Artscape Youngplace Hallway Galleries

Alicia Nauta, Ginette Lapalme, and Keith Jones weave unique immersive environments filled with bizarre characters, enigmatic colourful shapes, new age signs, and celestial symbols. Each stairwell installation offers a gateway to a psychedelic realm through spatial articulations of two-dimensional print-based work.

Anna Blewchamp’s assemblages/box constructions use found and second-hand objects, natural elements, fabric, and a variety of water based mediums to develop 3 dimensional commentaries on identity, memory, history and loss. The Bedlam Series, inspired by 19th century photographs of psychiatric patients at The Royal Bethlehem Hospital, extends these concerns into the realm of fiction as each religuary-type shadow box attempts to capture the essence of an imaginary patient and their waking dreams. Additional works invoke cabinets of curiosities, or mini object worlds, where the juxtaposition of objects from popular culture collide with the past.

Artist Blayne Collins continues to explore the themes of The Family History Series, this time focusing on family that grew up in Toronto or moved here: Jesse Ketchum (Jesse Ketchum School) and his descendants, and the late Bruce West (Globe and Mail columnist and author of the book 'Toronto') and his family. Family History Series: Toronto Project features 11 panels of vintage photos that have been printed on paper silk, with embedded QR codes that can be scanned to read text or to give audio info about the people in the photos. Each panel has a grid format speaking to the artist’s current obsession with squares, as well as an audio element, commissioned from Artistic Productions, featuring vintage Toronto sounds and readings of columns and letters.