Goat Gallery is an intimate space in an unsuspecting building on the north side of Geary Ave in Toronto.

Inside, you encounter a small bar with refreshments, screens hung up on the walls - some with headphones attached to engage in an auditory experience accompanying the visual. 

The flexibility of the open space lends itself well to a myriad of possibilities when it comes to displaying the art.

While the first exhibit is presented entirely on screens, the gallery can also do projection mapping. 

Stas Zlobinski is the man behind this new space and is excited to be able to highlight the work of the many talented digital artists around the world, including a significant amount based out of Toronto that he has met over the past couple of years. 

In November 2021, Zlovinskii organized a pop-up digital art exhibition and was surprised by how well-received it was. People were curious and showed up, which led to the forming of a community of local artists working in the genre.

Since then, he's organized approximately 25 digital art pop-ups across the city and supported exhibits internationally. 

Their inaugural exhibit, "Walking the Uncanny Valley," features eight local artists, a spontaneously formed group, who Zlovinskii describes as "digital superstars."

These artists are significant players and create digital art for a variety of jobs, however, this exhibit was an opportunity for them to share their own artwork. 

The exhibit itself is fascinating and offers intensely hyper-realistic images and animations. Zlovinskii summed it up well putting forward the question, "The uncanny valley is still uncanny, but how long will it remain like that?"

The artists featured were Newcolossal, Smearballs, Vini Naso, Voidz, Arice, Young Gun Motion, Runbo Chen, and Rodrigo (RWR2), with their varying takes on the theme, resulting in a vivid and thought-provoking artistic experience.

The next exhibit at Goat Gallery is set to be called "Asian Invasion," carrying a theme of the number 888, a prosperous number in Asian culture.

For future exhibits, the hope is to bring in a variety of guest curators to plan shows, in addition to having community showcase days focused on elevating local artists between curated exhibits.

While it's newer to Toronto, digital art has been around for years. One of the artists currently featured shared during a panel hosted on the gallery's opening night that he used to sell his digital art in CD form.

Now, the medium is coming into the mainstream, with galleries being set up around the world.

Traditionally, artworks need to be transported and can only exist in one place at a time. In the case of digital art, exhibits can happen simultaneously across borders and time zones. Zlovinskii was behind one of these exhibits, collaborating with NOX Gallery in Tokyo.

For anyone curious about the digital art world, Goat Gallery also hosts a weekly podcast called "Spotlight Show," interviewing artists and digital creators, with a mission of advancing digital art. 

Goat Gallery is located at 282 Geary Ave.