Picture This
Picture This is a functional sculpture in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park that originated as a community engaged eco-artwork in 2013. The project was refreshed by local artists with help from neighbourhood participants in 2023.
Project at a glance
Location: R.V. Burgess Park (46 Thorncliffe Park Dr, Toronto, ON)
Artists: Andrew Chiu, Ichraq Bouzidi, Joaquín Varela, Friends of Thorncliffe Park
Documentarians: Anushay Sheikh, Adam Ibrahim
Year: 2013 and 2023
Services: Cultural Planning
10
years of creative placemaking
3
community arts and reflection workshops in 2023
20+
eco-conscious artists since 2013
1
functional community sculpture
About the project
Picture This Original Artwork (2013)
Picture This was an outcome of youth-led engagement initiatives to identify opportunities for community projects in the Thorncliffe and Flemingdon Park areas in Toronto, which faced an accumulation of litter and lack of welcoming public gathering spaces.
This eco art project, facilitated by local designer Andrew Chiu, resulted in a functional sculpture that used salvaged materials collected by local youth to raise awareness about environmental issues facing the community. The group identified a need for seating and shade in public spaces, and the final sculpture was designed to offer both as a means of drawing people into the park.
Since the installation of Picture This, the community has taken ownership of the work and can often be found using it as a meeting point or a venue for recreational and other activities.
Reimagining Picture This (2023)
In 2023, STEPS and Friends of Thorncliffe Park returned to engage current local youth, newcomers, and community members through a set of low-barrier community arts and ideation workshops. These free public arts and reflection events with local facilitator Joaquín Varela and lead artist Ichraq Bouzidi invited members of the Thorncliffe Park community to reimagine Picture This and share stories through conversations and drawings.
The resulting artwork explores the themes of identity and collective memory within the context of R.V. Burgess Park and the Picture This project.
About the artists
Ichraq Bouzidi
Lead Artist and Workshop Facilitator
Ichraq Bouzidi is a visual artist who likes to explore and work in a variety of media ranging from digital illustration to conceptual art, new media, and 3D motion videos. With a subtle minimalistic approach, Bouzidi creates work that resounds and resonates with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination, in which the duality between clarity of content and its ambiguity is the focus point. She likes to explore the themes of duality, identity, perceptions, and collective memories; her works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, and past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role.
Joaquín Varela
Workshop Facilitator
Joaquín Varela is a Latinx Visual artist, educator, placemaker and nature interpreter. Joaquín has been leading classes all over Toronto with several years of experience with a focus on access to creative expression and resources. Passionate about nature and eco-conscious practices in public engagement, Joaquín leads hikes and workshops as a nature interpreter in many of the city’s green spaces. Joaquín is also the co-founder of Roots To Bloom, a collective that aims to cultivate crucial relationships to the land and collective stewardship through placed-based community art-making. When not making art you can often find Joaquín outside tending to his native plant garden.
Funders
In 2013, this project was supported by the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, ArtReach Toronto and the Kiwanis Foundation of Toronto, as well as partnerships with the TD Canada Trust, Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office, Design by Nature, Diasporic Genius, Trashswag, North Arrow, and the Toronto Tool Library.
We are grateful for our funders Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, City of Toronto Resident’s Grant program, and Scotiabank.
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