You don’t have to travel far to experience the festival, although you can as sites range across the city. Lucky for us, many of our local galleries and art spaces are participating.

Oz Studios is part of the action, with “Rotating Reality” running May 6-27 with an opening on May 6, featuring Sandy Baron’s exhibit of playfully altered landscape photographs.

“Glass Ceiling,” Jill Greenberg’s project about the “setup” of being a woman,  is opening tonight at O’Born Contemporary and will be running until June 2. (Above, from Jill Greenberg: American Girl Doll, 2010)

Don’t Tell Mama features the Chris Grismer exhibit “New Suburban Photomat,” which explores and plays with new photographic processes to create experimental portraits. The opening is May 5 from 7-10pm, and the exhibit is up through May 31st. (Below, a photo from this exhibit: Superfriends, 2010).

“No Permanent Address” has been showing at Gallery TPW for much of April and garnered acclaim, and the run continues through the festival until May 26. No Permanent Address is a three channel video portrait of the New People’s Army, a Maoist guerrilla group in the Philippines.

“The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” Angell Gallery‘s offering to Contact, will be sure to draw attention. We’ve all enjoyed the strange unexpected images snapped by Google’s cameras while mapping the world.  Jon Rafman’s series compiles “a fascinating array of incidental moments captured by Google’s cameras.” The exhibit opens May 3 from 6-9P until June 2.

If you are enjoying the festival, let us know what you’ve seen and what you recommend seeing.

Gallery TPW tops the Art category as Best Independent Art Gallery citywide and for Queen West.  Show & Tell Gallery won the same category for Dundas West.

Not surprisingly, our neighborhood had a few Citywide Winners in the food category: Pizzeria Libretto for best pizza, The Dakota Tavern for best bar and pub, The Lakeview for best diner/greasy spoon. All three are also the tops in the Dundas West neighborhood. Pizzeria Libretto, The Lakeview and The Dakota are repeat winners in these categories – they were voted Toronto’s best in 2010.

2011 is a good year for The Dakota Tavern, which won a second award as the Best Blues Club city-wide.

There are many more winners now that they’re awarding every category in every neighborhood, so to see if your favourite is there, just look up Dundas West or Queen West. Congrats to all the winners!

Lush and Lavish Salon and Spa is the first spot mentioned in a Toronto Star article about green and organic spas.

T.o.night newspaper (?) did a piece on Dundas West bar-restaurant The Port. Definitely go for the steak on a sword!

Tonight, Bohmer restaurant hosts a fundraiser dinner for Japan. With lots of well-respected chefs and wineries donating their time and talents, this sold out fast, but also got a lot of attention.

We already covered it when it happened, but it’s such a nice story, we like mentioning it again. Three bakery workers on Ossington won millions in the lottery and the press ate it up! (get it? bakery, eat?)

And it’s nice to see one of our local art galleries get some attention. The Globe and Mail highlights a recent exhibit at Gallery TPW.

Many of the exhibits will be presented at the new Bell Lightbox, but galleries in our neighborhood will participate. Gallery TPW will feature South African artist William Kentridge’s “Journey to the Moon,” in which he pays homage to French director Georges Méliès’ classic Voyage dans la Lune (1902), also on view at the gallery and widely considered cinema’s first science fiction film. Combining live action and stop motion animation, Journey to the Moon in part pictures the creative process as Kentridge performs for the camera, playing the scientist/artist who dreams of worlds afar but ultimately cannot escape.The exhibit is open September 7 – 19, Tuesday to Sunday 12 to 5 PM.

MOCCA on Queen West will feature Chris Chong Chan Fui and Yasuhiro Morinaga: HEAVENHELL Sep 10, 2010 – Sep 19, 2010, and, also on Queen Street West is Stephen Bulger Gallery/Camera Cinema with Stan Douglas and “Klatsassin,” a film inspired by Kurosawa’s Rashomon, September 9 – 19, Tuesday to Sunday 11 AM to 6 PM.

We know the main point for many is at TIFF is spotting celebrities, and we’re sure they’ll even venture over to Ossington now that we’ve got some of the best nightlife and restaurants in town, but don’t forget the art too!

Apart from the fundraising there are some great works displayed. Check the preview out online at their site here, but better yet see it in person at 56 Ossington. It’s always better that way!