The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery — Attraction in Toronto

Canada’s leading public gallery devoted to contemporary art, ideas, and conversations. Plant's gallery space with energy, music, and dance, brought by Sole Power! The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is a Canadian public art gallery located at Harbourfront Centre in the heart of downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Gallery is a registered Canadian charitable organization, supported by its members, sponsors, and donors, including funding authorities at all levels of government. "Contemporary art" refers to art made and produced by artists living today. Today's artists work in and respond to a global environment that is culturally diverse, technologically advancing, and multifaceted.

The Power Plant is on a mission to provide communities with an open space for cultural exchange and thought-provoking contemporary art. FREE admission to gallery and programs, until special events. Address: 231 Queens Quay W, Toronto, ON M5J 2G8 🇨🇦 Hours: 11am-6pm Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday CLOSED on Monday and Tuesday

Since 1987, The Power Plant has been Canada’s leading public gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary visual art. It is a vital forum for the advanced artistic culture of our time that offers an exceptional facility and professional support to diverse living artists while engaging equally diverse audiences in their work. The Power Plant pursues its activities through exhibitions, publications and public programming that incorporate other areas of culture when they intersect with visual art. As one of Canada’s most prominent venues for contemporary visual art, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is renowned for its culturally-diverse programming and being a catalyst for change in bringing ground-breaking and unconventional exhibitions and cultural events to the public.

Over its history, programs have included thematic exhibitions and major solo exhibitions from prominent Canadian and international artists and thinkers with a salient pledge to expand the dialogue surrounding contemporary art, and how the medium can function as a platform to address social issues confronted by humanity today.

Considered essential to the cultural infrastructure of Toronto and the country, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s ambitious public education programming and multi-disciplinary outreach have cemented its standing as the leading global platform for excellence in Canadian and...

The Power Plant’s current exhibitions were disappointing. Emmanuel Osahor’s To dream of other places is described as an “immersive night garden,” but in reality there is no immersion and certainly no night. The gallery is brightly lit, the fountains look like cheap garden-centre ornaments, and a semi-circle of blue tiles resembles a half-built jacuzzi. Rows of generic armchairs and small painted clay birds (meant to be held by visitors) feel more like props than artworks.

The curatorial text tries to connect these objects to colonial history, claiming the work reflects the “domestication of lands, plants, and individuals alike.” In practice, the leap never makes sense. Domestic furniture and decorative fountains don’t illuminate the violence of colonial dispossession — they reduce it to shallow metaphor. The large photographic mural of a friend’s garden, promoted as “immersive,” functions more as wallpaper than as art.

The concurrent Shelagh Keeley show has the same problem. Her large wall drawings are framed as “performative” and “embodied,” but they read more like decoration. The catalogue promises physicality and resistance, but the actual experience is thin.

Both exhibitions rely heavily on inflated curatorial language — “beauty,” “respite,” “gesture,” “regeneration” — that the work itself cannot sustain. The result feels like stage sets dressed up as serious critique. Visitors looking for thoughtful engagement with themes like colonialism or obsolescence will instead find surfaces, props, and rhetoric that overpromise and...

I went to take a video (I made sure there were no other people in the room or in the frame) and was rudely told I couldn't take videos. I said okay and I put my phone away. I went to another portion of the gallery, but was followed there by an employee. I started to feel uneasy as I realized I was being watched (as if I was going to steal a painting) so I went to a third room. Yet again, I was followed there. I looked at the person and realized they were glaring at me so I left the entire gallery because it was the most uncomfortable feeling having multiple employees glare at you and follow you around.

This was such an unpleasant experience because of the two employees who followed me around and kept glaring at me. I will say, there were two employees at the front who made the situation better, but unfortunately the bad apples really spoiled this...