BigArtTO at Summerville Pool

BigArtTO featuring "Echoes of Community" by Afifa Bari, kaya joan, Stephanie Avery, and Rebecca Jane Houston.

Presented with Akin Projects

Wednesday October 6 - Saturday October 9, 7:15 pm – 10:15 pm nightly.

How do collective and community rooted experiences radically reimagine art practices? How does ancestral knowledge of the past and the future inspire our making? What is revolutionary about community ties and how do we utilize those connections to upend oppressive systems? Akin is a Toronto-based arts organization that provides creative studio space as well as arts-based programming.

Afifa Bari @_fiffs

Born in 1997, Afifa Bari is a contemporary realist oil painter and textile artist based in Toronto. She earned her BFA from York University in 2020. Through representational art, she examines the contemporary world through the lens of capitalism, uncovering consumerist values in her work. She discusses issues around ideas of capitalism, such as poverty and the cycle of consumerism. Her work focuses on material possessions and the desire for materialism in the newly advancing society. She discusses fast fashion trends and the constant desire to purchase more in modern society.

Kaya Joan @kayajoan

Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary Afro-Indigenous artist living in T’karonto (Dish with One Spoon treaty territory). Kaya’s work focuses on placemaking, non-linear temporality and blood memory. Afro and Indigenous futurity and pedagogy are also centred in Kaya’s practice-working through buried truths to explore how creation can heal 7 generations into the past and future. Kaya has been working in community arts for 6 years as a facilitator and artist. 

Stephanie Avery @stephvonawesome

Stephanie Avery is a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist and adventurer. Using themes of discovery, absurdity, identity and memory, she intervenes with familiar spaces, objects and imagery. Stephanie works to produce new meanings and narratives, with the goal to inspire alternative perspectives and initiate dialogue about elements of contemporary culture that are often taken for granted. With images selected from her Ruins series, a photographic journey of abandoned buildings from around the world, Stephanie captures a unique and surreal beauty that is unlike any other environment. She shows us a lost vision of the past, as well as a potential future absent of human life. Once thriving places of home, work and leisure, her images are a stark contrast to Toronto's booming cityscape and a cautionary tale of what can happen when the needs of a community go unaddressed.

Rebecca Jane Houston  @rebeccajanehouston
Rebecca Houston is a sculptor, painter and installation artist (settler) from Tkaronto where she was born and where she has lived her entire life. She worked for two decades in community-based art at SKETCH Working Arts, Beat the Street and other initiatives before attending York University for her BFA and MFA (graduating in 2015). Houston has participated in group and solo exhibitions and has recently completed a series of commissions on the theme of plastic waste and water pollution. She also ran a tiny gallery inside Beaver Vending Machines for several years, curating editions from about 20 local artists to sell inside the pods which has shown at Nuit Blanche and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Houston currently works as an elementary school art teacher and lives with her husband, two teenage children and dog in the west end where she enjoys participating in neighbourhood activities like long walks on Bloordale Beach.

About BigArtTO: Explore Art Across The City

Experience art illuminated at BigArtTO, a city-wide public art celebration featuring free access to temporary public artworks projected onto local buildings and landmarks. Created by Toronto artists, the projections will play on a loop so that visitors can arrive at any time. Part of ShowLoveTO.

BigArtTO is the result of a collaboration between the City of Toronto with OCAD University and AVA Animation & Visual Arts Inc.

View all BigArtTO events here.

_{Image: still from Kaya Joan's Little Revolutions in Humus for “Echoes of Community”}