22 July 2017 1pm - 3pm

Mercer Union is pleased to present a billboard and City and Colour workshops with Jason Logan from Toronto Ink Company as part of Big on Bloor 2017. Celebrating 10 years, of local arts, culture and community, BIG on Bloor is a two-day summer event presented along a car-free stretch of Bloor Street West between Dufferin and Lansdowne Streets.

The gallery will be open extended hours for the duration of the festival:
Saturday 22 July from 11 am to 9 pm
Sunday 23 July from noon to 6pm.

CITY AND COLOUR: A MOBILE INK FACTORY WORKSHOP (all ages)
Saturday 22 July from 1 to 3 pm
Sunday 23 July from 1 to 3 pm

Workshop length: 2 hours
Wear clothes that you don’t mind staining!

Participants will be given a short introduction to Jason Logan’s practice at the Toronto Ink Company. This includes a history and definition of ink and ink-making tools. Using various native and invasive weeds of Toronto, as well as other street harvested materials, Jason demonstrates how the Toronto Ink Company makes colour from its city.

Learn and experiment with sorting, grinding, mixing, boiling, straining, binding and intensifying colour from street harvested sources. A variety of Japanese and European papers are provided as surfaces to test their newly concocted ink.  All participants take home their own custom bottle of ink, a souvenir of place, time, materials, mood and newfound knowledge.

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Founded by Jason Logan in 2014, The Toronto Ink Company is a collaborative, citizen-science project that harvests and distills colour from built, wild, and hybrid landscapes. The Toronto Ink Company works on all scales from bottled pigments and ink tests to collaborative projects with poets, artists, designers, filmmakers, and architects.

The inks are street-harvested, hand-made, sensitive to place and ecology, and vary according to soil and season. They have been tested by artists, illustrators, and experimenters around the world from Berlin, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Japan, to a National Geographic icebreaker in the Arctic.

The ink tests are a visual record of the possibilities and interactions of living pigments and point to potential avenues for further material research. Each ink test has been stabilized with a casein fixative, creating a living archive which may crystallize, oxidize, or change colour over time.

Photo: Sian Richards