Public Infrastructure
By: Tamara Jones
April 4-27, 2025

Storefront exhibition viewable 24/7
Gallery hours: Fridays and Saturdays 3-7pm

Public Infrastructure is a participatory installation featuring video art and textile sculptures, transforming a hostile landscape into a dreamlike site of play.

This is a crisis (2023): An anonymous bureaucrat traipses around the City of Toronto, repurposing hostile architecture as their playground. Featuring spliced audio of former mayor John Tory’s victory speeches from 2014, 2018, and 2022 municipal election nights, bleak scenes are juxtaposed with a heavy-handed narrative of progress and inclusion. Documented on January 31, 2023—weeks before Tory would resign—this public performance and accompanying video artwork offer a critique of procedural fetishism, the surveillance and criminalization of poverty, and what cities become when they leave the most marginalized behind.

Scaffolding #1-6 (2025): A dreamscape, a quivering horizon, a shifting surface for a society in free-fall... These participatory structures mimic hostile architecture, often installed on ledges to oppose public use. Flexible spikes rendered futile when moulded by pressure. They question their existence and ask us to do the same. Participants are invited to play, rest, learn, conspire, regroup, and construct the world they want to live in.

Tamara Jones is an arts worker based in Tkaronto (Toronto) and Yelamu (San Francisco). They create work about bureaucracy and urban choreography, often expressed through performance, appropriated media, experimental video, and participatory art practices. Tamara’s work has been programmed by the Black Experimental Film Festival, Artspace Gallery, Pleasure Dome, Dancemakers, Images Festival, and Whippersnapper Gallery. Their writing—documenting art and social action in the cultural sector—has been published by The Local, Spring Magazine, Mayworks Festival, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, and elsewhere.

Accompanying programming
Opening reception: April 4, 6-8pm

Workshop: Patterns for Living is a contact improv and performance art workshop for queer and trans artists of colour. Tamara will lead an exploration of work by marginalized performance and video artists and invite participants to create communal performance artwork. No performance experience is necessary. Space is limited.

April 19, 11am-2:30pm
April 26, 11am-2:30pm

Accessibility: Unfortunately, Whippersnapper Gallery is not wheelchair accessible. The washroom is down one flight of stairs. Masks will be available on-site. Please reach out to programming@whippersnapper.ca with any accessibility needs, and we will do our best to accommodate.

*N95 masks will be provided.

*We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which has funded this project through the Concept to Realization composite stream.