Entering the month of eternally frostbitten fingers, I suggest fun. Located at 587 College, a few steps above Strange Love, Whippersnapper Gallery has just that in store. This tiny gem offers up-and-coming artists a professional space to showcase their work through an established Toronto artist collective.

Not only is Whippersnapper a gallery; it also functions as a venue for artistic, cultural and community events, and a sort of hub for creative minds. This past Saturday, seventeen emerging artists got together and had their say about the month of love, in a group exhibit called Art for Chilled Hearts.

If Valentine's Day were a celebration of the union between our ghostly subconscious and assertive outer ego - instead of its usual flavorless mush - I would say that the artists featured at Whippersnapper Gallery this month understand love. Through and through.

Gallery co-founder Jessica Hayes says that Art For Chilled Hearts is inspired by the sheer feat of living in Canada during February and the numbing effects that it has on romance.

While somewhat cynical in its tone, the artwork collectively suggests a self-reflexive love that is more an expression of rudimentary soul than the quest for a soul mate. Among the many wonderful works on display, Jen Manns’s misty apparitions convey this well. The twin imagery in Jen's work plays with notions of the Doppelganger and the wild sense of ambiguity that comes with it.

Spotted with bears, birds, and many other of nature's beasts, the works all point at an undomesticated self-hibernating for the winter.

Gallery founder, Luke Correia-Damude, has aspirations of keeping the space expanding and adapting. Already collaborations with internet T.V. talk show host Carey Wass has yielded a bountiful show called Late Night In The Bedroom - a program filmed in various alternative spaces across the city which focuses on new music, new art, and everything new you hope to see sprouting in Toronto culture.

So, through utilizing a little internet, innovative collaborations like Late Night In The Bedroom can bring local culture into the home on these cold, cold weekends. But for those willing to brave the cold, Whippersnapper Gallery will surely make it worth the trek.

"Art For Chilled Hearts" runs through February 26 at Whippersnapper Gallery (587A College St.)