Dan Bergeron The Unaddressed

Presented in partnership with the
Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC)
at the ROM.

For the better part of a decade,
Dan Bergeron, AKA fauxreel, has been
creating subversive, photo-based street
works in Canada, England and the
United States. Many of his projects
tackle current social and political
themes, while others re-contextualize
the physical spaces that he liberates.
Bergeron documents people who are
rarely focused on by the mass media
and challenges the predominant visual
culture of advertising – its presence,
location and scale.

The Unaddressed (2009) focuses on
the under-housed, giving voice to their
personal opinions. By photographing
his subjects holding a cardboard sign
that announces their concerns, the
artist challenges preconceived notions
of homelessness. Working against the
minimal exchange between the homeless
and passers-by, Bergeron’s images
use the trope of the panhandling sign
to disclose messages usually ignored or
unspoken.

One pair of Bergeron’s giant figures
stand sentinel outside the ROM’s
Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Inside the
museum, life-sized figures appear on
the walls, wheat-pasted throughout
public spaces. They lead to Housepaint,
Phase 2: Shelter, Canada’s first major
exhibition of street art. By focusing
on individual stories and the issues
of homelessness and poverty, The
Unaddressed serves as the final of five
installations commissioned by the
ROM’s ICC and as a public installation
for CONTACT.

Dozens more life-sized figures are
scattered throughout the streets of
Toronto, grounding this project firmly
within the street art genre. Pasted up
in the streets, Bergeron’s images of
the homeless take on a very different
meaning: they represent their subjects
within the places that they call home,
and confront the viewer in the places in
which we all collectively exist.