October 19: This Week in the Gallery Space:

Yay! We are back online; I've been very hungry for my blogTO fix.

A couple of things to inform you of real quick:

Tonight sees the kick off for the 6th 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art which runs until October 29, 2006. Tonight's performance artists include Quebec's Les Fermieres Obsedees and Claudia Bernal, Japan's anti-cool, and Bulgaria's Vassya Vassileva co-presented with Fado Performance Inc. Performances start at XPACE, 303 Augusta (that is in the market) at 8 with a party at 10 pm. Suggested donation $5. This year's event features "20 established and emerging contemporary performance artists" from Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, the UK and the US, not to overlook ones from Canada and Toronto--it's a smorgasbord of performance artists. Grab a festival catalogue at one of the participating venues or, if you're impatient, download one.

Props go out to imagineNATIVE festival for their bad-ass "The Revenge of Pocahontas!" poster. In its 7th year, imagineNATIVE runs until October 22 and features film and media arts. As the film aspect is being covered by our capable film bloggers, I will stick to media arts:

Stephen Foster's Playing Indian: Burn, Static and Squelch will be on until Oct. 27 @ VMAC Gallery, 401 Richmond St. W, Suite 448. The artist gives a talk tonight at 6:00 pm at VMAC.

Then you'll have time to run downstairs and catch Jude Norris talking about Between the Lines at 6:30 at Trinity Square Video, Suite 376 which plays until the 26 of October.

On Friday, Oct. 20 at 6:30 @ A Space Gallery, Suite 110 of 401 Richmond, Maria Hupfield and Terrance Houle present an Interactive Performance and reception of Wagon Burner This! And Princess Moonrider That! Runs only till the 21st so catch it while you can.

And last but not least, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn will present an artist talk for Isuma--to have an idea at 12:00 pm at the Blackwood Gallery of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road North. Now before you start complaining that this is blogTO and not blog905 let me inform you that a "free bus transportation will be leaving Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre (from the Spadina entrance) at 11 am and will return at 1:30 pm". Trust me, it's worth it.

Make sure to check out First Vision, Inclusive and Wepinasowina as part of the New Media works online for imagineNATIVE.

image: Elizabeth McIntosh, Young Night Thought

No, this is not a festival but worthwhile mentioning. There is an opening reception tonight, 6-9pm for Elizabeth McIntosh's Young Night Thought and Paulette Phillips' Monster Tree at Diaz Contemporary, 100 Niagara Street (at Tecumseth), regular gallery hours are Tues-Sat 11-6.

I think Tanja is back next week so you can look forward to reading from her again. It's been a slice in the Gallery Space, and you can of course still catch my columns, For the Social Butterfly et al each week.