At some point in January this year whether we wanted to see it or not everyones feeds were inundated with posts of memories and highlights from 2016. Which I still find it hard to believe was actually ten years ago.
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.
In the meantime if you’re an artist or curator in your 20’s reading this I would highly encourage you to find the cheapest space you can find in your city and start a gallery or art space. Feel free to reach out or comment here. I’d love to chat and offer any help I can.
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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