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.

CAROLINE + GORD LANGILL | www.ocad.ca/faculty_biographies/bio

Brian’s Songs is an audio installation that traces an interaction between the evolution of the AIDS pandemic and the accumulation of an individual’s operatic archive over the same period. This work memorializes the exuberant and rigorous archival efforts of one man with a passion for living, healing and opera.

Caroline is a Peterborough-based artist whose academic scholarship and curatorial work pertain to the intersections between art and science. Presently, she is an Associate Professor at OCAD University where she also teaches courses revolving around technology and digital culture. She is a recent fellow at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, in Montreal.

Gord is a social worker and therapist who specializes in the field of early psychosis intervention. Together with Caroline, they have developed DIY technology for use in kinetic installations and land-based art. This is their first collaborative public artwork.

RYAN LIVINGSTONE | www.ryanlivingstone.com

Harbinger is a statuesque representation of the black crow; mysterious and surreal, which communicated the crow’s position as a universal inspiration for art, literature, and legend, holding a symbolic position as a scoundrel in some cultures and creator in others.  Commonly seen as harbingers of doom, crows have been adapting alongside us as our spaces and environments evolve, both rural and urban. The highly evolved corvid is a reminder of our own evolution and adaptability, while simultaneously also being a symbol of death, a constant reminder of the brevity of our own existence on earth. Crows are powerful metaphors for life, death, and creativity. I see the crow as artist and creator, trickster and mimicker, scavenger and collector, soul and lover.

Livingstone is an emerging Toronto based artist, born in the East Coast of Canada.  His artistic practice is often project based and not bound by medium, exploring forms of installation, sculpture, printmaking and painting.  The work has explored nostalgic histories found within Canadian identities and culture, while simultaneously also reflecting the landscape both rural and urban.  His work is often driven by a playful and poetic combination of love, life and loss.  Ryan has a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University, and has studied at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design.  Ryan is represented by Ingrid Mueller’s Art and Concepts.

JOHNSON NGO | http://ngojohnson.blogspot.com/

Unbecoming is a live performance where individual identity is lost, emphasizing the artist’s Asian physical characteristics, while challenging ideas of gender. Throughout the performance, the artist will cast his body with edible rice paper, fashioning a new identity; one that is neither male nor female.
Ngo is a Toronto based multidisciplinary artist, primarily working with performance, video, sculpture, and print. Recent exhibitions include Spark Contemporary Art Space, Toronto Free Gallery, 7a*11d, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Art Centre, Mississauga Living Arts Centre, and Hart House. Ngo would like to thank Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue for their assistance with this project.

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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.

LEE HENDERSON | www.noattainment.com

Borne back, ceaselessly is a video installation that aims to bring the discourse of class and surveillance to bear by invoking a motif from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the novel from which the work takes its title). Videotaping his own eyes on autofocus, Henderson fools his camera into doubting its own algorithm, forcing it to continuously oscillate between focal lengths as it gazes into him and he into it.

Henderson has studied art in Canada and Berlin, with talented professionals including Maria Vedder, Brian Eno, and Ellen Bromberg. Since completing his MFA in Intermedia at the University of Regina, Henderson has been furthering his time- and lens-based artistic practice while teaching Media Art, Computer Science, and Conceptual Photography at the postsecondary level (currently at OCAD University, Toronto). He continues to show in Canada and abroad. Recent and upcoming exhibitions and screenings include the Zero Film Festival in Los Angeles, The Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, The Rooms in St. John’s, SAW Video in Ottawa and gallerywest and Trinity Square Video in Toronto.

NICK HUTCHESON, MARA MARXT + EVA SCHINDLING | whiteloop.evsc.net

White Loop is a sound installation that explores and infiltrates the collective unconscious of a neighborhood through noise generated by 100 dream stories. Visitors to the installation encounter a sound landscape similar to white noise – a signal that contains all human-perceivable audio frequencies at once and causes the brain to stop focusing on individual sound sources. The sound of 100 voices speaking simultaneously – retelling their dreams – is a natural source of white noise. As the cognitive brain chooses to ignore the noise, the unconscious is free to perceive and interpret the hidden words. White Loop filters stories originating from the unconscious – the dreams of the collective – subliminally back into the unconscious of the visitors. Dreams are sent into a feedback loop that escapes the attention of the conscious mind. Like Parkdale itself, this gallery in a truck is a space of migration, a layering of stories, history, and an encounter with the dreams of one’s family, friends, neighbours and strangers.

Nick Hutcheson is a Toronto based producer with a passion for collaboration and stories. His writing has been performed on stage and published in magazines. Nick was most recently the production manager for Hooked at Toronto’s Summerworks after staging it in over 20 houses around Toronto. Other recent projects include coordinating The New Yorker at Luminato and founding the arts collective, Siding Project. Nick was the co-founder and associate editor of boulderpavement, a magazine of arts and ideas, published by The Banff Centre Press.

Mara Marxt is a Banff based curator driven by the transformation of concept into realization, drawing on her background as an artist and designer. She is a cofounder of MAGAZIN, an art off space in Vienna. Exhibitions include: The Opening, Der Traum einer Sache – Social Design zwischen Utopie und Alltag, Deadline today! – 99 stories, Für den Fall. In 2010 Mara moved to Montreal as a curator-in-residence, researching public art in that city.

Eva Schindling is a Montreal based new media artist and creative technician practicing in the interdisciplinary zone between art, science, technology and design. Driven by a fascination for the emergence of complexity and the nature of reality, she uses code, sculpture, electricity and visuals to show the beauty and mystery of the fundamental truths that constantly surround us but are rarely seen. Exhibitions: Japan Media Arts festival, Hong Kong’s Museum of Art, Finland’s Live Herring exhibition, the Pixxelpoint festival in Slovenia and the Ars Electronica.

KELLY JAZVAC | www.diazcontemporary.ca

Nest will be comprised of a UHaul moving truck completely covered in adhesive vinyl which has been printed with composite photographs of damage suffered by the facades of various big box stores in Ontario.

Jazvac is a conceptual artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation. Based in London, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent project at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik Iceland. Jazvac is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. Kelly Jazvac would like to thank Laura Goffin, Colin Miner, Solafa Rawas, and the University of Western Ontario for their generous financial support.

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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.