Under cover of darkness on April 19th, 2026, Toronto’s own Drake (and company DreamCrew) had 1 million pounds of ice dropped in a downtown parking lot. Why you may ask? The only straightforward answer was to promote his forthcoming album “Iceman.” Love it or hate it, it worked.

The activation was definitely equal parts: absurd, an attention grabbing stunt, guilty of inciting chaos, and absolutely brilliant at it’s success in sparking the curiosity of the entire city and beyond with its questions. The questions are always more interesting than the answers.

Questions like: When’s the release date? Where is it hidden in the ice? and how long will it take for the ice to melt?

I caught wind of this project prior to the install (not knowing what it was or what it was for) and one day later, I saw that my friend and neighbour Mike (and his company Mawg Design) were the ones who procured and installed all of that ice.

I made it down to the parking lot, located just south of Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and just east of Yonge and Dundas Square (the corner with the highest pedestrian traffic in Canada) to take these photos early in the morning on the second day. Not fully understanding the chaos that ensued the night before, which saw thousands of people gathering and partying on top of and around the ice, blowtorches in hand, and even lighting fires on top in an attempt to speed up the melt.

I waiting around till the sun rose in the sky enough to peak between the buildings and cascade brilliantly right onto the ice, edited a few photos and posted them to Instagram thinking I was probably a day late and not expecting them to get much attention. To my surprise the post went absolutely viral:

News media continued to report on the state of the “ice” all week as it continued to capture the attention of people in the City and beyond. Even prompting this great response by Mayor Oliva Chow during an unrelated media availability: (source CityNews)

Ultimately the ice sculpture was melted down by Toronto Fire, who blasted it with hot water for hours. It was so much fun to watch the buzz around Drake’s album and the ice sculpture ripple through the City seemingly both quickly and slowly.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes captured by Josh O’Kane for the Globe and Mail:

“Timeliness is important when ice is melting,” Mr. Gingerich said

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/article-drake-iceman-album-ice-blocks-downtown-toronto-publicity-stunt/

Below are a couple more articles which capture the absurd and fun nature of this and it’s so cool to see Mike quoted in several of them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/world/canada/drake-album-ice-block-toronto.html

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/fire-crews-toronto-drake-ice-blocks-melt-9.7172835

Thank you for reading (and watching) No AI tools were used in the creation of this post. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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In my last post I introduced one of my past projects Blackcat Artspace. It’s only really now that about as much time has passed as this place was active that I’ve been able to look back on it with a fresh perspective.

I figured for this post it might be fun to share some photos and highlights from between when we started it in 2013 until when it and so many things closed permanently in 2020.

Every time I look back through photos from the shows there I get completely lost in memories and also see that 95% of all the photos are of people and only a small amount are actually install shots of the art on the walls.

It’s easy for me to think this was a failure of documentation on my behalf at the time, but looking back it really was so much about the people and the art was what brought us together.

It was all about making something out of nothing and building community.

Something we all need now again more than ever.

That’s just a small taste of some of the near 200 exhibitions that took place at the Blackcat Artspace, Next up I’ll be writing about how the project grew into a former car dealership!

If you’ve been enjoying reading consider a paid subscription, till next time!

Thank you for reading (and watching) No AI tools were used in the creation of this post. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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It was fun to reflect on a past project. From 2013-2020 I ran a small art gallery here in the west end of Toronto called the Blackcat Artspace. It was a wonderful example of building community of a very small scale. The space itself was maybe 400 sq. feet and every show there would spill out into the street.

There was an energy and buzz in that room, I sometimes I miss it.

Many of the artists and photographers who had exhibitions there in the early days have gone on to be incredibly successful in there own practices. But in the begining there was no business plan, no guaranteed revenue. The goal was just to keep it going.

In the livestream I compare the experience to the movie Beautiful Losers, which you can watch the whole doc on YouTube:

Make something from nothing.

For most of the time I ran the gallery I never even had a good website for it. It was the golden age of social media and much of the documentation of the exhibits were posted as Facebook albums, each opening had a Facebook event…

In the video above I share how I used Claude Code to make a new standalone website that will be the archive of every exhibit, show, opening reception, and event that happened at Blackcat Artspace.

If you’re just getting started with using Claude Code, my biggest tip I can offer is this starting prompt my brother shared with me:

(The things I want to do) 
Reminder: I want a plan as the output here, not the code.
IMPORTANT: I want you to ask me questions now about any details, 
edge cases, features, etc. so that I can better instruct you. 
Keep asking me questions and DO NOT start writing the plan until 
I have explicitly told you I think you have enough information.

These AI tools are designed to impress us with “instant gratification” but in order to make any thing good you need to slow this process down. Tell Claude what you need it to create in as much detail as possible, or ask it what it can do, ideally before it starts to write any code.

I’m still working on “vibe coding” these sites, but check them out, and let me know what you think!

The urls are currently:

www.blackcatartspace.com and video.andrewwilliamson.ca

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All photos are my own, and copyright Andrew Williamson Photography (unless otherwise stated)

Thank you for reading (and watching) AI tools were only use in the coding of these websites not any of the writing. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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Now, there is definitely a bunch of people here in Toronto that assume or expect me to have use of some pretty unique spaces from time to time, given the fact that i’ve organized art shows or ran gallery spaces in everywhere from Laundromats, to old storefronts, to former car dealerships (to name a few) over the years. More on that in future Substack posts to come i’m sure.

Fast forward a few weeks and i’m having a coffee at Subtext Coffee here in the Junction with my friend and longtime Music Photographer and Music Video Director Colin Medley when he mentioned the band Holy Fuck had approached him about filming a series of live sessions inspired loosely on the The Beatles: Get Back documentary.

And that’s how the video above came to be, over the span of two days the crew credited below collaborated on this series which just launched last week:

https://holyf.ffm.to/atwork

The spirit of Holy F is to make music out of anything. We wanted to pull back the curtain and showcase how we create music live in the moment, embracing the unexpected.

Credits:

Band: Holy Fuck

Director:

Filming: @musicmanhann @vareysound

Behind the Scenes/Mini Doc:

Assistant BTS Filming:

Studio: Mooi Studios

EQ: ibukirentals.ca

Studio Manager: @aanitaqian

Studio Owner: Nick Koppelaar

Gaffer: @stuart.croll

DV Operator: @torilil

When I was in high school and just getting into photography, one of the subjects that interested me both as a consumer of photographs and a creator was the then-subculture of urban exploration or urbex for short.

Urbex involved photographing abandoned or off-limits buildings while adhering strictly to the "take only pictures, leave only footprints" rule. Back then many abandoned buildings simply had no security like they certainly do now and if you stayed true to that rule —and made sure to never let a door close behind you— it felt totally fine.

In high school, I followed countless photobloggers who were urban explorers and documented everything from large abandoned factories in Detroit to the old sewer systems beneath Montreal. Around that time I was able photograph some local sites like the abandoned Don Valley Brickworks (before the revitalization by Evergreen), the abandoned Whitby Psych (since demolished), and the former Camp 30 Prisoner of War Camp in Bowmanville to name a few (potentially future newsletter topics?).

Of course the mecca of urban exploration sites here in Toronto was the legendary Hearn Generating Station. So big you can fit the Statue of Liberty inside either upright or sideways, or large enough to house 12 Parthenons.

Now years later as a professional photographer I’ve had the chance to revisit a number of these previous urbex locations, witnessing them being brought back to life.

First time at the Hearn during the media preview

From a high school student watching others, we fast forward 10 years into 2016, having the opportunity to photograph the media preview before any of the programming began. It was wild to not just see inside of the building but also the amount of infrastructure the Luminato team, PARTISAN’s architects and many others had brought in: https://www.blogto.com/slideshows/hearn-luminato-2016-toronto/

Step into the Situation Rooms

After photographing the media preview, I had the chance to check out the Situation Rooms by the German theatre group Rimini Protokoll. A project that is hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it yourself and one I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

Situation Rooms is an immersive augmented reality theatre experience. Where you are directed through a series of carefully constructed sets via a narrative playing out on an iPad. During the span of the experience, you become 20 different characters directly involved in war or conflict:

‘Situation Rooms’ gathers together from various continents 20 people whose biographies have been shaped by weapons in a film set that recreates the globalised world of pistols and rocket-propelled grenades, of assault rifles and drones, of rulers and refugees, becoming a parcours of unexpected neighbourhoods and intersections. With the personal narratives of the ‘inhabitants’, the images start to move and the audience follows the individual trails of the cameras they have been given. They start to inhabit the building, while following what they see and hear on their equipment. The audience does not sit opposite the piece to watch and judge it from the outside; instead, the spectators ensnare themselves in a network of incidents, slipping into the perspectives of the protagonists, whose traces are followed by other spectators.

“Situation Rooms” is a multiple simultaneous cinema; augmented reality as three-dimensional as only theatre can be!

I still remember so vividly the moment I was put into the place of a doctor treating the victim of an explosion and requiring an amputation, and then shortly thereafter I was that very victim lying on the doctor’s operation table. This project feels so relevant in our current world now as a sort-of warning.

The power of a Citizenship Ceremony

I again found myself back at the Hearn during Luminato when I was hired to photograph a very special series of citizenship ceremonies, by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

Epic Night At The Hearn

Next Nobu and David (of Choir Choir Choir) hired me to photograph the Epic Night at the Hearn where over 1500+ people came together to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in the presence of Rufus Wainwright (see photo below):

Check out the other photos from this incredible event, viewable here:

The ChoirChoirChoir video directed by Byron Kent Wong on YouTube has over 14 MILLION Views:

UNSOUND Music Festival

… and then Vice Magazine’s, now-defunct Thump channel hired me to photograph UNSOUND Toronto:

Into the Culture Cave

It was such a memorable ten days, and a number of photos of mine from the festival were later published in the hardcover book “Into The Culture Cave” by black dog publishing.

It has been fun looking back through the hard drives and reliving these four happenings I had the chance to document for BlogTO, ChoirChoirChoir, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, and Vice Magazine. I am still so grateful for those opportunities!

In my next few posts, I’ll be sharing more recent projects, but I always love a good reason to look back through the archives. Will definitely be doing more of that! Stay tuned.

All photos are my own, and copyright Andrew Williamson Photography (unless otherwise stated)

Thank you for reading (and watching) No AI tools were used in the creation of this post. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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Undoubtedly it can be heartbreaking to see the public space in its current state between its past and future. However since the very beginning this place has always been a representation of both the past and the future!

Brief history: https://www.heritagetoronto.org/explore/toronto_harbour_waterfront_history/ontario-place-toronto-history/

As mentioned in the last post one of the stand out projects I got to document ten years ago in 2016, was in/future Presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music. The ten day arts festival was:

the first time the West Island of Ontario Place had been animated since its closure in 2012, with artists and partners responding to the past and future of the site to create responsive programming that was deeply rooted in this unique place.

- art spin archive

Below are just a small selection of my photographs from in/future:

More info and photos: https://www.artspin.ca/infuture

What does the future hold for the west island of Ontario Place? We’ll have to wait and see.

Thank you for reading (and watching) No AI tools were used in the creation of this post. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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But I get it, with what feels a little like society collapsing all around us and all the bad news happening south of the border, it’s not surprising that people want to look back to the so called “good times.”

In 2016 social media still was a pretty good time. The term “doomscrolling” wasn’t yet in our lexicon (it took two more years of enshittification till we got there) and new technology still felt like it would make our lives better and not threaten to take our jobs (cough AI, cough)

Digging into my 2016 photography archive

So when I looked back through all my photos from 2016 it did indeed feel like a bit of a simpler time, albeit a busy time for me and a time here in Toronto that was particularly worth celebrating.

By the year 2016 I had graduated university and been out in the real world for five years. I had really found my stride as a professional photographer here in Toronto with my two Canon DSLR’s hanging on my shoulders basically acting as my “key to the city.”

So what better way to begin to look into my nearly two decades long archive of work then to start somewhere in the middle! For me upon reflection there was three highlights that really stuck out in 2016 and I want to use them as a launching point to introduce some past projects i’ll be revisiting from time to time here on this newsletter.

1: The year Toronto music went global

In 2016 Canadian music had become wildly popular worldwide. It was the year Drake released Views complete with One Dance and Hotling Bling and The Weeknd released the banger that is Starboy ft. Daft Punk (which I got to photograph an activation the day it launched in Toronto)

2: The arts on a small scale

In 2016 I had been running a small DIY artspace on Dundas St West here in Toronto for three years. A project that essentially grew out of organizing small concerts and art shows in a loft space years prior:

The gallery started quite serendipitously after passing the right space and spotting it on Craigslist, as told in this BlogTO Article:

I stumbled upon this place walking by. It was all covered with paper and really looked like nothing, but then I found it the next day on Craigslist and got in touch with the landlord. I saw it two hours later, and decided that evening that I was going to take the lease. But when I came in it was disgusting...the guy who lived here just smoked all day, and there was a hammock from one side of the room to another.

That article also summarizes the first show pretty well, which really did set the stage for exhibitions to come.

In the first year it was simply called the address, “2186 Dundas” which was a Dundas West thing at the time, then later renamed to the Black Cat Artspace after I had revealed an old hand painted cigarette sign from the storefronts previous use as convenience store many decades prior.

I’ll definitely be writing more about the art shows and exhibitions that happened there over the 7 years it existed coming up.

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The amount of interest I had from artists of all disciplines in that first year was so overwhelming that I decided to throw a show at the end of the year I called the Salon of Inclusiveness where every submission ended up on the walls:

Video by: Marcel Canzona

It’s convenient that the only year we made a video of the Salon show was in 2016!

3: The arts on a MASSIVE scale

In 2016 the real estate market in Toronto was on fire and there really was this sense that every previously overlooked space was valuable and creative communities came together to do big things!

Two of which I got to be heavily involved with documenting in 2016 were In/Future at Ontario Place Presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music and Luminato at The Hearn Generating Station celebrating the 10th year of the festival.

The later of which was hosted in a massive former power plant larger than the Tate Modern which you could fit the statue of liberty in either upright or horizontal.

Both festivals activated their massive sites for more than 10 days consecutively and still to this day have been some of the most ambitious art festivals i’ve ever had the chance to play a part in documenting.

Substack is warning me that this newsletter is getting too long. So I feel these pairs of photographs are a good first glimpse of two projects that are worthy of their own posts.

Stay tuned for an upcoming newsletter about Ontario Place: past, present and in/future.

I’m also getting fired up to work on an upcoming post about the various different happenings that I got to document during Luminato’s epic transformation of the Hearn Generating Station in 2016.

Thank you for reading (and watching) No AI tools were used in the creation of this post. Any grammatical or spelling errors are the result of my career as a professional photographer and filmmaker and not being a writer. ✌️

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If you’ve already watched the video, thank you and nice to meet you! I’m a full time photographer, filmmaker, and general documenter of the arts here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

You can see some of my photography here and video here

I’ve been enjoying spending more time over here on Substack, the longer form and higher quality of writing here has been reminding me of the earlier blogging days and thats very refreshing these days.

Why Substack?

I feel like there is a lot of great discourse here on Substack and personally it has been my favourite place to go to for inspiration. So naturally I’ve been thinking about how best to show up here.

This year I want to challenge myself to share my work and more about the creative process and problem solving that goes into it. I’m aiming for this Substack to be a regular outlet to share not just finished work, but also side projects and explorations.

It doesn’t have to be good, completed, or perfect to be a topic on here.

Why Truth to Materials?

If you were to google search the term, you’d find that wikipedia defines the phrase as:

Truth to materials is a tenet of modern architecture, which holds that any material should be used where it is most appropriate and its nature should not be hidden.”

or even before you can get there, Google’s AI summary defines the phrase as:

"Truth to materials" is a design and architectural philosophy, rooted in Modernism and the Bauhaus movement, that advocates for using materials in their most honest, natural state. It emphasizes showcasing the inherent textures, properties, and structural qualities of materials—such as raw concrete, timber, or metal—without covering them with paint, veneers, or artificial finishes. This approach argues that materials should be used appropriately and their, often, constructed, appearance celebrated.

I first heard this term in my high school art class growing up in the suburbs and it really stuck with me, apart from it’s meaning relating to modern architecture, I just really latched onto the idea of highlighting and celebrating something for what it is, as opposed to hiding its structure (or in this case process) behind a facade.

When you think about what social media has become, it’s almost entirely a facade, fabricated and not truthful at all. People portraying their lives as highlight reels, and acting out the life they want, but not as it is.

So looking at my list (ya there’s a short list) of domains I’ve registered over the years, www.truthtomaterials.com felt to meet the moment here in 2026 and felt like a pretty good name for a newsletter about my creative process.

So What Can You Expect here?

Thats a good question you can expect future posts to include:

• some behind the scenes,

• some reflections on my day to day commissioned work,

• and some posts looking back at work in my archives.

Through all of this, I’m just hoping to connect with other creatives, both local and around the world. So go ahead and subscribe. Lots more to come.

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You can also find me on, Instagram / Threads / Vimeo and my portfolio