Color Connects: Painting Healthy Spaces Together is a project that aimed to create opportunities for individuals experiencing crisis to alter their surroundings using two powerful and relatively inexpensive tools: color and collaboration. The opportunity to reshape their environment was not just an act of beautification, but also of empowerment, connection and aesthetic justice.
Color Connects demonstrated the power of color as a tool for restoring connection to ourselves, each other and to our surroundings through a series of collage workshops I facilitated with the clients on the non-medical detox unit at Project Renewal’s 3rd St Men’s Shelter, these workshops culminated in a collective color intervention within the space. Through weeklly art classes, ongoing conversation and collaboration the clients chose the colors for the walls and we painted them together.
Color is fundamental to our experience of the world. Color isn’t just decoration, it’s a biological experience. We read color physically and emotionally; we process these colors in the unconscious brain so quickly, that we feel their impacts before we have the words to describe them. Color plays a critical role in determining our mental, physical and social well-being, thereby making it an integral instrument for creating restorative spaces. However, color’s capacity to improve our health and quality of life has largely been overlooked in institutions where people are confined to live.
Institutions where people are kept, whether hospitals, homeless shelters or prisons are spaces of crisis. Ironically. their design, often sterile and unfriendly and isolating, is such that proposed rehabilitation programs within them can be made ineffective, even to the point of exacerbating the existing traumas of those within. Crucially the very people trapped in cycles of poverty and incarceration, forced to navigate urban ecology of dehumanizing rooms and isolating living conditions, are those who have the least pwer to modify their environments. Color Connects tries to ameliorate this by demonstrating how color and art can be used as a tool for resistance and collective empowerment in times of crisis.
Myself and my colleague Morgan Mavis designed a series of art parties for SickKids Hospital in Toronto. For each party, we transformed a lounge space in the hospital into a colorful, vibrant art studio where patients and their family members were invited to stop by, hang out and make art. We also produced a series of animated instructional videos for patients who weren’t well enough to make it to the parties. They were given goodie bags with the appropriate art materials and our videos were broadcast on bedside TV screens so that everyone could join the party. The idea was to create a dynamic, cool art studio that felt nothing like a hospital.
The Art Cart is a portable art studio I made to bring art supplies to patients and their families and loved ones in the palliative care floor of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. The Art Cart was funded by the Ontario Arts Council Platform A grant.
Ultra Rare (2014) was an initiative though sought to energize a stretch of Toronto’s McCaul St. Ultra Rare included a collaborative mural, replanting flower boxes along the street, and reinventing an abandoned parking lot tollbooth (“The Small Space”); each aspect of this project required cooperation and support from a range of partners, including university administrators, building developers, property managers and private businesses. Ultra Rare models how civic stakeholders can empower artists to enhance public space and nurture community values in urban areas.
The Small Space was an abandoned parking tollbooth converted into a tiny gallery / pop up space that hosted performances and entrepreneurial projects by OCAD University students and alumni on a monthly basis. The idea for The Small Space came out of the rapid disappearance of studio and gallery spaces in the city due to a surge in development.
The Small Space launched Corey Moranis’s award winning jewellery designs and Kiera Boult’s infamous Truth Booth. The Small Space was also featured in Creative Time’s Art of The MOOC: Emerging Public Art & Experimental Education video presentation.
Essentially a dinner series, Hang at Home brought OCAD U students together with creative community leaders over meals served in private living spaces that double as either exhibition venues or studios. The Lab promoted the value of overlapping personal life and professional practice. The guest lists, intimate settings and models for inspired, integrated creative living combine to give participating students an enlightening experience. Campus community, studio and exhibition space, student housing and art school romance are all lacking at OCAD University, making Hang at Home critically novel.
The Good Bike Project was conceived by Vanessa Nicholas and myself as a simple color intervention on the street project that we hoped would beautify and energize the grim strip of Dundas Street West where we work. The bike’s bold, graphic and current aesthetic was an instant hit with passersby; and when we were ticketed by the City, support for the bike poured in from locals and from people in far flung places including Brazil and Australia. The controversy spawned a public art project - where Vanessa and I salvaged over 80 rusted bikes from the trash heap and spraypainted them in neon color to create a community map of Toronto. Each bike marked a site that embodied the spirit of community and creativity - both historic and contemporary - that inspired us in the first place.
