Sept 7th -- This week in the Gallery Space:

akau gallery (1186 Queen St W - entrance on Northcote Ave) presents one of the most interesting shows in the Gallery Space this weekend: Road Maps.

3 pieces by Sandra Recchio make up Road Maps. Each piece explores the act of walking and its age-old place as inspiration for the artist. In one piece, Recchio turns her walks into line drawings by taking notes and joining them to city maps. The piece on display at akau has been translated into a huge wall-sized work using vinyl tape (which took 30 ours to put in place). The show opens Sept 8th at 7pm.

Road Maps runs til Oct 14th.

Also on Friday, YYZ (401 Richmond St W, #140) launches their new season with their newest issue of YYZINE. Party starts at 8pm. Two artists' work will be featured at the YYZ gallery: Mark Bell's, The Truth About Falling and Nancy Duff's, BORDERDOM.

Bell takes photographs from daily papers and translates them into oil paintings, while Duff's work consists of aerial views of the North American body as seen along its international borders.

Exhibition runs to Oct 21.

To celebrate their 1st anniversary, Diaz Contemporary )100 Niagara St at Tecumseth) also presents a double-bill this weekend with Three Sculpture by Mowry Baden (in attendance) and Five Monoprints by Jessica Stockholder.

Baden, recipient of a 2006 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, is showing several sculptures while Stockholder, brings her wild and colourful installations made up of orderings of found materials and objects.

Show opens Saturday, Sept 9 from 3-6pm. Show runs until Oct 14.

And finally, out on the Junction streets, the 14th Annual Junction Arts Festival is back and with it comes their 3rd Annual Curated Exhibition.

Entitled, Trust Us, We're Artists, the exhibit features Tejpal S. Ajji (Toronto), Ulysses Castellanos (Toronto), Kirsten Forkert (Montreal / Malmo), and Jessica MacCormack & Hazel Meyer (Montreal).

The show (and festival) runs Saturday and Sunday from noon-6pm along Dundas St. West between Keele and Quebec Ave.