This event is FREE and everyone is welcome. We hope you can join us to enjoy this showcase from home – wherever that may be! In case the Zoom event reaches capacity, we will also live stream this event on the Workman Arts Facebook page.

We also have a virtual Gallery on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/193283975@N06/galleries/72157719479293760/

Based on a 2021 Digital Workshop Series that Lisa Anita Wegner created for Yuri Araj for KickStart Disability Art and Culture in Vancouver, Workman Arts presents the Toronto Edition. You will hear from Apanaki Temitayo M & Lisa Anita Wegner, two extraordinary artists who live with multiple invisible disabilities and have made it a priority to not let that stand in the way of achieving their creative and life goals. Join us for an hour and a half long presentation of art, films, stories and inspiration. Talks will be followed with a Q&A period.

Where: Zoom
When: Thursday, April 8, 2021, 6 PM – 7.30 PM EST

This is a free event for Workman Arts members and the general public.

ASL interpretation and live captioning will be available.

Join us for a collective virtual paint night to raise $2,500 for mental health programming! Have fun and contribute to a cause that is essential for all.

Where: Zoom
When: Thursday, January 27, 2022, 7 PM – 9 PM
Only 50 tickets available! (only one ticket needed per screen/household)

Cost is by donation with a minimum donation of $50*

• First person to donate $100 receives an all-access pass to Rendezvous with Madness Festival
• First person to donate $200 receives the instructor’s painting AND an all-access pass to Rendezvous with Madness Festival

Materials needed

• 1 small canvas (5 x 7 or 8 x 10)
• 5 paint colours of your choice (colours used for the example painting are primary yellow, magenta and primary cyan/blue, with black and white)
• Two paintbrushes:
  • #10 flat/bright brush (#10 round can also work – 2 inches wide)
  • #2 round brush (pencil size)
• Paint Palette (Plastic cover or lids)
• Small bucket of water
• Paper Towel
• No solvents are required. All paints are water-based. 

Materials can be purchased at the dollar store or an art supply store (Aboveground Art, Curry’s, Michaels) or mailed to your home for an additional fee of $25 per kit. Click here to open the materials kit in a new tab to add to your cart after you’ve added your ticket.

Please note that orders for materials kits for mailing must be received no later than Friday, January 21, to ensure they will get to you in time.

*Tax Receipting Policy: In accordance with CRA regulations, the value of benefits must be deducted from the total gift. We will provide a tax receipt for the portion of any donations above $50 (i.e $75 ticket eligible for a receipt for $25, $100 ticket eligible for a receipt for $50, etc.). Materials kits are not receiptable.

Multitude of Fish is an installation consisting of 1000 handmade clay fish. In this piece, the artist touches on layers of meaning through its process and how it’s experienced by the viewer. She explored how things we cannot see like intention, emotions and thoughts, form our reality. This is reflected in the creation process as each mark carved into the clay builds up to the fish and eventually becomes a piece to the overall installation. For the past two years, Jenny worked with the image of water in her drawings which was preliminary work that led up to this installation. In her work, the fish flows through its surrounding space and leads the viewer on a journey reminiscent of the inner realm.

Jenny Chen is a multimedia artist, currently working in watercolor, pen and clay. Her work uses symbols to create otherworldly environments while considering themes of existentialism and spirituality. Her exhibition history includes the Living Arts Centre (group), Toronto Media Arts Centre (group) and United Contemporary (solo). She is a recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council (exhibition assistance) and Cue Arts Projects.

Images of the Multitude of Fish installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

untitled ([not] always like this) is an ongoing artwork created by collecting the artist’s used tissues and dipping them in porcelain, adding worth to an otherwise worthless object. The piece is a response to the society we live in and the importance placed on doing: you must make, you must work, you must grind. Our opinions of ourselves are tied to a quantifiable output rather than how we feel. Instead, we should spend time listening to our bodies, allowing ourselves to take things slow, being intentional with the way we move through the world and giving ourselves permission to heal from the everyday. These tissues hold the memories of going against the grain, of days stuck in sickness and hours lost crying.

Kassandra Walters is a multimedia artist currently practicing in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her art tackles mental health, all that it encompasses and all that encompasses it. With a strong desire to normalize speaking about the unspeakable, Kassandra’s work is honest and raw. She finds solace in the act of making through repetition.

This artist has an item in the RWM swag bag to go with their piece in the exhibition. All ticket holders will be invited to receive RWM swag bags available for free curbside pickup during festival hours.

Images of the untitled ([not] always like this) installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Into the dark of my skin uses a bird’s eye view to look at all possible perspectives, going beyond the corners of the frame. Mutated and shared bodies visually meet in only one spot, never meeting in a second. Their virtual encounter is a need that satisfies and nourishes the fetal and its obsolete memory. This, unfortunately, is a search for impossible love or the cohabitation of two human beings, which is only possible through a visual juxtaposition. The video medium creates a ground that allows a meeting…impossible bodies, different times and places.

Wieslawa Nowicka explores the branches of visual art and its pluralism. As a result, she has liberated herself from a singularity, permitting her to explore the facets of history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis through the plurality of arts – painting, design, performance and video installations.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Nudity

Images of the Into the dark of my skin installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Quote from the artist: My work is a reflection of an idiot world run by idiots. A two faced world where if you “appear” good, then you are an upstanding person. Being good is not important, just “appearing” good. A place where you can have a career managing and polishing someone’s public persona to make them appear human when they’re actually reptiles. A place where selfishness rules and the ego dictates action. I’m just here for a limited time and I paint what actually IS.

As a self-taught outsider artist from Toronto, Mitchell’s talent is intuitive and his paintings spring from an authentic need for expression. He discovered that through painting, one can overcome hardships. Working in a variety of media in a self -defined style, his larger works begin as vast, abstracted canvases that act like theatre venues, unveiling narratives of semi-figurative actions, improbable scenarios and inordinate scripts. The works offer the artist’s unique vision of the world through narratives of discontentment and critique, mockery and playfulness or just the simplicity of being.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Violence, Suicide, Anxiety

Please visit our online store to purchase:
Looking Up While Down I
Lamb (Scarecrow Redux)
Phoenix Pt. II

Images of the Scarecrow installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Executed as a hybrid of sculpture and painting, Alpha Support explores the distance between presumption and certainty when observing the masks that obscure vulnerability. The work examines sub-narratives of anxiety, mental health, relationships, support systems, security and the regeneration of personal power. They encourage that we take more social risks; offer support to those who have fallen, accept support in return, advance beyond projected facades to form deeper connections and sideline insecurities to allow our true selves to surface.

Justin Mencel is a Canadian painter, sculptor, and animator. He uses interpretations of space and time to explore elements of human nature and mental health. His work is sold by Birch Contemporary in Toronto.

To purchase pieces from the Alpha Support series, please contact paulina_wiszowata@workmanarts.com for more info.

Images of the Alpha Support installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Paulina Wiszowata

A colourful video projection onto a soft surface, marks the entrance to the installations – a suggestion that the guest, following the arrows, is entering a carnival fun house. A series of drifter dance documentations using hand motions and body movements to respond to and amplify the patterns of found carpets. Taken in the semi-public passageways of hotels— it explores the interpolation of class and the end of conference culture. An act of resiliency, and taking nothing for granted: watching a sunset from a goldfish bowl, spun on a ride at a carnival, your body stays still below, by becoming a blizzard, in an inside out forest. The project celebrates itinerancy of artists, mad folks and other portable persons.

Grey Muldoon (they/them) is a movement artist working primarily out of Toronto / Tkaronto and Halifax / Kjipuktuk. Grey is disciplined in performance and puppetry arts and makes immersive sculptural installations. A proud Workman Arts member, Grey is interested in close observation, picking things up and carrying them gently, and collaborating with clear-voicing and shout-noisilying. Their experience of rare cognitive relational vibrance, a.k.a. Autism, of survival system sensitivity and subtle time injuries, a.k.a complex PTSD, and the discovery of practical imagination technologies via crisises, a.k.a Madness, allows them to make their work.

Images of the Mad Carpets – Hotel Carpet Dance Projections installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Paulina Wiszowata

“The Collage Party” serves as a platform for people of all backgrounds and artistic levels to come together in a group setting and experience the benefits of exercising their creativity through collage making. “The Collage Party” is accessible to all. With collage, you respond to images, as opposed to starting with a blank page like with painting and drawing. One does not have to know ‘how to draw a straight line’ with collage. The objective with “The Collage Party” is to provide participants with a platform to express themselves and exercise their creativity in a supportive, social environment.

Currently based in Toronto, Paul Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist with an interest in artist- driven projects that challenge current art world models. His practice includes: hosting “The Collage Party” – a touring experimental studio established 1997; directing the operations of “The Other Gallery” – a nomadic commercial gallery focused on overlooked artists’ practices; founding “The Upper Trading Post” – an invitational website that facilitates artist trading and initiating “Reverse Pedagogy” – a traveling, experimental residency. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland and La Maison Rouge, Paris.

The first 25 people who sign up for The Collage Party Zoom event get a collectible Collage Party pencil case with necessary tools to collage with. They are available for free curbside pickup at 651 Dufferin Street between the hours of 10AM-9PM, October 15-25.