The City of Oshawa began collaborating with Durham College’s Community Collaborations Course in 2015. Over the past four years, student's work has been showcased in three murals located at Civic Square (located on Centre Street at City Hall), vinyl images affixed to the windows of the Arts Resource Centre, and in Alexandra Park adjacent to Lakeridge Health Oshawa as well as inside the hospital. For the 2019/2020 project, we will be choosing locations in our Community Centres and Oshawa Seniors Community Centres.
Illustration and Design
Below are a few favourites from various commissions completed between 2021 and 2026.
This piece, commissioned by Worlds Collide Comics for their beautiful new space, is a love letter to comics, the first art form that truly felt like home to me. Comics were my earliest doorway into the visual arts, which felt inviting and accessible without formality or instruction.
Through their interplay of words and images, they created portals into other worlds while meeting me exactly where I was. They balanced the written and the visual in a way that allowed pictures to hold what language could not, and they welcomed me on my own time and terms.
This piece references the private spaces where I would retreat to read and create and the spaces comics could be tucked away. It references the horror and science fiction genres that first helped me explore stories and ideas of symbolism, identity, mystery, and the unknown.
Local artist The Spud loves comics and got excited about this piece. So we designed it together, weaving our art into the composition, designing a shared signature for this work and any collaborative work we do together in the future.
This artwork celebrates the language of comics and the worlds they continue to open.
"This project was inspired by conversations held at the LivingRoom Community Art Studio about the Durham Region Health Neighbourhoods Report with folks living in Oshawa’s priority neighbourhoods. We agreed that the issues in the report were very real and impacted many of us in varying ways that needed to be addressed. However, the conversations about the report also highlighted the stigma that those of us living in these neighbourhoods often experienced as a result of having our communities - and by extension ourselves - predominantly referred to in negative or problem centred ways. It was then that we decided to create an arts project that would explore, document and honour aspects of our lived experience that rarely receive attention. In a world that sometimes makes us feel like we're a problem - it's sometimes important to remind ourselves and others that what we really are is a resource." - The LivingRoom
As part of this initiative, I contributed to the development of a feedback form, conducted virtual and in-person interviews involving creative activities with the public, developed visual materials for branding and marketing, reviewed participant feedback, and produced a series of images celebrating Oshawa’s five priority neighbourhoods.
This first instalment of images has been shared with the community as a zine.
