On Location: Toronto

Apparently there's this new feature on facebook where you sign in on your smart phone to where are you are so all you're contacts know where you are and so you can see how many of your acquaintances are in your vicinity. Consider this as me signing in to Toronto.

Toronto is one of these cities who's face keeps changing every time you visit. You can put money on it that I will never know where I'm going or where we've just come from. It's not that I'm bad with direction, it's just that Toronto has countless points of interest where Edmonton mainly has two (you know what they are). During my last visit I discovered Roncesvalles, a Polish burrow, St. Lawrence Market, Kensington Market, and the shops on Queen St. West. Last visit included several cultural happenings including the World Press Photo exhibit depicting some of 2009s most important photojournalist shots. See above photo for photograph by Italian Pietro Masturzo who won the top prize with his picture of the rooftops of Tehran taken in June 2009.

This visit to Toronto has also been a cultural cultivator. Upon discovering that Toronto Public Library has a killer Museum and Arts Pass (MAPS) that is FREE, I experienced two museums in three days. Up first was the Textile Museum of Canada. With an impressive name like this I was expecting to be swaddled in yard and yards of fine oriental silks and Persian rugs. This, however, did not happen. Among a handful of ancient kimonos and religious shawls hung a poster of the textile storage facility which depicted rows and rows of fabrics from around the world. Sadly, the textile museum displayed very little of the historic fabrics that they have in their possession. A redeeming feature of the textile museum, however, was their interactive looming room. One very friendly curator graciously explained how to set up the loom (a very time-consuming task) and answered any questions we had on looming. I must admit, since I've started knitting, I have a new found appreciation for the cottage industry. A second redeeming quality of the Textile Museum was Kai Chan's exhibit A Spider's Logic. Chan's believes in the three dimensional thread as its own medium which influences much of his earthy and intricate sculptures.

The Gardiner Museum of Ceramics was our second opportunity to take advantage of out MAP pass. As the dutch household stipulates one checks the bottom of blue-on-white ceramic for it's Delft's authenticity, I became a pottery critic at an early age. The ceramic museum housed floors of decadently painted pottery ranging from relic shards from Chinese Empires to religious effigies excavated from Mayan ruins. British Delftware had an impressive display as did Austria with its Hausmaler porcelain, yet the Delft's blue that originated in Holland was curiously missing from the whole collection.

More to come: AGO and the Maharaja exhibit.