Artist Statement:
"(Safe) Streets Portraiture"
According to Ontario's Safe Streets Act, a person may not solicit for money while walking alongside, ahead of or behind someone. Nor while intoxicated, while obstructing someone's path, after being ignored, or in any aggressive manner. These policies have led to over 1400 charges being laid in 2007, with fines up to $500 on a first charge and up to $1000 on repeated charges.
From my series about anti-poverty protests, I have been pushed to create work addressing Toronto's poverty issues more directly. These portraits are not meant to be seen as a narrative or series, but as individual images that would be placed back on to the street as posters. Initially, one may not recognize that all of these portraits are of panhandlers from Toronto's streets, but the portrait of a woman holding a sign clearly stating her homelessness brings context to the other images.
By using conventional, close-up portraiture with large-scale vinyl printing, I am attempting to create a relationship between outdoor advertising media and panhandling. Walking on either Yonge or Queen Street, pedestrians and drivers are confronted with various billboards and posters, all selling products, services or lifestyles. These advertisements are usually situated so that we must look up at them, but when we look down, we may be faced with people seated on the front steps of retail stores asking for spare change. My attempt to bring these people's portraits into large posters, is to gain attention and to force people to look at them. In a public street installation, people would notice these posters alongside corporate advertisements and would hopefully rethink their judgments towards panhandlers asking for change in relation to the corporations asking for more profit.
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