Image courtesy of Poster Child

Renegade street artist Poster Child has been doing installations on the subway vents in front of Nathan Phillips Square in the last few weeks. For his third piece he created a big inflated doll and invited the folks at Dear Toronto to film the event. Let's just say that not everyone was feeling it:

The third annual installment of Alternative Tentacles ends tomorrow Saturday, May 3, so if the urge to go gallery-hopping during this month's CONTACT festival hits you, this exhibit might be worth checking out. Showing at the new Xpace gallery location on Ossington north of Queen, Alternative Tentacles 3 features artwork from nine alternative high schools around the city.

Despite the downpour last night a solid number of people packed the galleries along the Queen West strip, and even with tonight's impending rain there's no stopping the official launch of the CONTACT Photography Festival at Brassaii. Like last year, the party will be featuring live portrait photography and projection by quirky duo Alex Vs Alex.

Alex Vs Alex is Alex Ioannou and Alex Gray, whose friendship spawned from their penchant for taking pictures of interesting people in equally interesting environments. The Alexes have come a long way from their 18-year old selves tinkering with their fathers' hand-me-down cameras to highly sought-after photographers commissioned by Mini Cooper, Puma and the Royal Ontario Museum. Tonight the Alexes are replicating last year's Portrait Party but on a grander scale with a guerilla post-production studio, a specialized computer system that automatically uploads the pictures and projects them as a slideshow and no less than six printers dispensing instant headshots for the partygoers.

Continue reading for pictures from last year's Portrait Parties at CONTACT and Nuit Blanche.

Starting today, Toronto becomes every photoenthusiast's mecca with CONTACT running across the city all month. Tonight in Parkdale Gallery 1313, Shopgirls and The Gladstone are opening their doors to the public with their respective CONTACT exhibitions, and right smack in the middle is Queen West's newest addition to the art crawl, GalleryDK.

GalleryDK is the brainchild of the DK Photo Group, an established Toronto-based collective made up of Russell Brohier, Sean Galbraith, Laurin Jeffrey, Steve Jacobs and Mat Merrett, known for their haunting imagery of abandoned urban sites. I met Sean at the gallery while he was hanging his pieces for tonight's Anamnesis launch.

During yesterday's much-blogged about Earth Day I decided to take the 501 streetcar down to the Lower Don River and check out the latest project by No. 9. According to their website's mission statement, No. 9 believes that "contemporary art can stimulate positive social and environmental change". For this particular piece, executive director Andrew Davies (of NYC's MoMA and Evergreen @ The Brickworks' fame) commissioned Quebec artists BGL to install a 30-foot sunken cruise ship* on the water and a huge orange lifesaver with "Don River" painted on it.

I missed the Earth Day walking tour which happened in conjunction to the April 22 project launch so when I got there the only people in that area were a few cyclists and a homeless man shouting indecipherable words at me from under a bridge. I was expecting a "sunken ship"* like it says on the website but this is what I saw:

With its burgeoning independent music scene, it made sense that Toronto took part in the annual Record Store Day which was celebrated across North America last Saturday. The eight-hour long event showcased a diverse array of local artists ranging from blues rock to straight-up country.

Held at Sunrise Records' 336 Yonge St. branch, Toronto's Record Store Day consisted of unplugged performances from Illscarlett, Neverending White Lights, The Sunparlour Players, Machete Avenue, Laura Barrett, The Joys, The Rizdales, Derek Miller and The Creepshow. There were a number of kids who camped out in the store from lunch just so that they could get a good glimpse of Illscarlett come dinnertime. Talk about dedication.