On Wednesday October 19^th at 7 pm, Groundlevel Cafe invites you to help them PAINT THE TOWN:  GREEN!

For several years now, the Ground Level Café has been serving fair-trade, organic coffee as a matter of principal.  According to owner Mike Wood Daly, with their cafe providing careers for at-risk youth – serving coffee off the backs of exploited workers and in ways that harm the environment just doesn’t make sense.

In keeping with this idea, Ground Level is working to make their café even greener – by introducing a number of fairly-traded, natural and organic products – many of them gluten free and many of them produced locally!

Groundlevel is also introducing  an exciting new project they’re partnering with called  The Food Chain.  The Food Chain is designed to provide licensed kitchen and market space for small scale food producers in the Parkdale area; artisans who are currently producing delicious foods like jams, pickles, chocolates and baked goods from their homes.  Groundlevel’s role in the project will be to provide market space in the café for their products, to offer mentoring on various aspects of business development, and to provide logistical support for ordering locally grown organic produce and ingredients.

If you are interested in helping to support Groundlevel in these endeavours, please attend:

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 19^th at 7 pm.

Tickets are $25 at the door.

$20 in advance and can be purchased at the café.

A donation of $20 through our website before October 18^th

will also reserve a spot for you on the guest list.

All tickets will be entered in a draw for a framed, limited edition print

by renowned Canadian artist, Robert Bateman.

The evening will include opportunities to purchase and/or bid on a wide selection of framed, limited edition prints by Bateman and well-known artists as well as a variety silent auction items contributed by local businesses, some great jazz, food and drinks!  All purchases involving artwork will also be eligible for a charitable tax receipt.

If you would like to see some of the Bateman prints available please visit their website at www.glyv.org or see Groundlevel’s youtube presentation at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7patySBcd9w

For more information on the event or to make a purchase of one of the Bateman prints in advance of the event please contact us at mike@glyv.org or by calling 647-278-8370

THE TORONTO ALLIANCE OF ART CRITICS | http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_276435113491&ap=1

Speed Art Criticism II will again redefine the notion of social networking in the arts community.  For one night only, visual artists will be invited to bring their artwork to a rental cube truck stationed at the Gladstone Café (http://gladstonecafetoronto.com) – 1181 Queen Street West, at the South West corner of Queen Street West and Gladstone Avenue. Artists’ work will then be critiqued by the country’s leading art critics during the all-night project. Follow the TAAC throughout the night with comments and critique on Twitter.  All are invited to bring work for a group critique, or bring images on mobile devices to spar and spur the dialogue!

TAAC was founded in 2009 by Nadja Sayej and six Toronto art writers. Since then, the TAAC has grown to include fifteen of the country’s leading art critics from: the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, artUS, Canadian Art, Magenta Magazine, Modern Painters, ARTnews, C Magazine, Border Crossings and Artforum (among others). The TAAC is committed to improving the standards of art criticism in Toronto and beyond. Their goal is “to give a voice to art criticism.” David Balzer, Rose Bouthillier, Bill Clarke, Otino Corsano, Sky Gooden, John Bentley Mays, Amish Morrell, Elena Potter, Leah Sandals, Murray Whyte, Stephanie Vegh are involved in the project for Leitmotif.

MARCIA VAITSMAN | www.khm.de/~marcia/

Nocturnal Encounters is a public artwork that presents TV as public space and how the community of Toronto is represented in the media.  The audio and video was compiled through a series of onsite workshops at The Parkdale Library during the summer. Over 75 people participated in the dialogue that is revealed in the final work. The artist feels that it is important to question how the media landscape in Toronto reflex the complex Canadian cultural plan. This project is funded by the Biennial of São Paulo Foundation.

Born in Brazil, Vaitsman studied media, art and photography at Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Kunsthochschule fuer Medien KHM, Germany; and SCAD, Atlanta. Vaitsman has projects awarded and/or sponsored by the Sao Paulo Biennial Foundation; UNESCO-Ashberg, France; Ministry of Culture, Brazil; IAMAS, Japan; Prince Claus Fund, The Netherlands, among others. Her work has been shown in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

LUKE PAINTER | www.lukepainter.ca

Restless uses projection and 3D animation in order to touch on the often stressful and tiring act of moving furniture and create a space that places these home furnishings in a virtual limbo. Visitors to Restless will stand at the back of a moving truck and peer into the space, seeing a number of home furnishings and boxes hover ever so slightly in the air; never fully coming into contact with the ground.

Painter is an artist and educator living and working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions of his work include: Revivalesque at the Elora Centre for the Arts and Revival-esque at Angell Gallery in Toronto. He is represented by Bonneau-Samames Art Contemporain in Marseille, France.

TAMARA PLATISA + SASA RAJSIC | www.tamaraplatisa.com |  www.sasarajsic.com

103°52’74″N   103°70’41″WE represents the sum of the longitudes and latitudes of Toronto, Canada and Helsinki, Finland. Platiša will be performing in Toronto and Rajšić will be located in Helsinki. They will engage in a Skype conversation and project each other’s images on a blank wall. They will begin to paint each other’s portraits until an external factor prevents them from continuing. The images Platiša & Rajšić will create are personal and a reflection of their physical location, movements on the projection and the quality of their Internet connections. In an exchange of lines on a wall they will make the intangible, tangible.

Platiša and Rajšić originate from a country with a turbulent history whose borders were regularly redrawn before it ceased to exist. They grew up in Yugoslavia at the end of the socialist era, during the civil war of the 1990s.  Toronto based artists with a BFA in Sculpture & Installation from OCAD University.  The work examines the relativity of proximity and distance in terms of their own communication in installation, performative and video format. The collaborative duo look to their shared tangible and intangible personal histories of Yugoslavia and the non-existence or disappearance of places, of residence and therefore of home, together re-examining the “everyday” as a space, where collapse and recovery occur simultaneously as well as in succession.

QUALITY SLIPPERS PRODUCTIONS | www.qualityslippers.ca

Infinity in the Palm of your Hand is a brief history of the world in a timed performance project that attempts to capture the entirety of human history over the period of the 12 hours of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. The show will open on a void. By midnight – a glimpse of our first life on the planet, and at 2 am – complex organisms emerge.  Between 2 am and dawn we see the development of prehistoric animals like dinosaurs, and in the final fifteen minutes of the event, humans appear, civilizations rise and fall, and we are left to meditate on the fleeting nature of it all. This piece will aslso include a live performance and serenade by Toronto based singer-songwriter Joey O’Neil.

Quality Slippers Productions, led by Artistic Director bekky O’Neil, creates and produces original theatrical pieces with a focus on experimental puppetry forms for adult audiences. Exploring narrative structure, unconventional storytelling, and the histories that connect us the group aims to reanimate the historic genre into a new contemporary practice. O’Neil holds a BFA in Playwriting from Concordia University and has apprenticed with Peter Schumann at the legendary Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. Recently her soft-sculpture and collage work was featured at the inaugural Visual Fringe in Toronto.  Her newest play, “Exit, pursued by a bear” premiered at the 2011 SummerWorks Festival.  Past works have also been featured at Nuit Blanche Montreal, The Art Matters Festival, Pop Montreal, The Montreal Fringe and the International Toy Theatre Festival in NYC.

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LEITMOTIF on Facebook [Leitmotif | Scotiabank Nuit Blanche] LEITMOTIF on twitter [Leitmotif2011]

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council for their support of LEITMOTIF

LEITMOTIF is possible with good spirited collaborative support by Advantage Car & Truck Rentals – www.advantagecarrentals.com

LEITMOTIF is also appreciative of the support we are receiving from the following community sponsors:

Advantage Car & Truck Rentals, Barton Floor Coverings, Belle Optical, Brock Carpet, Capital Espresso, City of Toronto Public Library – Parkdale Branch, Common Sort, Free Radio Berkeley, Future Cinema Lab at York University, Gladstone Café, The Gladstone Hotel, Hope Neon, Ltd., Imagine8, Ingrid Mueller Art + Concepts, Mangez, Mascot Café, Misfit Studio, São Paulo Biennial Foundation, OCADU, PARC, Parkdale Village BIA, Public Butter, Queen West Antique Centre, Queen West Subscape Inc, Rhino, Shop Girls, Studio Brilliante, Toronto Public Space Initiative, The Workroom and the spirited community of Parkdale Village.