Queen Street art walk

This evening I went on Betty Anne's Queen Street art walk. (It starts at 6:00 so I had to delay making fettucine alfredo again.) She makes printouts of her itinerary, and the one I got reminds me of a lot of details I couldn't have remembered on my own.

The galleries we visited were all on Tecumseth Street south of Queen.  The first was the Susan Hobbs Gallery, where Susan has a twentieth-anniversary show called "Simple Present, Future Anterior." The show had stuff like a block of wood carved in the shape of a Samsonite suitcase, and what looks at first glance like a classic Hudson's Bay Company blanket but the colors are slightly different. (I didn't ask whether the chair it was on was part of the exhibit.)

Then we went to the nearby Georgia Scherman Gallery which was displaying paintings by Melanie Authier.  They have an impressionistic look that conveys motion.  One picture reminded me of a Japanese ballerina doing a Noh drama or something.  Another reminded me of a Chinese New Year dragon procession where the guy in front holds up the dragon's head and the others support the tail in a serpentine formation.  And one on the north wall was like a white figure holding a black mask near his face.  And one nearby was like the prow of a boat breaking out of the picture's surface into the third dimension... (Go see them yourself if you doubt me!)

Then we went to the Birch Libralato Gallery.  One room had posters by Andy Patton showing Chinese-style poems printed out with the letters going from the top down like Chinese writing.

I     s     l
t     o     i
      r     k
l     t     e
o
o     o     t
k     f     h
e           i
d           s

The other room had "photo-based works" by Toni Hafkenshied that showed buildings with a subtly artificial composition style, sort of like the buildings you create in computer games like SimCity.

Then we went on a walkabout along Queen Street, stopping at Balisi and a Slavic restaurant called Czehoski's.  They had some food samples at the latter place, but I had a headache and didn't stay for that.

Betty Anne says she got hooked on LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY thanks to me.