The Whippersnapper Gallery, in it’s College Street manifestation, was the venue for so many awesome music and theatre performances, art exhibitions and forums. I had wondered what happened to it: Another fallen art space? Then one day it reappeared in a new location on Dundas Street near Chinatown and Kensington Market.
The new location has a slightly different mandate, focusing on the work of new generation Canadian visual, new media, and performance artists. What is interesting about this space is how compact and easily viewable it is — like a glass box — a massive display case. During operating hours the public can enter to engage more intimately with gallery works, however, the street alone gives a great vantage point and walk-by traffic can’t help but notice. At 130 sq. ft, exhibiting artists are forced to interact with the space. The Whippersnapper co-directors, Adrian Dilena and Josh Barndt, say that they are very interested in site-sensitive art, installations, video projections, and other media that work with the space’s constraints.
Whippersnapper has been able to reinvent itself thanks to small but consistent funding from the Ontario Arts Council, good for them and us!