Results tagged “ossingtonavenue”

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Since she no longer returns our phone calls, Torontoist decided to visit Ossington in person. Our mission: to chronicle what happens when the booze isn't flowing, the restaurant staff have yet to wake, and the denim and flannel are being worn by actual construction workers. Drama! Passion! And the distant sound of an old Portuguese man watering his sidewalk!

Everyone has a story for that night when the lights went out.

Last week, passersby at the corner of Queen and Ossington began to take notice of a curious wooden crate protruding from the side of a building. Some gathered around it with great awe and wonder, while others scoffed dismissively, thinking, “So what? It’s a frickin’ box sticking out of a frickin’ wall.”

A price has been put on west-end authenticity, and apparently it’s $20. As of today, the Save OSsington T-shirt is available for purchase, the badge of a newly launched local campaign to provoke critical discussion on issues of gentrification and neighbourhood transformation.

The building at the northwest corner of Ossington and Queen couldn't stay vacant for long. As Kevin Steele notes on his photo of 2 Ossington from October 2007, "In the 80s this was the Toronto Transfer Lounge, a TTC theme bar that I assumed was meant to be a hangout for drivers. Eventually it transitioned into a rocker bar." Further transitioned into the First Step Homes, and then abandoned, the building has long been a target for taggers and artists. Now, it's on the verge of being converted to the 2 Ossington Lofts, but before it's torn down for good someone's added an inconspicuous new addition to one of its boarded-up windows, discovered (and photographed, above) by Torontoist Flickr Pooler --richelle--. Roll over the image to see the paste-up up close.

Cheap Thrills is a new bi-weekly column filling you in on fresh ways to get your kicks in the city and on the cheap.

Photo by Ryan Coleman from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Photo by Tim Shore/BlogTO

You may remember our coverage of the excellent Vice film Heavy Metal in Baghdad. A documentary following the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda, we reviewed it at TIFF and called it “one of our top films of the festival” before interviewing one of the directors, Suroosh Alvi.

Tomorrow night, November 2nd, a new CaseCamp-format un-conference will touch down in Toronto. Combining two sessions from the art community and one session from a related industry, ArtSmash is a unique speaker series that will generate a room full of creative ideas. The event is being coordinated by Ella Cooper and presented by the Emerging Arts Professional Network.

For the next four months, twenty of Toronto's garbage bins throughout the Financial District will be given a reprieve from displaying ads to instead serve as big, beautiful, magenta frames for some rather lovely photography.

FOUND magazine's hook is simple: readers send in items they've found (from handwritten love notes to Polaroids), and Davy Rothbart curates and publishes them. The finds, which appear in the magazine, the best-selling series of FOUND books, or on the mag's website as the Find of the Day, run the gamut from cute to tragic; like PostSecret, it's a way to get an anonymous glimpse inside someone else's life, but unlike PostSecret, participation in the project isn't voluntary.

A whole slew of 12” by 12” works by local and international artists will be exhibited in AWOL Gallery’s Square Foot Show. In its fifth year, the show has grown to such a scale that the works will be displayed in a 2,500 square foot room on the second floor of 100A Ossington Avenue rather than in AWOL’s own gallery space. Over 500 square feet within 2,500 square feet should give ample room to accommodate the throngs of eager art fanatics. Since size constraints are the only limitation for the pieces, there will be a diverse selection of squares for your viewing pleasure.

Two Steps Back, the eighth emerging artists show at Interaccess opened last week. Interaccess has been on a bit of a roll of late, having just hosted a workshop with Second Front, the premiere performance art troupe of Second Life earlier this week.

Pandas is an odd name for anything, and more than a little disconcerting if you're a fan of large, bamboo-eating quadripeds who don't like to breed.

The city is full of high society soirées such as the Brazilian Ball, the Power Ball, and Fashion Cares. Which is fine for the jet set, but the rest-of-us set also likes to get dolled up once in a while. Which is why Gallery TPW is inviting everybody to the D-List Ball this Saturday at 56 Ossington Avenue. The fund raiser will be hosted by Keith Cole and features musical entertainments by Karl Lagerfeld's Ponytail, Black Turtleneck, Will Munro and Jon Sasaki as well as a performance by Darren O'Donnell. There are also lots of prizes including a little something for the best ensemble of the evening. Tickets are $20, which according to Gallery TPW, makes it a fancy pants event that even artists can afford to attend.