{"id":55873,"date":"2025-05-10T13:25:15","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T17:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=55873"},"modified":"2025-05-10T15:23:37","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T19:23:37","slug":"walking-the-artist-project-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/?p=55873","title":{"rendered":"Walking the Artist Project 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

May 8 \u2013 11, 2025<\/strong>
Better Living Centre, Exhibition Place<\/strong>
195 Princes\u2019 Blvd, Toronto
Hours: May 9 & 10, 12 \u2013 8 pm, May 11, 12 \u2013 6 pm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yehyun Lee: My favourites<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this year\u2019s Artist Project, Toronto once again pulsed with the vibrant energy of over 250 independent artists gathering under one roof to share their visions. More than just an art fair, the event unfolded as a living, vibrant exchange of ideas, offering a rare opportunity to encounter artwork in a setting designed for conversation and curiosity. Between large-scale installations, guided tours, and an ever-present sense of artistic discovery, the experience was both intimate and alive with the possibility of stumbling across the unexpected. Among the countless talents on display, three booths stood out to me as windows into distinct, deeply considered artistic worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Artist Project Booth Row View, Better Living Centre, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Booth 518, photographer Ian Brown offered a quiet, contemplative counterpoint to our image-saturated digital world. Working exclusively with analog materials\u2014film stocks like Kodak and Fuji\u2014Brown transcends the immediacy of digital capture, dipping instead into the ephemeral physicality of photography\u2019s older traditions. Fascinatingly, his raw film photography, printed on richly textured paper, brings a tactile, gentle, and unmistakably human presence to the medium. There is something quietly resolute in his commitment to process, something that honours the beatific essence of photography as both craft and reflection.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ian Brown, Booth 518, Artist Project 2025, Art Tour<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His series Languishing Impermanence<\/em> is a collection of images taken over the past decade that explores the uneasy, lingering relationship between humanity and the spaces we build, inhabit, and eventually abandon. These photographs are not just documents of neglect or absence\u2014they are atmospheres of pause. Brown captures landscapes and streetscapes suspended in a liminal state, where traces of human presence echo faintly in stillness, caught somewhere between vitality and decay. His work resists spectacle in favour of something slower, more meditative, an elegy for what slips through our fingers, and a gentle reminder of the beauty found in what remains.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ian Brown in front of Nevada Bus, Archival Giclee print, 30 x 40 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Booth 109, Maureen O\u2019Connor\u2019s photographs offer a striking meditation on the convergence of the natural world and the built environment. By placing live Canadian animals, photographed in collaboration with local sanctuaries, within abandoned, crumbling domestic interiors, she creates uncanny tableaux that blur the boundary between wilderness and home. These spaces, long emptied of human presence, become transformative sites where memory lingers and new meaning begins to stir.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Maureen O\u2019Connor, Booth 109, Artist Project 2025 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Connor invites us to cross a threshold\u2014literal and metaphorical\u2014into settings where fragility is made visible in both creature and structure. Her images capture a deep stillness, asking us to imagine how animals inhabit these forgotten places, and what stories might unfold in their silent coexistence with the remnants of human life. In a country shaped by both its vast, untamed landscape and its carefully gridded cities, her work challenges us to consider how these opposing forces shape our sense of place, identity, and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Maureen O\u2019Connor in front of (L-R) This Shadow is My Own & The Meadow, both Chromogenic Photograph, 20 x 20 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emerging interdisciplinary artist and First in Show 2025 winner Ash Godley at booth 126 delivered one of the most strikingly cinematic experiences of the fair. Her oil paintings plunge the viewer into nocturnal worlds of stark contrast and unsettling familiarity. Drawing inspiration from game media, voyeurism, and the uncanny, Godley\u2019s flashlight-lit scenes frame domestic architecture from the viewpoint of an unseen onlooker, often at night, always in the shadows. There is an eerie magnetism to her compositions: beams of light slicing through darkness, revealing just enough to stir curiosity and dread.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ash Godley, Booth 126, Artist Project 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a sophisticated command of light and colour, Godley turns ordinary spaces into theatrical stages of psychological drama. The viewer becomes complicit\u2014an observer, maybe even an intruder, invited into moments and spaces that feel both intimate and forbidden. These paintings are not only formally intriguing, curious, and eerily beautiful; they ask urgent questions about perspective, surveillance, and what it means for us as viewers to look, to notice, to watch.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ash Godley in front of Cottesmore Ave (footprints), 2025, Oil on canvas, 48 x 35 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Text and photo: Yehyun Lee<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rashana Youtzy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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Entrance of the Artist Project at Better Living Centre<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fair was crowded with visitors ambling in groups. The excitement could be felt as patrons giddily opted for selfies in groups in front of some booths.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Artist Project 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I was watching Hugo Cantin was taking a photo of visitors photographing his photo-based works, laughing together with them at the layers of his work.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Cantin\u2019s works are meticulous collages using 16mm film, housed in LED light boxes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These interactions give the Artist Project an approachable atmosphere to strike up conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Installation view of the Artist Project, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephanie Singh sees the pace as an advantage. Singh noted that the opportunity for one-on-one has been helpful in explaining the technical process of her works. She was especially excited given that it was her first time at the Artist Project, and she won the Standing Ovation Award 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Singh\u2019s work uses sourced flora dried and incorporated into large resin works like the table and oval wall hangings pictured here<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through to the closing time of the fair on Friday night, the Artist Project was crowded. Several artists were packing up artworks, wrapping them in films or putting away terminal readers. Many people left with smiles on their faces and turning over artist cards in their hands, excitedly asking each other which booths they got to check out. Surely some of them will need another visit to the Artist Project, as it is impossible to see everything in one day.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Artist Project 2025 with Ben Johnston\u2019s installation (in front)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Text and photo: Rashana Youtzy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Yehyun Lee & Rashana Yuotzy<\/strong><\/p>\n

More than just an art fair, the event unfolded as a living, vibrant exchange of ideas, offering a rare opportunity to encounter artwork in a setting designed for conversation and curiosity.<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,232,276],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-rashana-youtzy","category-yehyun-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55873"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55890,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55873\/revisions\/55890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/55869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}