Documenting the "Drake" industrial complex
Love him or hate him, Drake has been on the forefront of putting Toronto on the map globally for decades. With fans from Scarborough to the Mayor's office to the most remote places on earth.
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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