From Sept 21st to Sept 30th, a visual exhibition will feature work from local and international artists, architects, educators and community agencies.

Luis Jacob and Amos Latteier will present Pigeon Condo, a luxury condo for pigeons, represented in a scale model, interactive website and audio tour. Pigeon Condo uses urban wildlife to talk about homelessness and housing. The recent conflict with the City over the actual construction of Pigeon Condo on Yonge St. at Lakeshore Blvd. will be discussed.

Chris Hardwicke is an architect from Toronto. He has proposed alternatives for high density, urban living. Farm City is a new kind of architecture that would enable cities to feed themselves. It is a skyscraper for living and farming, developed by Hardwicke, Hon Lu, Vivien Lee and Mark Juhasz. Sprawl or Tall? is an interactive computer generated 3D image of the GTA which lets the participant explore housing form and density.

Mary Porter is a Toronto-based artist. Her work examines the built environment of the city and liminal landscapes. In her series of flipbooks and paintings, she is appropriating ‘artist concept’ images from condominium ads. Depicting buildings not yet constructed, the images serve as a bridge between the planned and complete spaces.

Luke Painter is a Toronto-based artist. His work explores clichés in romantic sentiments and the social construction of space with urban centres. Notions of utopia are represented in Pipe Dreams, consisting of digital animations of sites in Toronto and Montreal that have come under heavy condo development and gentrification. His animation reconstructs the condo sales centre, drawing on historical architecture that once inhabited the space. He positions these planned social projects in a constant state of construction and deconstruction.

Lois Klassen is a Vancouver-based artist. Her work “I want to win a 42” plasma T.V” looks closely at how housing is packaged and sold. It places marketing ploys in an historic context in order to examine changes to the presentation of ‘home’. Her work consists of needlework, based on a recent marketing brochure for home
financing, and movie clips.

Xing Danwen is a Chinese-born, New York based artist. Her photographic series, Urban Fiction, looks at the globalization and homogenization of the urban landscape. Her images of condominiums are photographed from corporate maquettes created to promote real estate developments being planned in China today. Trying to imagine life in such spaces, Xing inserts a cast of characters, all of which she acts out herself, creating both playful and poignant vignettes of social drama.

Lasse Lau is an artist from New York. His project, Luxury Displacement, plays with images and sites used by condo sales centres to explore social constructions and stigmas.

Kenta Kishi is an artist and architect from Japan. His work explores the transformation and interpretation of housing landscapes. Flat Tower Campaign challenges the anonymity of condos by engaging with local residents in explorations and reconstructions of condo shapes and landscapes.

Jon McCurley and The Theatre Centre will be presenting the history of the Theatre Centre and its place in the neighbourhood.

Laura Hatcher, Jessica McKillop and Elsa Fancello are graduate urban planning students based in Toronto. They are exhibiting a cultural map of the city based on the lifestyle marketing of condominiums. Examining the city through the lens of condo marketing reveals an emerging vision of Toronto as a globally competitive city. Their mapping will reveal which stories of the city are celebrated and which are excluded. The work will invite viewers to contemplate their own vision of the city.

Regent Park Focus The aim of the Regent Park Focus darkroom photography program is to give youth participants a strong technical and creative foundation in photography. They will exhibiting their project Regent Park Demolition Photography Project.

Edie Steiner is a Toronto photographer and filmmaker currently pursuing a PhD in Environmental Studies at York University. She lives in the the Bathurst Quay neighbourhood and is involved in a local fight against waterfront developments that, in her words, “impinge upon the health of the local waterfront community and that of the larger metropolitan community.” Edie’s images reflect the changing landscape seen from her home.

Ute Lehrer is a professor at York University and Board member of the Toronto Free Gallery. She has a SSHRC grant to research image production of condominium developments in Toronto.

St. Christopher House and the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies will present elements of their 5-year participatory research project investigating neighbourhood change, including the impact of condominium developments, in Toronto’s Centre-South neighbourhoods (in which the Theatre Centre is located).

The Centre for Urban Pedagogy in New York will be exhibiting a zine and a film which emerged from a resident-led project investigating gentrification in a neighbourhood in New York.

Euan Hague, Winifred Curran and Harpreet Gill from DePaul University and activists from The Pilsen Alliance are presenting their project Contested Chicago: Pilsen and Gentrification. The project is a result of 2 years of efforts to engage more local residents in planning, development and zoning issues. The project focuses on gentrification and condominium developments as they affect the neighbourhood of Pilsen in Chicago.