Gay Gardens

Online Exhibition/Art Book
Deadline: May 25, 2020

Launch Date: June 25, 2020

How to Enter:

UPLOAD ENTRY MATERIALS via the JOTFORM on our website submission page: airdgallery.org/submissions. 300 DPI jpegs no larger than 1.5 MB with proper naming: last name, first name, title, size (hxw), date, price. Example: Smith, John, “My Beautiful Tulips”, needlepoint, 30cm x 20cm, 2018, $350.

ENTRY FEE: The non-refundable entry fee of $50 is to be paid when you submit your jpegs. Pay via on-line banking using INTERAC E-Transfer to director@airdgallery.org. This fee covers entry of up to two works per artist and helps our not-for-profit gallery create an online exhibition/art book and to continue delivering diverse and excellent exhibitions.

DEADLINE: Midnight Monday May 25, 2020. Selected artists will be notified by May 31, 2020. Aird will facilitate online sales and asks for a 30% donation to the gallery. The artist and buyer will coordinate shipping.

Aird Gallery will host a fabulous closing event on Friday July 17, 2020 in our virtual garden, or if possible in our actual garden at 906 Queen Street West, Toronto. Entry Details found here: airdgallery.org/submissions/

Be part of our ‘book.’ All accepted artworks will be published online (+print) to showcase and share (forever) the
love within you in our gay garden.

Entry fee: $50.00 fee covers entry of up to 2 works per artist and helps our not-for-profit gallery create an online exhibition/art book.

Entry Details found here: airdgallery.org/submissions/ About the Online Exhibition/Art Book:
Can a garden be gay ? Can a flower be lesbian ?
Can a tree be LGBTQ2IPA ?

Gay Gardens is inspired by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist, who published Systema Naturae in 1735. The book describes his method of naming and classifying plants based on their sexual organs and sexual actions. Society was shocked and embarrassed by the botanical orgies happening in their back yards. A woman has sex with six different men, in the lily flower’s arrangement of pistils and stamens. The virtuous canna is monogamous with one husband and one wife. Ferns and mosses keep their sex organs hidden and their marriages too.

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Aird Gallery wants your submissions for our upcoming online art exhibition. Send us up to 3 jpegs of your work, old or new. We encourage contents such as: botany, sexuality, wilderness, gender, flowers, orientation, landscapes, transitions, gardening, the birds and the bees, and other representations. We encourage mediums such as: drawing, quilting, painting, pyrography, needlepoint, photography, ceramic, weaving, printmaking, beading, sculpture, video, performance, and etc. Our jury of gay garden experts, Jowenne Herrera and curator Patrick DeCoste, will select their favorites to be included in our online exhibition/art book which will go on view June 25, 2020.

1. Andrea Wulf, The Brother Gardeners, Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession. (London: Windmill Books, 2009). 2. Call for entry image: Ladies Morning Dress, Louis de Carmontelle, 1771, colour engraving

Jurors:
Jowenne Carpo Herrera is a visual artist and designer who works with various media integrating painting, drawing, illustration, photography and typography. Many of his works depict subjects drawn from nature and daily urban landscapes – experimenting with the dualities and tensions between identities, societies and idealisms. He thrives in the diversity of thought – inspired by the many things he sees, feels and experiences everyday. He is a Registered Graphic Designer of Ontario (RGD) and Certification Portfolio Evaluator for the association. He owns ABAKADA design + communication, and for over 20 years has been delivering creative design solutions across public, private and not for profit sectors – specializing in brand development, editorial design and graphic illustration. He served as John B. Aird Gallery Chair/President and Director in Toronto for over 10 years. In his spare time, he abandons the digital world and gardens, cooks and runs a lot.

Patrick DeCoste is an award-winning Toronto-based visual artist who studied fine arts at Mount Allison University. He has exhibited extensively in Toronto, as well as New York City and beyond. The Globe and Mail calls him ‘a young old master’ and Los Angeles writer Chris Kraus in C-Magazine describes his painting as ‘heroic and musty, strange and disturbing’. He was awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2011.

Through his art he explores Indigenous histories and his Nova Scotia Métis roots. In 2014, he received the President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies from OCADU, where he completed an Interdisciplinary MFA. His recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Galerie Youn, Montreal 2014; Station Gallery, Whitby 2015. This past year DeCoste was awarded grants from The Canada Council for the Arts for the production of new works, from The Ontario Arts Council’s Aboriginal Artists in Schools program and from the Toronto Arts Council for his 13 Moons and A Canoe exhibit. When not in the city, Patrick spends time at his studio on Georgian Bay, near Lafontaine, canoeing with his dog Luca, and making art in the forest.

Google Sibling Abandons Ambitious City of the Future in Toronto

a bit of the New York Times article on the projects stoppage.

Maria Street had an additional incentive for relocation. By the early 1900s, a building project was developed by Gaffeny and Casselman. The aim was to create a co-operative housing and employment plan whereby each resident would buy a house on the street and would commit hours of labour to build others. In exchange, the buyers would be provided with jobs at a new needleworks being built nearby.
text source, Ontario Jewish Archives.

Joseph Alexandroff

Joseph Alexandroff describes how many immigrant Jewish families came to live on Maria Street because of housing incentives. Interviewer: Diana Fancher. Ontario Jewish Archives, July 17, 1987, Oral History #AC-199.

click link below to hear this audio hosted at the Ontario Jewish Archives.

Windows Media – High Bandwidth

Pint of Science is an international festival organizing public talks in bars since 2013. The Canadian chapter was created in 2016 in Québec and took place in 25 cities across the country in 2019. More than 300 scientists and 7 000 curious people joined us last year. 

To register go to this link and scroll down to Monday May 11.

Thirsty for knowledge? Every year, Pint of Science Canada brings scientists and the public together in local pubs. For the 2020 edition, the international science outreach festival is breaking new ground, hosting talks online on May 11-13rd to celebrate its 5th birthday.

What would it be like to live on Mars? How can chemistry help us to make better whisky? Are birds actually dinosaurs? These are just some of the questions that researchers will answer during Pint of Science Canada 2020. Over 3 consecutive days, researchers will present their latest discoveries online so audiences can learn and enjoy a drink safely at home. ‘’Our goal is to make science accessible to everyone, by making it fun and interactive. We had to innovate this year to keep the festival running! This was a great opportunity for us to include scientists from all over the country as well as Canadians living abroad’’, explains Alexandra Gellé, Director of Pint of Science Canada and a PhD student at McGill University.

With multiple events to choose from every evening, the festival mingles all areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and includes speakers from more remote areas. Sebastian Jones from Yellowstone Conservation Initiative will talk about preservation of wetlands in the Yukon and Dr. Brian Wagner from Prince Edward Island will explore fluorescent molecules in our everyday life. The full program is online now.

About Pint of Science: Pint of Science is a non-profit organization which quickly took off around the world since its creation in 2013 in the UK. In 2019, 397 cities worldwide organized events, gathering more than 140,000 participants. Quench your thirst for knowledge this year by joining one of 54 virtual presentations organized by Pint of Science Canada 2020!

This decades underused storefront, now with a bridal salon  is one of the last original facades of the Junction.  The greatness of the Junction now having a bridal salon brings ones mind back to the 70’s when the junction had one of top Zbridal salons in the city.

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It is 1908. A lone man stepped onto Canadian soil. An immigrant determined to bring his family one by one from Russia. The Anshel Wise agency helped him, as they had others, to bring these loved ones over one by one.

Unafraid of doing what needs doing they found success in junkyards. One of the children had worked in one as a laborer. Now they opened their own on Maria Street, the same street where they lived in three of the homes. This was in the days that the Junction was called “Muddy York” circa 1915.

Avoiding idleness the mother made stocks of bread, preserves and pickles. This hard work would see their family through the winter. More than that they were known for sharing with the other struggling Jewish families on their Maria Street. Sara Patlick recalled there was no antisemitism in the Junction.

In those days the “jitney”, not streetcar, took you by right home for five cents. You had to be careful getting out as the mud cames “up to your ears”. Electronics like cars, radios nor televisions were around. Instead home entertainment centered around a gramophone, later versions being known as a record player. For a quarter dollar you could pay to have a piano in your home. After school many children tapped away on the keys taking piano lessons. Peretz Shul on Beverley St (first on Crawford) organized concerts and dances. If you wanted to get into a picture show you pulled a nickel out of your pocket.

Aware of their international origins families formed organization where by doing things together they could keep their cultural identity alive. Among the various charity works were efforts for Bloorview Hospital, Princess Margaret, Sick Children’s, Mount Sinai, Jewish Blind, Syrian Jews and emergency funds for the state of Israel.

Among the works was a little house on Maria Street that was the first Junction Shul founded circa 1918, around the end of World War One. When the Shul building became to small they relocated to the present day Junction Shul.

The story of people who combine the finest of being Canadian and being an active party of their original culture.

Researched by Junctioneer, parsed by Laxson.

full sound and transcript from where this short article was adapted at the Ontario Jewish Archives,

search.ontariojewisharchives.org/List?q=Sara+Patlick&p=1&ps=50&objectType_facet=sound+recording