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What to see at this year’s Toronto Design Offsite Festival

If you haven’t heard of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival, better known as TO DO, you’ll want to add this smorgasbord of design exhibitions and events to your, uh, to do list. The festival is now in its fifth year and runs concurrent to the Interior Design Show from January 19-25 at locations across the city. Here are a few festival highlights to get that list going:

White Out presented by Keilhauer

You might expect an exhibition “that explores the colour white” to be a tad monochromatic, but to the Pantone-initiated or anyone who has ever had to decide between egg shell and macaroon cream for the kitchen walls, white is a world of colour. This group exhibition explores white in all of its shades, shapes, ages, textures and materials. There will be images, furniture, lighting, textiles, sculpture, dinnerware and more.

Jan 20-25, 2015, TAC Art/Work Gallery 568 Richmond Street West.

Outside the Box

This first-time event brings the international world of design to Toronto — in neatly packed Banker’s boxes. Design correspondents in chosen cities across the U.S. and Canada select local designers to ship a boxful of work to Toronto, where it is unpacked and arranged in a storefront display. All American-made objects and images can be found in the windows and inside of Design Within Reach (435 King Street West), while each participating Canadian city gets its own storefront.

Various times and locations, visit the festival website for details.

1/16

When it comes to furniture, Toronto is home to some mega-talented up-and-comers. With that in mind, the aptly named exhibition 1/16 features the work of 16 emerging Toronto furniture designers, all recent grads of Sheridan College’s Furniture Craft and Design program. Expect wild variation and experimentation with form and function from this eclectic collection of student work.

Jan 19-Feb 28, Craft Ontario Gallery, 990 Queen Street West.

Do Design

This event makes engaging with the festival as easy as taking a stroll, as TO DO transforms the Trinity Bellwoods strip of Dundas West between Bathurst and Grace into a public exhibition space. The work of current designers will be displayed in storefronts, while In-Context, a video documentary series about contemporary Canadian architecture, plays in various shop windows along the strip. There will also be receptions at various venues on Saturday afternoon between 3pm and 8pm, and a guided tour of exhibits with talks from various designers on Sunday, January 25th.

Jan 22-25, Dundas Street West between Bathurst and Grace Street.

For more information, visit todesignoffsite.com.

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