Artscape Salon 2015

Photography by Mauricio Calero

Last week, the who’s who of Toronto’s art scene assembled under the soaring skylights of Wychwood Barns to talk everything art and hyper-local at Artscape’s annual Salon dinner and speaker series. Rather than guests focusing their attention on presentations at the front of the room, the ingenuous premise of the evening’s activity involved a rotating roster of artist speakers around the dinner tables.

The 20-odd guests of honour hopped from table to table to interact with guests and stimulate dialogue about art, the city’s artistic landscape and the intersection of the two. Our table in particular saw multimedia artist Alex McLeod lead a discussion about subjective experiences with our city in relation to its relatively recent cultural upheaval, while artist and graphic designer Nicole Charles passed out postcards of Toronto’s skyline and invited us to augment the photos with our own artistic expression (then proceeded to dole out colour-scopes based on which Crayola marker we chose). Third course was dedicated to fashion design wunderkind Sid Neigum who adorably taught an origami 101 primer (not surprising given his signature geometric design cuts).

The evening concluded with guests enjoying the glittery synth-pop and bossa nova vocals of Toronto duo Prince Innocence (replete with a dreamy aura-like projections, natch). Artscape Salon is one of many initiatives engineered by Artscape, whose aim is to bring the city’s creative minds together in property projects that serve to advance the needs of the Toronto arts and cultural community.