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OPENING // Sunshine Tormé Johnson // The Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313

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December 1st 2024, 5:45 PM, meeting at Gallery 1313 (courtyard) and moving to Parkdale Library Auditorium space (space and washrooms are accessible). Masks mandatory inside. Home to Heal, Sunshine Torme Johnson, 2023. Inkjet print on paper In the portal-like space of Gallery 1313’s Window Box Gallery, Sunshine Tormé Johnson’s holistic perspective and wealth of experience takes on the forms of critique, reflective celebration, and images of beyond-medical healing. Creating with a Housing First perspective compounded by personal experience, Sunshine’s work welcomes the viewer into the intimacies of working towards thriving in a disabled body mind within the land-based and infrastructural complexities of Tkaronto. Sunshine Torme Johnson (he/him) is a dynamic facilitator, artist, and community member. As a Black, disabled, gender-diverse and queer individual, he celebrates the uniqueness of his identity by embracing the fluidity that defines him through his art. Sunshine creates transform...
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Ocular Occurrences

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  Sept. 15 2024 to Jan. 15 2025 113Research, 113 McCaul Street, 5th floor Monday-Friday 10-6PM Opening Reception September 30 4.30-6 PM  Pam Patterson &  Mel Rapp "Ocular Occurrences" as exhibition, displays, in the vitrines, digital colour prints (that use eye scans, photographs, and topographical maps) overlayed with Amsler grids, designed to engage the viewer with how Patterson sees and processes images. What, she asks, is the disconnect between medical models and subjective experience? What can a body do to…? The seeming ineffectiveness of this exercise in locating sight is expressed in the accompanying video, Sites of Perception . Optician, designer and writer Mel Rapp exercises his theory of the intersection of observation, memory, and language by responding, in the vitrine, in writing to Patterson’s ironic images. In the two facing photos in the annex lounge, one sees closeup Patterson’s eye framed by one of Rapp’s iconic glassware designs. Here futility is...
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Harmeet Rehal at WBG Gallery 1313

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Harmeet Rehal’s  Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023, curated by Mason Smart and Jack Hawk, will run from September 1st 2024-October 30th 2024 at Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, Toronto.  The Window Box Gallery will be visible from 1pm-5pm Wednesday through Saturday, and from 1pm-4pm on Sundays. A community opening event will take place on September 3rd from 6:30-8:30, at Gallery 1313. All are welcome, and Rehal’s Manjas will be in action at this event.
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TAC Project for 2024-2025

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For this year WIAprojects  will be working with   113Research   and   Gallery 1313   on a Toronto Arts Council funded project,   Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires . In “Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires”, the “disabled” bodies we inhabit foreground our concerns as we, emerging and established artists/designers, curators, project leaders, and advisors, take on critical exploratory work. Here the thematic, creative forms, and community practices are embodied with our pain, frustration, confusions, limitations, desires, loves and cares. As “disabled” people, our bodies exist in tension with the normalized expectations of ordered bodies. In "Transformative Access," we examine how our bodies’ experiences remake our worlds. In conversation with ideologies, people, policies, and structures, we ask, how can the "crip" body act, given its creative potential, be centred in these practices, and be resilient to ableism. We ask, “Wh...
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Window Box Gallery: Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature - Gallery 1313 Toronto

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  Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature March - April 2023 The Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313 Artists: Iris Adrienne Langlois, Liz DeCoste, and Abby Kettner Curator: Mason Smart --- Within  Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature , many of the pieces are  ephemeral in a sense, especially pointed to through their translucency. There is a unity of mid-being  broken by the instances of opaque metal. Oscillating visually on the border of being  solid, made separate by glass, floating: this is a possibility. This is a foreign yet familiar world,  making the viewer a visitor in their own habitual “Toronto-space”, here made alien, made soft  and precarious. Ephemera can be a counterpart to the literal and figurative concrete. As part of her series City Skins (2023-ongoing), Abby Kettner's latex casts respond to  the symbols made manifest in Toronto’s infrastructure by isolating and manipulating them. In this  pro...
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Exercising Urbanism October - December 2022

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Exercising Urbanism is a collaboration in urban exploration with local emerging artists and designers Ella Hough and Maya Freeman. Freeman and Hough will lead three drawing workshops in the city (at set locations in Parkdale, Cabbagetown, and Chinatown) that aim to help us re-examine the city critically, imaginatively, and playfully. The drawings that develop from the workshops will make up the installation of the Window Box Gallery. With each subsequent workshop, drawings will become layered in the window box as the experiences of the city’s secret corners and alleyways are reimagined as hubs for creative expression and informal gathering.  Participation in the workshops is free (pre-registration required) and materials will be supplied. To register, please email: exercisingurbanism@gmail.com. Artists Maya Freeman is a designer based in Toronto, Canada. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 2021. Maya is motivated by the possibilities t...
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Opening August 27, 2022 Bridget Lu / 晓茶 Grocery

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In exploring the demarcation of exoticism and otherness in international food aisles,  Grocery  interjects sculpted replicas of cultural foods into their broader corresponding food categories. Photographed   in   Walmart   grocery   aisles,   Lu   deconstructs   habitual   exotification   by   asserting   that sesame oil is oil, black rice vinegar is vinegar, and shrimp chips are chips. The disruption of imposed otherness re-envisions the potential of cultural foods in building, diversifying, and nourishing communities. Bridget Lu/  晓茶  is a Chinese-Canadian artist, science enthusiast, and aspiring medical illustrator. Her practice includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media— often taking   form   in   multi-media   works. Lu   explores   and   integrates   cultural   identity,   design   practices and biological concepts— currently focusing...
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