Back to life: Winter season in high gear, starting tonight

My dance card is filling up quicky, which means we've finally shaken off the Christmas doldrums. Thank heavens. The art world is humming again, with a bunch of openings tonight and this weekend worth your while, if you're up for braving the snow.

Just off the top of my head tonight is Flavio Trevisan's intriguing Museum of The Represented City at 80 Spadina. Trevisan's an urban-minded sort, as his recent show at Diaz Contemporary, "Studies of a New Past," would indicate; so too would his work curating the always eye-catching Convenience Gallery, a storefront on Landowne just norht of Queen. This project, in its own words, is  "(a) series of sculptural works (that) present a fragmented yet multifaceted mapping of Toronto’s built history, inviting the viewer to retrace familiar paths and discover surprising new ways to explore the cityscape." Works for me. An off-site project of the Koffler Centre, the show opens tonight at 6 with remarks by Trevisan at 7.

That's only the beginning. Gallery TPW has Chrsitine Negus's invitingly-titled show "You Can't Spell Slaughter Without Laughter," a collection of darkly festive obejcts -- banners, wreaths -- providing decorous atmosphere for an installation of video and digital animation pieces at its core. Opening tonight at 7 pm at the gallery, 56 Ossington Ave.

What I'm most interested in this evening, though, is the first Toronto showing of new work in almost a decade by Toronto hyper-political proto-conceptualists Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge. They've been working in a devout mode of social justice for almost four decades -- they are, if anyone is, the art world voice of the labour movement -- and the current show, Scene Otherwise promises to be as fiery as ever. I'll have a closer look at it in the next little while, but more immediately, it opens tonight at the Toronto Free Gallery in that emergingly-hip strip coming to be known (at least by the hipsters that inhabit it) as Blansdowne (for Bloor/Lansdowne, get it? Hipsters are so clever).

Anyway, it's 1277 Bloor West, at 6 pm. Enjoy.