Art class

Art Gallery of Ontario, March 2016

I HATE WINTER. Which is why, having two hours to myself on Saturday mornings while my daughter was at art class, I didn't head out onto the streets with my camera but haunted the Art Gallery of Ontario for the last couple of months. Not that it was a particularly brutal winter, but I simply wasn't made for the cold.

It's hard to believe that I didn't even know my hometown had a major municipal art gallery until well into my teens; for some reason it was never a destination on school field trips and, apparently, not the sort of place my family went. It's very different now - we have a family membership and daughter #2 is a big fan of their cartooning classes, so we spend a lot of time, together and apart, in the galleries at the AGO, behind the glass carapace and blue metal skin of Frank Gehry's recent renovation.

Art Gallery of Ontario, winter 2016

There's art on the walls, of course, but it's hard not to look at the rooms themselves, and every space, as something worth contemplating. I always feel a bit self-conscious in the scant handful of rooms - sometimes just one, big white space - in private galleries, but there's something really freeing about a maze of galleries, frequently reconfigured, and the little game of running across the same group of fellow gallery-goers and security guards the longer you linger there.

I couldn't help but turn my camera on them. My new Fuji X-30 has been a godsend, especially since I can not only set it up to shoot 1:1 square format like my beloved Rolleiflex but, thanks to a pivoting LCD screen on the back, I can shoot it waist level, with a completely silent shutter as it's mirrorless.

Art Gallery of Ontario, winter 2016

I love living in a big city.

Art Gallery of Ontario, Feb. 2016