Street hassle: Noise, art, and activism

When I was invited to have a solo exhibition at Trinity Square Video in the summer of 2019, I decided I didn’t want to do it alone. I had proposed to create a 30-channel sound system for the gallery, which is housed in Toronto in Canada's oldest media arts centre, but I conceived the apparatus as a platform for collaboration, for inviting other artists and the public to help me continually recreate the exhibition. I wanted to know what an exhibition could be if I intended it to be a question rather than an assertion. Everyonce included three (re)installations of the sound system: one version resulting from a public workshop I gave on field recording; a second in collaboration with Dont Rhine (a founding member of the activist art collective, Ultra-red) and Syrus Marcus Ware (a Toronto-based artist and organiser); a third with Anishinaabe artist, Maria Hupfield; and a concert featuring Diné composer, Raven Chacon. It is the second of the installations, an instalment we called Street Hassle, a work addressing the experiences of front-line workers in the current opioid crisis, that will eventually be the focus of this text.