A New Beginning
Expressions of Hope, Rejuvenation & Community
A New Beginning is an art walk across Cabbagetown featuring the work of a selection of local, notable artists. Centered around the themes of community, hope, and rejuvenation, these works are meant to highlight our resilience and help us keep going, together.
Check out the map to make sure you visit each of the installations. Please remember to follow all physical distancing guidelines when viewing the work.
If you would like to purchase artwork, please contact the artist directly.
— Contributing Artists —
Darryl Mabey
Located at: 237 Carlton St
On display now at the Cabbagetown BIA office
Darryl is a Digital Artist and a Cabbagetown resident with over 14 years experience in the creative industry. Getting creative and bringing people joy with his colourful designs is one of his favourite passions.
In this piece, “Patch Love”, the greenery of the iconic cabbage symbolizes the blooming of a new season and the eclectic, bright energy of Cabbagetown. The variety in the colours and sizing of the individual letters of the typography further reflect and celebrate our diversity as a community.
Bareket Kezwer
@bkez
Previously located at: 516 Parliament St
Bareket is a Toronto based muralist, community engaged artist and facilitator, curator, cultural producer, creative director, graphic designer, frequent collaborator and eternal optimist. Her multidisciplinary practice is motivated by a desire to spread joy, cultivate individual and collective gratitude, celebrate the power of kindness and compassion, and support the growth of inclusive and connected communities.
It's easy to lose perspective around change, healing or growth and feel stagnant or totally unstable. We may fall into the trap of seeing success as a defining moment, instead of paying attention to the series of small choices that add up over time. It's easy to overemphasize one monumental moment and overlook the thousands of daily moments that got you there. Gains accumulate over time, but each day might not look that different. It's often only with months or years that the change becomes visible. It's easy to give up when we don't see success quickly enough and I want to remind people to keep going.
Julie Amlin
Previously located at: 570 Parliament St
Julie Amlin is a Toronto-based artist and muralist who feels deep reverence for the way colour can create playfulness in the otherwise mundane. She believes this innate power can be better harnessed to improve emotional well-being in both private and public spaces. Underlying themes of nature and sacred connectedness intermingle in her work as she questions the lens of perception through which we categorize reality vs imagination. What materializes are delightfully blurred lines between categories such as Impressionist, Abstract, and Contemporary Art. Julie aims to awaken your inner child by rejecting monotony and inviting collective curiosity and exploration through art.
”Human Connection” - From deep within the rubble, it is reaching for the surface, biding its time to emerge again, bigger and brighter and more exuberant than ever. The magic of human connection. We will unite again with each other- we will intertwine in the beauty of life, the way we once did, but with new depth. For then we will have known the feeling of solitude like never before. We will remember the uncertainty within the rubble where we once found ourselves lonely and longing and take great joy in the light of a new day upon our ready faces.
Julia Prajza
Located at: 233 Carlton St
On display now
Julia is a one-woman-creative-team in Toronto with a focus on motivational messages and vibrant colours. An OCAD University graduate and maximalist at heart, her aim is to bring more joy and positivity into the world.
Creating intrigue with her detailed murals and whimsical lettering, Julia loves to transport people to another time or place – when life moved slower and we were able to pause and appreciate the beauty in nature, art, and life itself.
"Grow wild and free" was born as homage to Toronto’s wildflowers, representing the rejuvenation of new seasons and welcoming the regrowth of flora in our urban environment. I would like to celebrate these unique plants, that are often seen as undesirable weeds, and paint them larger than life, to inspire others to look forward to the spring season and all the natural life and beauty that comes with it.
Karen Roberts
Previously located at: 200 Carlton St
Through dance, Karen Roberts developed a fascination with the body and its ability to move in weird and wonderful ways. She paints using acrylic, latex, and aerosol, on paper, canvas, or walls, to portray movement, moments of transitions, being off balance, falling, recovery, and growth. She often finds inspiration in ecology, the environment, and site-specific surroundings.
Karen chooses to create art that can be seen and appreciated by the public, free and accessible to anyone - bringing beauty to neighborhoods or neglected areas of town. She enjoys working with communities to engage them in the process of change, establishing personal connections and developing a sense of pride in their neighborhood.
She is a practising multi-disciplinary visual artist exhibiting murals, painting, photography, sculpture, pottery, and mixed media pieces. Karen has created public art for the City of Toronto, King St. Pilot, streetARToronto, Artscape, Bell Box Program and private organizations. She has exhibited at Art in the Park, Danforth East Art Fair, Barns Art Market, Artscape, Bata Shoe Museum, Female Eye Film Festival, Contact, Snap, and Dance Ontario. She also shoots and exhibits still photography.
Born in Toronto, she practices in the GTA. Karen graduated from Central Technical 3-year Adult Art, Ryerson Photography and Humber College Audio/Visual Technology Programs.
Dove, is an Op Art digital design that creates the sensation of movement through optical illusion. The dove is an international symbol of hope. Blue is the colour of hope. Spring is a time of hope, rebirth, growth, and renewal. During this difficult, trying time of the pandemic, we hold on to hope. A time of healing is on the horizon.
Laura Gallo
Previously located at: 223 Carlton St
Laura is a local artist in the process of finding her creative voice. She has worked in Cabbagetown for 8 amazing years at Claudia Salzmann and Associates as an RMT. Her passions lie in art, movement, energy and healing. In 2020, she started me.bygallo to share her art pieces to spark joy and happiness to others. She loves working with magazines that will be tossed away and transforming the pages into something new.
A cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a cup of cocoa. You hear those words and they make your heart warm up , glow and feel comforted. Each one of us brings our own beauty that grows when we are supported and loved. “12 cups” represents what we CAN be when we come together, share our energy and bring each other up. We walk away better people. We grow unique flowers that are beautiful no matter the size, colour or shape. These pieces are an experience of 12 different people having a drink together and becoming who they are supposed to be.
Eric Farache
Previously located at: 419 Parliament St
Eric graduated from OCAD (’94) with time spent in Florence, Italy, and went on to complete a MFA from the University of Leeds(’00). He has proudly had a studio in Cabbagetown for the past 15 years, focusing on photography, watercolour, and oil painting, all the while producing elaborate sketchbooks.
In the print, Just Another Rock N’ Roll Band, Farache’s introduces the viewer to their artistic practice of sketching people from such locations as cafes, bars and clubs to create a fuller view of the world around us rather than idealized artist models in a static setting. We get the sense of the fun jam session that is playing out in warm colours and we are reminded of the events we hope to return to in the near future.
The photograph, Poppies, was created using a Holga Camera, an affordable film based plastic camera. The Holga presents many challenges- light leaks, poor quality lens and you do not look directly through the lens. However, these challenges make the camera an opportunity and using professional sized film gives the user a lot of flexibility to create and explore. This image was created with multiple exposures at the time of shooting. The only Photoshop used is for colour balancing and to clean the negative of dust. The image reminds the viewer of the peaceful and healing quality of nature, how nature inspires hope in us all and the poppy’s symbol of memory and redemption.
Aidan Ferreira
Previously located at: 419 Parliament St
Aidan Ferreira is a Toronto based artist and OCADU Alumni who has lived in the city’s East end for the majority of his life. After taking a nearly decade long hiatus from art, he decided to pick up the brush and come back to creating art, which was his first passion.
His submission for the Cabbagetown Winter Art Walk is his piece named, “Life, Uh, Finds a Way”. It is 18"x24" and is acrylic paint on birch. The theme of the piece rejuvenation and growth, and depicts both the aesthetically beautiful aspects of nature as well as what some would consider less pleasant. The piece uses these different components to form the shape of a heart, symbolizing the life energy that is, or once was a part of each feature. The core of the heart is exposed geode, which represents that beauty is not just on the surface, but something that needs to be revealed to be appreciated.
Many of the elements are references taken from photos of Torontonian wildlife which the artist gathered while on various urban nature walks with his family.
Moira Ness
Previously located at: 419 Parliament St
Moira Ness is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Toronto. She makes conceptually-driven work concerned with relentless archiving, pattern generation, and tracing comprehensive lines through her own personal history. Data mining her collection of personal correspondences and connections, Moira creates confessional and romanticized text.
This piece is part of a body of work entitled "Maladaptations". Maladaptations is a series of minimalistic text-based paintings. This piece sticks out because it is unusually hopeful compared to most of her past work. The rest of the series leans towards more solemn lines of text, which makes this painting an even more important part of this series. To Moira, it is about a personal relationship, but the sentiment of the text can be applied to endless situations, even the monumental task of addressing COVID-19 itself.
If you would like to purchase Moira’s work, please contact her directly.
Kira Duff
Previously located at: 419 Parliament St
Kira Duff is an emerging artist who has lived in Cabbagetown for the past 8 years.
Her paintings, “The Stories We Make” are influenced by our time in isolation and the lack of human contact and touch. At the same time, they stand for hope as they reach for something beyond their grasp—a new light or opportunity. Hands tell stories about people, where they have been, what they have touched, and are often marked and scarred with many of life's experiences. And these hands reflect a search for hope and represent the community coming together and helping one another in today's uncertain times
If you would like to purchase any of Kira’s pieces please contact her directly.