Akin Vitrine Galleries + Kyle Yip

We are delighted to introduce our current Akin St. Clair Vitrine Gallery artist, Akin Ossington artist Kyle Yip. Kyle's work will be on exhibit in our galleries beginning at 1747 St. Clair Avenue West for the month of February and then 1485 Dupont for the month of March.

“The following body of work are exact replicas of visual art conceived and produced during the rapid-eye movement dream state of the artist. While the purpose of dreams are not completely understood, psychoanalysts believe they are the manifestations of our deepest desires and fears. They are the direct expression of imagination and utilize the most efficient language of symbolism and mythological archetypes.” - Kyle Yip 

In Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls describes dreams as projections of the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, rejected, or suppressed. Carl Jung added that every person in the dream may represent an aspect of the dreamer, which he called the existential approach to dreams. Perls went to far as to say that even inanimate objects in the dream may represent aspects of the dreamer. Through association, the dreamer would be asked to imagine being an object in the dream and describe its characteristics, bringing into awareness the more disaffected aspects of the dreamer's personality. 

Kyle Yip is an award-winning, internationally recognized, critically acclaimed visual artist based in Toronto. He is known not only for his Juno Award Nominated debut album for best 'Electronic Album of the Year’ from the 45th Annual Juno Awards in 2016, but also his international exhibitions in New York, Vancouver and South Korea.

Sewer
Mixed Media
30 x 22 1/2”
2019

Moonbeam
Mixed Media
30 x 22 1/2”
2019

Pepto-Abysmal
Mixed Media
48 x 36”
2016

To contact the artist:
Instagram: @kylepyip
#Akinvitrine
www.kyleyip.com

Akin Collective + Akin Projects are excited to present our 2020 programming in two Vitrine Galleries located at Akin St. Clair and Akin Dupont. These miniature galleries feature the diverse talent of our members with travelling installations rotating each month. Each artist will be featured for the first month at St. Clair and second month at Dupont. For more information about our artists and our programming, join us on Instagram @akinvitrine.

Kyle’s work will be on view for the month of February in our St. Clair Avenue West Akin Vitrine Gallery, 1747 St. Clair Avenue West. Gallery is street level and can be viewed at any time.

The exhibition will then travel to the Akin Dupont Vitrine Gallery where it will be on view for the month of March. Find Akin Studio 215 on the second floor and follow the sign into the hallway around the corner. The building is open from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Saturday.

Furoshiki - Opens Saturday!

SAMARA Contemporary in collaboration with Kid Icarus, are pleased to announce Furoshiki, A group exhibition that will feature the works of 20 artists working with the theme: “Gifting”. Furoshiki wrap is an eco-friendly alternative to traditional wrapping paper.

Where: Samara Contemporary, 156 Augusta Avenue, Toronto

When: Saturday, November 30th, 12-6pm

Every holiday season more than 8 million tons of gift-wrap ends up in landfills. Disposable and chemically processed, this waste is destroying our environment. Furoshiki can be re-used, passed on from one gift receiver to the next.

Cloth wrapping has been used for over 1200 years in Japan. The word Furoshiki came about during the Edo period (1603-1868) when cloths were commonly used in bathhouses to wrap clothes or as bath matts. Today, Furoshiki can be used to wrap gifts, wine bottles, books, groceries, or just about anything!

This year and onward present your special gift enveloped in beautiful art created by some of Canada’s
top illustrators and artists! An environmentally ethical and unique option to gift giving!

Participating artists:
Daniela Roessler, Dave Setrakian, Fiona Smyth, Flips, Akin Ossington alum Jenn Kitagawa, Jill Holmberg, Jimmy Chaile, Akin Sunrise artist Jieun June Kim, Justin Broadbent, Akin Ossington alum Kendra Yee, Kirsten McCrea, Luke Parnell, Happy Sleepy, Marijke Bouchier, Mariko Paterson, Mike Ellis, Orbital Arts, Rachel Joanis, Santiago Paredes, Trio Magnus

Akin Vitrine Galleries + Nicole Crozier

We are delighted to introduce our current Akin Vitrine Gallery artist, Akin Ossington artist Nicole Crozier. Nicole’s work will be on exhibit in our galleries beginning at 1485 Dupont for the month of November and then 1747 St. Clair Avenue West for the month of December.

Nicole Crozier is a Toronto-based visual artist and arts manager. Her work surrealistically explores the animate potential of accessories and decoration in relation to the female body. She aims to cultivate an aesthetic that is simultaneously seductive and unsettling as a means of investigating the overlap between desire, fantasy, identity, and self-image.

Bordering on the baroque, “Beckon” is a painter’s experimental foray into sculptural installation. The work plays with our magpie-like attraction to bright, reflective objects, promising delights with outstretched, inviting gestures, but from incorporeal hands surreally disassociated from reality. These hands, reminiscent of mannequin models positioned in storefront windows, are slowly being consumed by ornaments once meant to decorate them in a shrine-like ode to the power of the display. “Beckon” insists on seduction while highlighting the dangers of desire, utilizing the disembodied hand as a means of creating a point of association as well as disconnect with the viewer. It simultaneously invites and threatens, beckons and repels, offers promise and yet leads nowhere.

Beckon
Mixed Media
Dimensions Variable
2019

To contact the artist:
Instagram: @nicolebcrozier
#Akinvitrine
www.nicolebcrozier.com

Akin Collective + Akin Projects are excited to present our 2019 programming in two Vitrine Galleries located at Akin Dupont and Akin St. Clair. These miniature galleries feature the diverse talent of our members with travelling installations rotating each month. Each artist will be featured for the first month at Dupont and second month at St. Clair. For more information about our artists and our programming, join us on Instagram @akinvitrine.

‘Beckon’ will be on view for the month of November in our Dupont Akin Vitrine Gallery, located in the Clock Factory Building at 1485 Dupont Street (entrance on Campbell Avenue). Find Akin Studio 215 on the second floor and follow the sign into the hallway around the corner. The building is open from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Saturday.

The exhibition will then travel to the Akin St. Clair Vitrine Gallery and be on view for the month of December at 1747 St. Clair Avenue West. Gallery is street level and can be viewed at any time.

Akin Artists Included in blog TO's list of Up and Coming Artists

This past weekend blogTO released their list of 10 up and coming Toronto artists and many are current Akin members. The list includes Kendra Yee of Akin Ossington, Joshua Advincula, Chason Yeboah, Liang Wang of Akin MOCA, Jill Smith of Akin Dupont, Amika Cooper, Charlotte Penabel, Raquel Da Silva of Akin MOCA, Alexander Robinson, and Allana Cooper. BlogTO compiled the list of up and coming artists based on suggestions from local arts institutions and organizations. The individuals who made it onto the list are all visual creatives who have emerged on the scene in the last couple of years with some exciting work. Some of them already have a few solo exhibits under their belt, while others' CVs consist solely of group exhibits. Regardless of how many past shows these artists have done, the future looks promising (blogTO, 2019).

Continue reading to learn more about the Akin artists who made it onto the list.

Diverting Cracks Found in the Cement, 2017 by Kendra Yee

Kendra Yee

Kendra Yee is a Toronto-based artist, designer, and curator. Her work consists of mixed-media paintings, ceramic sculptures, and panel-based illustrations. Yee pulls tales from her personal history, lived experiences and collective memory to form speculative worlds where fluid characters come to life through the conversations of interactive bodies.  

Yee is currently developing a program with Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood and Community Health Center that centers around alternative education. In fall 2018, selected women participants aged 13-19 in the west end area of Toronto will join together to create an independent comics anthology surrounding topics on personal identity.

Liang Wang beside his painting The Colour of the Wheat, 2017, Oil on panel, 18” x 24”

Liang Wang

Liang Wang is a Toronto-based painter raised in various parts of Taiwan, China, Australia and Canada. He has exhibited work in numerous groups shows at locations including Northern Contemporary Gallery (Toronto); Federation Gallery, Turnbull Gallery (Vancouver); and Rutherford Galleria (Edmonton). His work is in private collections in Canada and New Zealand. One day I saw the sunset forty-four times is his first solo show. Wang currently teaches painting at the McCanny Secondary School.

Us by Jill Smith, performed at Forest City Gallery, 2018, part of in attendance

Jill Smith

Jill Smith is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario (1995). Her most recent work explores everyday absurdity, as well as the connective possibilities of materiality. By re-contextualizing familiar motifs with organic, bodily forms, her work calls into question how one both exists and performs as a social body. While Smith’s work stimulates the imagination through whimsical and nonsensical colour and form, it is the relatable, yet ambiguous materiality that offers a platform to question the familiar, and escape to the alien and the uncanny.

Detail view of work by Raquel Da Silva

Raquel Da Silva

Finishing up her degree in Painting and Furniture Design at OCAD, Da Silva's super clean and colourful acrylic paintings have caught the attention from the likes of Nike (she designed a shoe for them in August). Plus her furniture is rad too (blogTO, 2019).

Akin Show and Tell on July 31st at Akin Ossington →

Every month Akin hosts a relaxed and fun ‘Show and Tell for Artists’ at one of the Akin Collective studios or at one of our partner organizations' locations. This is a time for Akin members and other Toronto artists to show completed works or works in progress and get friendly feedback and answers from their peers in a casual studio setting.

Feel free to bring art to share, bring a friend or two, bring snacks or drinks or just bring yourself! Come for the conversation or just to meet other artists and makers. This is FREE public event - everyone is welcome!

The July edition of the Show and Tell is happening at Akin Ossington at 888 Dupont West (northeast corner of Dupont and Ossington) on Tuesday, July 31st from 7-9PM. 

Artwork by Akin Ossington Artist Amy McNeill at Volta Espresso until December 31

Amy McNeill is a Toronto-based artist who just recently went full-time when she joined Akin Ossington in August with her company Little Potje Ceramics. Amy is a ceramic artist but writes and creates paintings as well. Limited edition signed prints, original paintings and a limited selection of Little Potje Ceramics are now available for sale at Volta Espresso until Dec. 31, 2017. 

Volta Espresso
Open everyday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.
866 Bathurst St, Toronto, ON M5R 3G3

Amy is motivated strongly by her personal experience of losing loved ones who made their livings as makers. Every pot, bowl and vessel she throws is dedicated to her family who raised her to have a strong work ethic and dedication to quality craftsmanship. 

In her fine art, Amy meditates on issues of fertility and reproduction. Trying to decipher what it means to be human rather than female, she's found that it's an identity mixture hard to separate and isolate at the best of times. 

Amy also enjoys writing arts and life pieces for news outlets, and working with small businesses as a copywriter and content strategist. She spends her spare time sailing, skiing and making terrible jokes at which her friends and family rarely laugh.

AKIN OSSINGTON: Akin Announces New Light Industrial Studios

Akin is thrilled to announce the launch of two new studio spaces at 888 Dupont Street on the north-east corner of Ossington and Dupont. This location will be Akin's first studios dedicated to providing workspace for light industrial art making, with new members moving in at the end of this month.

Photo credit: Brian Wilcox

Expanding on its twelve current studios located at 444 Dufferin Street, 87 Wade Avenue, 100 Sunrise Avenue and 1485 Dupont Street, Akin's new spaces will offer a range of affordable studios in various sizes and set ups for light industrial use.

Akin will develop programming specific to this unique new space in addition to our current range of workshops, studio critiques, gallery crawls, community programs and skill shares.

This exciting expansion will increase Akin’s size to approximately 22,000 square feet of studio space serving nearly 200 artists, enabling it to meet the ever-increasing demand for affordable workspace.

Since opening its first modest space almost 9 years ago, Akin has striven to make being an artist in the city a more fun and financially viable vocation. Now more than ever, we feel our role is an important one for Toronto's cultural community and our artists as we ensure that there is always space to create.

Akin's new 'Akin Ossington' location will be easily accessible by subway, streetcar, bus, bike, or car. By transit, visitors can access the studios by a short bus ride from Ossington subway station, or along the 26 Dupont bus route.

All rentals include 24/7 access to the studios, taxes, insurance, wifi, access to communal working areas as well as storage, kitchen, and bathroom.

For more information, pricing inquiries, to book a tour or to share ideas, please get in touch:

CONTACT:
info@akincollective.com


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