail newspaper on display.
below: The exhibit is being held at the Press Hall on Wellington Street (near Spadina). This old building is slated for demolition in the near future as the Globe and Mail is in the midst of moving to a new home. Prints were in cabinets in the center of the room while other images were projected high on the walls.
The Globe & Mail has amassed a collection of about 750,000 photographs. As they transition from print to digital images, they are ‘cleaning house’ with respect to their photo archives. About 100,000 of the prints are going to be digitized and a portion of those donated to the new Canadian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
below: Some of the pictures were covered with red, with what is known as a rubylith mask. When the images were printed, the portions covered in red remained as they were while the rest of the picture could be changed to suit the needs of the story of the day.
below: The woman with the two trophies, bottom left, is Marilyn Bell who swam across Lake Ontario. I know that the man beside her is from a story about a cowboy championship of some sort in Calgary and my apologies for not remembering more of the details.
On view at 425 Wellington St. West until 26 June 2016
#CONTACT16
Canstruction is a non-profit competition where teams create sculptures of canned and packaged food that is then donated to food banks. The event is held in many cities around the world including Toronto. Since its inception in 1992, Canstruction has contributed more than 17.5 million pounds of food to food programs globally.
Planning for the 17th annual Toronto Canstruction began in January. The “build night” where the teams come together to build the sculptures was held on the 16th of May at the Toronto Dominion Centre. The sculptures are now in the many lobbies of the TD Centre buildings and they will remain on view until the 21st of May. At that time they will be “decanstructed”.
A sample of this year’s entries:
below: A winning emoji, ‘EmojiCAN’ built by GM BluePlan Engineering Ltd. Emojis, the little symbols popularized by social media, understood by everyone no matter what language they speak.
below: ‘Let’s End Hunger by All Measures’ by Walsh Canada. “Food Banks Canada estimates that in 2015 852,137 Canadians turned to food banks each month for food. The need for food banks spiked in 2009 and has hovered at record levels ever since.”
below: A lovebot made of cans by Cecconi Simone Ltd.
below: A close up of part of ‘Hungerbling’ by Hatch. It features Drake and comes with lyrics.
You used to call me on my cell phone
Late night when you need my food
Call me on my cell phone
Late night when you need my food
And I know when that hunger bling
That can only mean one thing
I know when that hunger bling
That can only mean one thing”
below: ‘CANadian MAyPoLE’ by Candevcon Limited. “We often dance around the issue of hunger, but this time the children have the formula to fight it.”
below: Close up of ‘Perspectives on Hunger and Heroes’ by ARUP. A tribute to the late David Bowie since “hunger has many faces”.
as I walk Toronto 