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Nuit Blanche visitors got a sneak preview of acclaimed Annex artist Vivian Reiss' latest project last weekend at the Gardiner Museum.

Her current focus is on Mexican migrant agricultural workers in Southern Ontario, which she interspersed with paintings from her own garden.

"I have an urban farm in downtown Toronto (in the Annex) where I have giant tarot and 14-foot-high broom corn. I have about 60 types of edible plants in my garden."

The exhibition was short-lived, timed to coincide with the unique overnight Nuit Blanche festival.

"The show at the Gardiner attracted like 5,000 people, it was a huge success, people just loved it," Reiss said.

The six "large-scale" portraits are now in storage and Reiss will continue working on the series with tentative plans to have it ready for a show in her gallery "probably in the spring," she said.

Meanwhile, at her architecturally fascinating Annex gallery at 500 College St., she continues shows on two related themes until the end of the year. The related themes - The Endless Day into Night and Counting Sheep - both received their inspiration from Nuit Blanche, "which was an endless day."

"And so when you can't sleep at night, what do you do, you count sheep."

During the summer, the Annex resident spent considerable time at a sheep farm in Northumberland.

"The sheep got very friendly with my paintings, they rubbed up against them," she said chuckling. "They were sheep with personalities ...

"Half the paintings are on the theme of counting sheep and the other paintings are on the subject of the space between being awake and asleep. And it has to do with a lot of still lifes of toys and how I develop my paintings from black and white into colour."

Reiss' focus on the Mexican migrant agricultural workers is a logical progression from a series she was commissioned to undertake two years ago for the prestigious Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, the largest international art exhibition in Japan, held once every three years.

In that project, she created a series of 18 intensely personal paintings of the inhabitants of Hachi, a small rice farming village in the mountains of Japan, which is slowly shrinking as farming looses its prestige in Japanese society.

To create the artwork, Reiss actually lived in the village for three months, visiting rice fields, homes, kimono factories and shrines, coming to deeply experience the culture and soul of her subjects, which she portrayed in her portraits.

During the actual art festival in 2006, she exhibited her work in the village's abandoned school house, where it was viewed by more than 300,000 people.

Back home in Canada, an exhibition from her trip was hosted from August to October 2007 at the Japan Foundation on Bloor Street in the Annex.

Reiss said she had hoped to follow a similar pattern with her current project, by spending time right in Mexico, but couldn't arrange the details as quick as she would have liked, "so I decided to start the project here."

She travelled this summer throughout Southern Ontario to various farms, wineries and greenhouses.

The Mexican workers, she said, work for "eight months of the year and then they return to their towns in Mexico. And so I really got to know them. What's wonderful about the portraits and the idea of it is another glorification of agriculture."

What she hopes to accomplish is attach people and personalities to the bounty local residents have on their dinner plates at the end of the day.

"Each one is given a personality and their interests come in these paintings and you see individuals. You don't see a title or a name.

"What's remarkable is that at the Gardiner one of my models took the bus from Virgil (near Niagara-on-the-Lake) to come and be at my show, and it was really touching for both of us."

Readers can get an immediate glimpse of Reiss and her art, thanks to an accessible website. In particular, you can view the Satayoma Storehouse, the Mexican migrant workers as well as paintings from her two ongoing shows (as well as artist elaborations). Visit www.vreiss.com to view the paintings.