January 4, 2024

Happy New Year, my friends!

I've been reflecting on 2023 and all the amazing art I had the privilege to create and show. For those of you who don't know, I spent many years working in the film industry, trying (but rarely succeeding) to balance film work with art work. The pandemic was a real wake-up call for me. I didn't realize how skewed that balance had become and how much of myself I had given up for the film world. I made the very scary decision to not go back and commit 100% of myself to my art. I've had to hustle 1000 times as hard and in 2023 I started seeing the results of that hustle.

This year I participated in:
Fourteen gallery shows including two solo exhibits
Showed work in four countries
Had art in Nuit Blanche, The Artist Project, Fashion Art Toronto, Do West Fest, the Geary Art Crawl, Trampoline Hall, and The Other Art Fair in New York City
Made two big, interactive, pun-based treasure hunts
Live-painted at four festivals/events
Had so many studio visits
And painted sixteen murals. Sixteen!

Let's look back at some of the highlights.

I kicked off the year with a bang at Northern Contemporary Gallery with "The Art of Intervention: The collective urban interventions of Shari Kasman, Martin Reis and Stephanie Avery". The show was half retrospective of our collective mischief-making and half showroom for our Parkdale Provincial Park project.

2023 was the year of the mural! After spending the summer of 2022 honing my skills in my playhouse project, an abandoned building I had permission to practice spray painting in, and a project for which I received a Canada Council for the Arts skill development grant, I really hit the ground running! I painted sixteen of my own murals this year, four of which were international, plus assisted on some other awesome projects, plus did a bunch of fun live painting.
See all the murals here.

I particularly love designing my interactive paint-by-number murals. I rarely get the opportunity to create these, which is a darn shame because people love painting them SO MUCH. I couldn't have been happier when the Boys and Girls Club/Hershey's Canada approached me to design one for Pink Shirt Day. Here's some very cute press with the mural in full swing.

It was a great year for puns. I organized a pun workshop/round-table pun competition and ran two big pun-based treasure hunts: Walking in a Winter Punderland, a winter-themed treasure hunt for the Geary Winter Art Crawl, and Here Comes the Pun, a music-themed treasure hunt for the Wavelength Summer Thing. See the whole musical treasure hunt here!

I was particularly honoured to have my large AdHack paintings included in Fashion Art Toronto. This body of work can be critical of the nefarious aspects of the fashion industry and I really respected that FAT was open to including them in their ongoing conversation about fashion, art and self-expression.

In 2022 I made 'Showroom' for the Geary Art Crawl. It was an interactive art installation about culture and gentrification that was an open-air condo showroom made out of salvaged wooden condo ads. 'Showroom' managed to be poignant, funny and functional. In 2023 I remounted the project not once but twice! 'A Cave in the City' was a three-person show at La Mashu Artspace that contrasted an old Toronto in which artists were able to thrive with a dystopian future-Toronto in which culture and creativity can no longer afford to exist. In a sad and ironic twist that was La Mashu's final show. Right before it started they were given notice that their building had been sold and their rent was tripling. On the other end of the spectrum I also exhibited 'Showroom' at Nuit Blanche, Toronto's annual all-night art spectacular. As one of the city's flagship art events, it attracts over a million visitors and shows the importance (and profitability) of the arts. Yet, despite branding itself as a city that supports the arts, it is increasingly difficult for artists to live here.

Speaking of development and gentrification, I teamed back up with my Parkdale Provincial Park crew to create an intervention about just that. Not too far from me there's a little street full of houses that have been emptied and boarded up for some massive new condos. We painted silhouettes depicting the departed residents going about their everyday lives. Not exactly a critique of redevelopment but, rather, a question of access, equity, and what happens to communities when they are wrenched apart to make way for developers. The project garnered quite a bit of press including finally getting an article (that slightly missed the point) in the much coveted Toronto Sun

For years now people have been telling me I need to get my AdHack paintings to the States. So I did! In November I took to the road and showed my work at The Other Art Fair in New York City. TOAF is all about featuring awesome, unconventional art work so not only did I fit right in, I was in amazing company. I had a fantastic time, met some awesome people and got me some American art credibility.

Which finally brings me to one of my coolest projects of the year, my new lenticular prints. People always want to know what my ad paintings looked like before I added my improvements. Now, thanks to the magic of science, they can! Tilt the lenticulars from side to side and they'll transform before your very eyes. I made them for New York City and they were a huge success! And now I've finally put them in my website shop. Here's a link to see the transformations in action.

Thus concludes the highlights of an awesome year that was full of art! I can't wait to see what 2024 brings.

Love, 

Stephanie