YYZ Artists Outlet

Artist Talk: Zinnia Naqvi
2024-03-22 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Please join us at the gallery on Mar. 22 at 7 PM to participate in conversation with Zinnia Naqvi and Zehra Nawab on the occasion of Zinnia’s exhibition the person you don’t see in this image is me, the camera person.
Zehra Nawab is a multidisciplinary artist working in documentary-film, journalism, illustration and theatre. She is the writer and co-director of the documentary ‘Home Truths,’ exhibited as part of the travelling ‘Making Heimet’ exhibit from the Venice Biennale. Zehra is the recipient of the Agahi Award, Journalist of the Year 2016: Reporting on Culture, for the Herald magazine cover-story ‘Seeking Paradise’. She has also co-directed the experimental documentary-film ‘Mad Mad Mad Film World’ which screened at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. She is presently collaborating with Pat The Dog theatre on writing ‘The Vintage Project.’ As an illustrator she has most notably designed the cover for ‘Sita Under the Crescent Moon’ published by Simon & Schuster In. She has also illustrated for the Registry Theatre and for The New Quarterly. Zehra is the top 3 finalist in the Best Local Artist category of the Waterloo Record Readers’ Choice Awards.

Zinnia Naqvi (she/her) is a lens-based artist working in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, social class and citizenship through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her artworks often invite the viewer to consider the position of the artist and the spectator, as well as analyze the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera.
Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Whippersnapper Gallery in Toronto, C’cap in Winnipeg, Dazibao and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal. She is a 2022 Fall Flaherty/Colgate Filmmaker in Residence and recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Naqvi is member of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group, an inter-generational feminist collective. Naqvi received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
Presented in partnership with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC).

Opening: Sat. Sept. 21, 1PM - 4PM
2024-09-21 13:00 - 16:00 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Join us on Saturday for the opening of our Fall exhibitions:
In the Y gallery we are presenting work by Miranda Bellay & Amanda Fauteux with Colleen Coco Collins.
In the Z gallery artist Eunice Luk is exhibiting new work developed during her summer residency.
kaya joan is our annual mural artist presenting a new commissioned work.

Colleen Coco Collins: Live Reading
2024-10-04 18:00 - 19:00 | Ontario
Please join us Fri. Oct. 4 at 6PM for a live poetry reading by Colleen Coco Collins as part of the exhibition Radicant currently on view. Coco collaborated with artists Miranda Bellamy & Amanda Fauteux in this video installation by writing, and performing, thirteen poems in response to a collection of Brendel botanical models composed in a virtual environment. The Brendel Company (Berlin late 1880s-1920s) made detailed models of plants and fungi from papier-mâché, glass beads, gelatin, and feathers. They were purchased as teaching tools by institutions worldwide. The written works are layered poems investigating histories across time, plant mysteries and experimental revelations, personal narratives, universal growth, and the phenomenons of decay and rejuvenation.
Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

Nuit Blanche: 7PM-12AM
2024-10-05 19:00 - 2024-10-06 00:00 | Ontario
We are open for Nuit Blanche from 7PM-12AM!
The building is full of art lovers that night, so come and join us.

Book Launch: The Prophets, Richard Igbhy & Marilou Lemmens
2024-11-25 18:00 - 20:00 | Guido Mollinai Foundation, 3290 St. Catherine Street East, Montreal, Quebec, H1W 2C6, Canada
Join us for the double launch of two publication by Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy, The Prophets and The Power Given to Abstractions That Make Us Stupid. Marie-Eve Beaupré, Director of the Foundation, will discuss the duo’s work, focusing on the central element of both publications: abstraction.
The Guido Molinari Foundation was privileged to welcome Richard and Marilou for a residency in winter 2022, culminating in the exhibition In the MIlk of Facts, There Always Lands a Fly. To build on the connections between our resident artists, we will take the opportunity to introduce the artists who will be in residence at the Foundation in winter 2025: Jean-Maxime Dufresne and Virginie Laganière. They will be revealing the subject of their research-creation residency in an exclusive discussion with Camille Bédard, Associate Curator of the Foundation.
Edited by Ana Bajaras, The Prophets: Richard Igbhy & Marilou Lemmens (YYZBOOKS, 2024) focuses on Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’ seminal work The Prophets (2013-2015), a delicate handmade collection of 412 small, whimsical sculptures made from everyday materials that renders economic graphs into makeshift models. In this work, the artists explore what it means to move from a material world of entangled, interacting agents to a world of mathematical modelling and graphical abstraction. The Prophets cuts across a wide range of historical and contemporary topics of interest to economists such as labour, consumption, production, taxes, savings, investments, credit and so on, to constitute a diagrammatology of economic thought. The book includes texts by Peggy Gale (independent curator, author and editor), Sven Lütticken (critic and art historian), Harro Maas (economist and professor), Marina Roy (artist and author) and Jakub Zdebik (professor and art historian).
Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens create sculptures, videos, installations, public artworks, and artist books. Combining rigorous research with a material exploration that is specific to each project, their practice questions issues at the intersection of ecology, economy, epistemology, and history. For several years, they have examined the history of science and other forms of knowledge, including the language of economy, the magic of statistics, the capacity for models to impact the future, the aesthetics of data visualization, and the design of laboratory experiments. More recently, their work seeks to expand concepts of hospitality, care, and interspecies communication.
In addition to their individual practices, Jean-Maxime Dufresne and Virginie Laganière have been collaborating as a duo for some twenty years. Anthropological in nature, their artistic research focuses on the transformations of our built, natural, and technological territories, with a particular sensitivity to the human psyche. At the confluence of documentary, fictional and speculative approaches, their work with image and sound aims to interrogate various realities to reveal minor narratives. Their approach is primarily guided by field research, conceptual thinking and investigative processes deployed during residencies, which include collaboration with stakeholders from multiple horizons. Through the telescoping of diverse phenomena, their artistic production translates into protean installations that create a fertile dialogue in the arrangement of research material. In order to explore their experiential and critical scope, a reflection on the staging of the photographic and videographic image runs through all their exhibitions, integrating sound art, sculptural elements and architectural devices.

Holiday Open House
2024-11-28 17:00 - 20:00 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Start and finish your shopping at 401 Richmond this festive season. Explore 5 floors of galleries, shops, a licenced café, and 25+ open creative studios. Find artworks, objects, books, toys, clothing, accessories, cards and much more.

Winter Open House
2025-01-17 18:00 - 20:00 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Please join us on Friday January 17 from 6-8PM at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, a contemporary art gallery and art book press, for a recognition event in honour of the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) as supporters of YYZ through their Resilient Communities Fund grant. Remarks will be given at 6:30PM by Chris Glover, MPP for Spadina-Fort York.
Our organization received a generous Resilient Communities Fund grant to help us build our resilience and sustainability by re-designing our website into an interactive and accessible platform to deliver online programming that will engage and grow our community sustainably. To mark the near completion of the project, we will open our doors to the public for an evening of art and conversation. This digital upgrade will help us reach our community as we maneuver a post- Covid landscape that is now largely remote. We have hired new staff to produce online content and have procured the necessary equipment to do so. We have engaged with digital artists and designers to rebuild our online presence in a way that is engaging and clearly focused. These upgrades will continue to serve our community for years to come.
On view, we will make available the initial audio project from artist Josh Thorpe as part of our re-designed digital platform. We will also have visual works on display from Toronto-based artists James Rollo, Ella Gonzales, and Henrjeta Mece.

Artist Talk: James Rollo
2025-03-21 19:00 - 2025-04-01 21:00 | Ontario
Please join James Rollo and Philip Leonard Ocampo in conversation in response to Rollo’s first Canadian solo exhibition “I let the intrusive thoughts win” at YYZ Artists’ Outlet. The accompanying essay, “Intrusive Thoughts Galore” is written by Ocampo. Ranging anywhere between a skin-deep peek to an in-depth probe, the talk will dive into Rollo’s themes of “queering”, humour, and object/space intervention.

The discussion begins at 7pm on April 1st (fittingly on April Fools Day—but please be rest assured this is actually happening. Or is it? I don’t know. I’m just a blurb).

We will see you then! (Or will we?!)

Artist Talk: Henrjeta Mece
2025-03-26 12:00 - 13:30 | OISE, 252 Bloor St W, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6, Canada
Art, Research and Life Practices: Invited Panel & lunch
Please join us for our next CMCE Invited Speaker Series!

Affective Detours: In-Between Art, Research, and Life Practices
Location: OISE, Room 12-252 (Hybrid: In-person & Zoom)

Lunch provided | Space is limited. RSVP now here
You can also join via Zoom. The link will be emailed to registrants.
Discussion topics include:

The myth of solitude in research and the intersections of life, research, and work
Challenging rigid domains in artistic methodologies
Exploring the commonalities between artists, social scientists, and scientists
How “unprofessionalism” disrupts traditional research and artistic practices

INVITED SPEAKERS
Lisa Steele – UT Professor Emeritus, and pioneering artist in video, photography, and performance, Steele has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, and beyond. Dr. Steele co-founded Vtape, a national distribution service for independent video, and established the Graduate Program in Visual Studies at U of T.

Ana Barajas – Director of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Barajas has organized over 100 exhibitions. With expertise in sculpture, installation, and modern art history, she is a leading voice in contemporary curating.

Henrjeta Mece – Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in Social Justice Education at OISE, U of T, Mece integrates artistic and research practices. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Zweigstelle Berlin, MOCA (TO), and ISCP.

The Centre for Media, Culture & Education Invited Speaker Series brings together thought leaders and artists from various disciplines to share their work in media, culture, and education. Through a range of talks and presentations, the series fosters meaningful dialogue on the role of media in shaping education, cultural literacy, and social justice. For further questions, contact:
Sara Rasikh, CMCE GA –

Art Crawl: Jake Kimble
2025-06-04 17:00 - 22:00 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
The Art Crawl began unofficially in the early 2000s and has been a staple of the Festival since 2012. Every year, imagineNATIVE collaborates with established and local artist-run galleries in downtown Toronto to present national and international exhibitions featuring Indigenous artists who push the boundaries and expectations of what Indigenous storytelling is.
imagineNATIVE is proud to partner with Vtape, Onsite Gallery, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Gallery 44, Collision Gallery, and Kent Monkman Studio for the 2025 Art Crawl.
At each gallery, you will have the opportunity to hear from the exhibition curators and attending artists. The talks are timed, and we keep a tight schedule, but you are welcome to return to the galleries after the talks are complete.
Thursday, June 5 | 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM
FREE, ticketed
Schedule
5:00 PM – 5:40 PM
Collision Gallery
30 Wellington St W, Suite G114
6:00 PM – 6:20 PM
Onsite Gallery
199 Richmond St W
6:45 PM – 7:05 PM
Gallery 44
401 Richmond St W, Suite 120
7:10 PM – 7:20 PM
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
401 Richmond St W, Suite 140
7:30 PM – 7:50 PM
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
401 Richmond St W, Suite 452
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Closing Reception:
A Celebration with Miss Chief Eagle Testickle!
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park

Lingering Service: A Panel Talk
2025-07-25 17:30 - 19:30 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Please join us at YYZ for a public program of Anran Guo: At Your Convenience with speakers Carlo Cesta, Lisa Neighbour and Anran Guo, moderated by Wang Zi.
This panel takes the exhibition At Your Convenience as a point of departure to explore how artists engage with domestic objects through acts of holding, altering, and remembering. The conversation will consider how material gestures carry emotional and political weight, negotiating the tension between care and abandonment. Panelists will reflect on technique as a form of meaning and on the complexities of working with objects that resist disappearance. Lingering Service asks how art can hold space for what lingers, for what remains unresolved, unrepaired, and insistently present.

Opening: Annie Wong & Juan Ortiz-Apuy
2025-09-19 18:00 - 20:00 | YYZ Artists’ Outlet, #140-401 Richmond St. W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
Please join us for the opening of two exhibitions: Annie Wong’s to hear all the sounds in the world and Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Coming to Grips.
In commemoration of Hungry Ghost Festival, the opening reception will be accompanied with a brief fire ceremony and performance by Sifu Julian Diego at sunset in the 401 courtyard as part of Annie Wong’s exhibition.

Art Toronto
2025-10-24 12:00 - 20:00 | Metro Toronto Convention Centre North Building, 255 Front St W, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 2W6, Canada
YYZ is at Art Toronto for the first time!
Since 1979, YYZ has supported visual arts in Canada by connecting audiences to local, national and international artists, and by championing critical, diverse, and experimental practices.
This year, we are making our debut at Art Toronto 2025 with a special 70/30 fundraising sale.
Artists will take 70% of the sale price, with the remaining 30% directly supporting YYZ’s operations and helping us to continue our long held mission of uplifting artists and their work.
The artists featured by YYZ at Art Toronto represent the past, present, and future of YYZ, including:

Daniel Borins & Jennifer Marman
Sandra Brewster
General Idea
Anran Guo
Insoon Ha
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
Aaron Jones
Micah Lexier
Julie Moon
Lisa Neighbour
Susy Oliveira & Sasha Pierce
Juan Ortiz-Apuy
Ed Pien
James Rollo
Derek Sullivan
Jacob Whibley
Annie Wong
Lan Yee
Z’otz* Collective
