Take shelter. Build. Take apart. Rebuild. Make shelter. Recreate.
Bring a can if you can. Take a can if you need.
Canned food and cardboard boxes form the basis of this participatory installation. Using these materials, viewers are invited to pack, fold, and stack to create a shelter. Participants may take food items as needed or may bring non-perishable food items to contribute to the piece. Remaining food will go to the Fort York Food Bank.
As participants add to, take from, and alter the shelter, they are implicated in a struggle for stability in a system where stability isn't possible. The cyclical and temporal nature of this exhibition is reflective of the situation perpetuated by superficial solutions supposed to remedy issues of poverty and homelessness. In donating leftover food to a food bank, Take Shelter simultaneously participates in and problematizes one of such temporary solutions.
The experience may be playful, reminiscent of building a fort with the box that the refrigerator was delivered in. But it also may be desperate: how do we create shelter when our resources donŐt make sense?
Presented by the One Off Collective.
One Off Collective is made up of emerging artists Maggie Flynn, Meiko Maruyama, Stephanie Nicol—, Jessica Thalmann and Annie Si-Wing Tung.
