Projects
STACKT Market, Toronto, Ontario — 2019
In 2019, curator and cultural producer Jacqueline West invited me to participate in an early artist residency at STACKT Market, a rapidly evolving cultural space constructed from repurposed shipping containers in downtown Toronto.
For one month, a shipping container became both studio and laboratory: a place to produce work, test ideas, and explore forms of public participation extending beyond conventional mural practice.
The residency unfolded across multiple surfaces and formats, including murals, installations, experimental paintings, merchandise development, and a participatory project that would eventually become one of the most meaningful works of the residency: Love Letters to the Great Lakes.
Rather than asking what could be placed into the space, the residency increasingly became a question of what kinds of encounters the space could support.
What made the residency unusual was not the artwork itself, but the freedom surrounding it.
Many public art projects begin with clearly defined deliverables. This residency felt different. The container provided space to work, experiment, and respond to the site as ideas emerged.
That openness was very meaningful.
Much of the work that developed during the residency required a degree of institutional trust and flexibility. Sidewalks became canvases. Parking areas became public installations. Circulation routes became places for reflection and participation.
The resulting installation functioned as a collective archive of affection, concern, gratitude, and belonging.
The central public-facing project invited visitors to write messages, memories, concerns, and reflections connected to water.
Created in collaboration with Jacqueline West, Amy Peebles, and Derek Akers, the installation transformed STACKT’s circulation spaces into a growing collection of handwritten responses woven across the site.
At the time, much of my work was engaged with water stewardship through projects associated with SeaWalls and PangeaSeed. What increasingly interested me, however, was not the communication of environmental facts, but the cultivation of environmental relationship.
Facts and figures rarely move people.
Emotions, memories, and personal experience often do.
Rather than asking visitors what they knew about the Great Lakes, Love Letters asked something simpler:
What do these waters mean to you?
Alongside the larger installation, the residency produced a series of smaller works and interventions.
Experimental paintings, studies, merchandise concepts, and a washroom mural transformed overlooked transitional spaces into immersive environments of colour, movement, and atmosphere.
Projects like these have long interested me.
Not because of their scale, but because of their ability to alter the emotional texture of a place through relatively modest means.
Sometimes the smallest surfaces create the most intimate encounters.
What remains most significant is not any individual mural or installation, but the freedom to experiment.
For a brief moment, STACKT felt unusually open-ended — a place where experimentation, participation, and public imagination could flourish with relatively little separation between artists, organizers, and visitors.
Participation begins with permission.
© Jason Botkin