Junk Food | About Face Installation at Gladstone Grow Op

First rendering of Junk Food: An Urban Foodscape

 In an email exchange last week, one of our project partners appropriately opened with the sentiment that she'd "usually say something about the awesome spring weather and the beginning of garden prep" but that she would refrain, sad face. On that cold, windy, grey day, we felt a little sad face-y too. Looking out the window, it was hard to imagine containers overflowing with ripe veggies any time soon.

We've got our happy faces on with this sunshine today, but we've actually been prepping to plant for weeks (well, for months really, but seedlings are in at the greenhouse!). We've got all sorts of exciting plans for this season to tell you about soon enough (one big exciting one in particular!) but let's start with the first: Gladstone Grow Op.

We're really, very excited to be working with the Gladstone on an installation piece for their inaugural four-day show, Grow Op: Exploring landscape and place. If you've ever been to the Gladstone's amazing, annual Come Up to My Room event, you'll have a rough idea of what to expect. Grow Op follows a similar format, inviting artists and designers to realize their visions within the walls of the historic hotel. The show "will facilitate a cross-disciplinary forum for landscape, garden design, art and place making within the vibrant setting of Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood".

The Gladstone's contribution to local art and their commitment to sustainability made fans of us long ago. Now that we've had a few planning sessions with the Grow Op crew, we're even more smitten.

Our installation, Junk Food is a collaboration between illustrator, artist and About Face art director, Lauren Pirie, multi-disciplinary artist and designer, Mahmood Popal, our own garden coordinator, Natalie Boustead, and SKETCH. It touches on themes of urban food production, food security, sustainable design and Toronto heritage and identity. The "urban foodscape"  is being built using salvaged materials, and home-made milk paint and will grow crops like lettuce and peas.

Watch our blog and the Gladstone Bag for more progress shots and join us from April 25 - 28 at the Grow Op!

Natalie and Mahmood disassembling salvaged materials at HUNTCLUB Studio

Translating the design digitally

Natalie whipping up some milk paint

Gary Taxali Makes Money! (Literally...)

Gary Taxali for the Royal Canadian Mint, via National Post

Good on the Royal Canadian Mint for this one: Today marks the release of a set of six special occasion coins designed by Toronto-based artist and illustrator, Gary Taxali (of whom we're big fans). In this CBC video, Alexander Reeves explains "the retro pop art look is cool and it's hip and that's what the Royal Canadian Mint wants to identify with." Who knew?

Of course, we love what Taxali made of the project. We're also pretty stoked on his view that "the best way to represent a wedding in Canada is to show the love between two people, regardless of gender". The product is "two rings intertwined and in love". Cute.

I mean, we're usually somewhat excited to get money, but especially today.

"Oh Canada" coin via Art Daily

New Design! | Squab

 

Remember these lovely and entertaining Wishlist posters from our Greenhouse Gallery show? They were printed locally on 100% Recycled paper using a waterless UV process and VOC-free inks and created by our friends at Squab.

Creative Director Tammy Yiu and crew have just moved into new digs in Liberty Village. In between setting up the new stude and feverishly designing away, they've found a bit of time to start posting some recent work on their lovely site. Check it out! (Challenge: hit refresh on their homepage a couple times and just tryyy not to get sucked in).

Packaging for soup and bread roll for Portaselo Fine Foods

Identity for new Canadian-made outerwear company

Pure Green Zine, Money!

How the h it's taken this long for us to discover Pure Green Mag, we do not know. But now we know! Yeah yeah, you're like "Pff, Pure Green's only been like the coolest sustainable ish for the last year, don't you read the internet?"

Sapna's DIY fun!

So we read the internet today, and it told us that our good friend Sapna had contributed one of her many talents (not that one) to the DIY instructional of this mystery magazine. Intrigue! After some link-clicking and about an hour of the afternoon spent staring at its pretty pages via the computer screen, we'd discovered that PG is a refreshingly stylish Canadian green living and design mag. This issue has a cover featuring a babe with a bike (10 points), articles on Montreal vintage hunting, book binding, organic recipes (um, blue cheese beet cakes with hot pepper cream whuut! 100 points) fruit and veggies preserving and for that extra win with my heart strings, an interview and lovely photo spread of the Algonquin Park Lodge owned by my childhood camp owners (a lot of points).

We also really like their mandate to "have, a strong undercurrent of handmade culture; it supports small businesses and features green designers from around the world. We are very passionate in our views on green living, and don't for one second think that living green means sacrificing style." I don't know how many points that all adds up to, but probably at least a million. We're excited to kick back with a print version coming soon. For now, if you have some time to kill, do it here.