CaféTO Art Walk

Wajeeha Abbasi

Located at: Fattoush Levantine Diner, 253 Gerrard St E

Wajeeha Abbasi is a Toronto-based Visual Designer and Illustrator. Her work represents narratives from every day, builds visual bridges, and discusses themes around women, pop culture, and the philosophy of the Self and the Other.

Abbasi has won a Ladybird Books Publications award and has had her work featured on several platforms including Art Toronto, London Design Festival, Digital Arts, Elle Italia, Al Jazeera, Made in Arts London, and Secret 7". She has worked on projects for NASA, V&A Museum, Coca-Cola, Ogilvy, UN Women, Little Island Publications, British Council, Herald, and Red Bull amongst others.

Abbasi completed her Masters in Illustration and Visual Media from the University of the Arts London (UAL) in 2015 and did her Bachelor's in Communication Design from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2012.

Abbasi is an avid indie music fan and a concert-goer, likes travelling, cycling, watching art documentaries, screen-printing and spoiling her cat.

Yaara Eshet

Located at: Pastor Taco, 245 Gerrard St E & Alice’s Place 554 Parliament St

Yaara Eshet was born in Israel and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Yaara has illustrated over thirty books for children and adults. She has exhibited her art in galleries and museums, in solo and group exhibitions, in Israel and Canada. Yaara lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her family and a variable number of cats.

The panels consist of works I have created in the last two years. This work served as a place for me to escape from the gloomy reality and the growing sense of uncertainty, art was my hiding place within the fantastic worlds I built, an escape to the realms of childhood and making up stories.

Esmond Lee

Located at: Super Bargain, 441 Parliament St.

Esmond Lee 李春錦 is an artist, researcher, and architect based in Toronto’s suburbs. As a second generation Chinese-Canadian, he explores long-term, intergenerational experiences of migration in peripheral spaces, examining identity, belonging, and nuanced cultural and political borders in the built environment. Lee is proud to create hyperlocal research and art concerning his community in Scarborough. Recent public installations include a continuous 250-foot vinyl mesh installation for Nuit Blanche Toronto, developed during his time as the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence, and a 30-foot tall installation at Malvern Town Centre for CONTACT Photography Festival. His work received an honourable mention in the Burtynsky Grant and supported by Toronto, Ontario, and Canada Art Councils.

Drawing from his background in architecture, Lee photographs intriguing moments, spaces, and buildings, combining them to explore new fantastical worlds. These photographs act as vibrant digital paint for him to layer, merge, and blend with his digital brush. Part architectural design and part art-making, this process of using photographs with inherent cultural and social contexts allow Lee to imagine new, exciting places free of political borders and physical limitations. He is inspired by traditional Chinese horizontal scrolls that depict everyday life through axonometric illustrations that cut through large lands, from city centres to rural towns. Similarly, he works with long scroll-like formats to construct his images, paying special attention to not only content but also scale and perspective.

Yasaman Mehrsa

Located at: Saigon Pai, 446 Parliament St.

Yasaman Mehrsa is a Toronto-based Multidisciplinary Artist. Born and raised in Tehran/Iran, she got exposed to art from a young age.

She completed her studies with a Bachelor of Visual Communication and Graphic Design from Iran and later achieved Bachelor with honours in Visual Arts at Brock University, Canada. Yasaman's work is often representative of awareness of the human-nature relationship. Inspired by nature, she creates storytelling arts and expresses different emotions in each of them to inspire her audiences to discover their imagination, feeling, and interaction with the natural environment. She also has a strong passion for public art and has worked on various projects for communities and organizations since 2018. 

Nelly Torossian

Located at: F’Amelia Ristorante, 12 Amelia St

Artist & ARTcheologist

Nelly Torossian is a professional graphic artist based in Toronto for over 15 years and a Mural Artist for the last 7 years and studied graphic arts at Seneca College. She had the honour of studying Graphic Design under the instruction of World Renowned Graphic Designer Theo Dimson. Dimsons contemporary design aesthetic has had a huge impact on her work. 

Nelly is a dedicated lifelong ARTcheologist who is curious and keen on learning about the meaning behind the deep interrelationships that exist between us, and the local Indigenous flora and fauna. Her creations are rooted in Land-Based Pedagogy she calls “Futuristic Abstract Realism”. By abstracting their forms, she captures the essence and the spirit of the animal. In her eyes the flora and fauna reveal their own secret stories and histories that weave together mother natures' mysteries that help answer our own questions about our own existence on this land. She considers her art as a vessel for the unveiling and the communication of the visual storytelling of these hidden truths.

Kirk Sutherland

Located at: L’Avenue, 583 Parliament St

Kirk Sutherland is a Toronto-based Canadian artist. He has exhibited his work under the representation of many art galleries internationally over the last 30 years. Many of his pieces are included in both private and corporate collections globally. 

Sutherland graduated high-honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) in 1991, majoring in Contemporary Art and Drawing and Painting from the Faculty of Experiential Arts.

Kirk Sutherland is a renowned colourist who was born with synesthesia. This blending of senses very much enhances his perception of colour and his overall creative process.

Kirk Sutherland is also known for working with the Hollywood Film Industry, creating and designing public art in urban environments and working with the music industry creating album cover designs.

Chris Perez

Located at: Stout Irish Pub, 221 Carlton St.

Chris Perez is a Canadian based Filipino artist practicing in abstract painting and mural art. Perez pushes moments of arbitrary movement to create an inner dialogue with material and environment, like that of an abstract dance with painting. His influences are derived from street art, graffiti, murals, abstract art, and expressionist painting. His work explores ideas behind personal and cultural identity using abstraction that touches uses the aesthetics and shapes of florals. Perez primarily uses latex, acrylic, and spray paint as his main mediums. Aside from painting, his work expands to different mediums such as site-specific work, installations, print media, and digital.