Local Colour Info Centre
Emerging Toronto artist Erica Brisson engages audiences in an exploration of public space, identity and community through drawing and urban interventions.
Over the past few years, Brisson has been examining the experience of physical environment through different strategies. She has staged a colouring party on the theme of national parks in a former auto-shop in Calgary, and demonstrated how to make furniture out of cardboard in a Montreal public park.
For her Koffler Gallery Off-Site project, Brisson becomes an inquisitive tourist inviting Torontonians to act as her guides. Inspired by tourism information centres as well as the process of public consultation, Local Colour Info Centre sets up a social space where passersby can share their personal interpretations of the city’s intentional or informal landmarks. Based on her discussions with each visitor, Brisson creates postcards that reveal diverse and subjective perceptions of the city’s visual identity through minimalistic drawings that recall blueprints or maps.
By scanning and re-printing her drawings as postcard multiples, Brisson readily shares the images. The individual interpretations of the city’s iconic locations are also recorded in an on-line component of the project. A growing, idiosyncratic map mirrors this accumulation on the wall of the Local Colour Info Centre along with the generated postcards that become available for sale to the public. Furthermore, visitors can intervene and draw on the existing postcards, making a symbolic mark upon the cityscape.
Through her interactive approach, Brisson elicits interest in taking a closer look at the physical environment, unearthing emotional connections and shared experiences of the city. Considering the notions of landmark and monument and their role in recording and anchoring public memory, Local Colour Info Centre reveals the many facets of Toronto in the imagination of its inhabitants.
Erica Brisson is a visual artist who uses drawing and participatory strategies to explore ideas of community, place, and identity. Born and raised in downtown Toronto, Brisson has a BFA from Concordia University and attended the curatorial outreach work-study program at the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre. She has produced participatory and community-based projects including teaching passersby to build their own furniture out of cardboard in a public park for Dare-Dare artist-run centre in Montreal; designing a mobile billboard in collaboration with inpatients from the geriatric ward of Torontoís Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; and, most recently, compiling an inventory of observations about everyday life in the Berlin neighbourhood of Moabit as part of a residency at the ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanism.
