BigArtTO at Piccininni Community Centre

^{Image: 'Group Movement' by Hamid Mohammadi}

BigArtTO featuring "Echoes of Community" by Kyle Yip, Hamid Mohammadi, Annwin Manitowabi, and Diego Gutierrez

Presented with Akin Projects

Wednesday October 27 - Saturday October 30, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm nightly.

How do collective and community rooted experiences radically reimagine art practices? How does ancestral knowledge of the past and the future inspire our making? What is revolutionary about community ties and how do we utilize those connections to upend oppressive systems? Akin is a Toronto-based arts organization that provides creative studio space as well as arts-based programming.

Kyle Yip @kyleyip
Kyle Yip is a Canadian, JUNO Award-Nominated hypersurrealist artist internationally recognized for his highly accurate creations of original visual art, electronic music, and films from his dreams. Since a 2006 Arts York Visual Arts Graduate Exhibition at Frederick Varley’s residence, Yip’s work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

Hamid Mohammadi @hamidxvi
Hamid is a current Akin Collective Member and actively practices art, architecture and design.  He has studied these three fields and they inform his creative work. He has shown his artwork at  exhibitions, galleries and group shows in Canada. His artwork addresses the essence of a subject  through minimal yet expressive form as it communicates a sense of positivity, optimism and  movement of figures in space. Hamid is inspired by daily life and views his artwork as a way to  send uplifting messages to himself others.

Annwin Manitowabi @annwinarts
"My art submission comes heavily inspired from my experiences having worked in corrections as an Indigenous Programmer. While working in a maximum detention center I began providing art supplies for Indigenous inmates as an opportunity to connect to culture through artistic expression. When the pandemic hit, in early 2020 during lockdown, I began using some supplies I had laying around from my program and somehow I began creating artwork of my own with zero training or experience. I have since left corrections and now have a full time art business while I enter my second year of Specialized Psychology. I plan to combine art with my degree and become a therapeutic art programmer for ex-military and veterans in the future."

Diego Gutierrez @gutierrez.gallery
"A New Canadian from Colombia, I am a fulltime painter. My art is the way through which I interact with the world and a conduit on which I rely to invite spectators to take a journey to explore it together. My paintings, reflecting feelings from personal experience, are an attempt to capture a world in motion and to keep its beauty alive for as long as possible through illusory representation. Paint is my passion, my being, my life, my very essence."

About BigArtTO: Explore Art Across The City

Experience art illuminated at BigArtTO, a city-wide public art celebration featuring free access to temporary public artworks projected onto local buildings and landmarks. Created by Toronto artists, the projections will play on a loop so that visitors can arrive at any time. Part of ShowLoveTO.

BigArtTO is the result of a collaboration between the City of Toronto with OCAD University and AVA Animation & Visual Arts Inc.

View all BigArtTO events here.