About - Projects For These Warming Days

About The Residency

Projects for These Warming Days was created for Waterfront Toronto and the Waterfront BIA’s 2022 Artist in Residency Program by Lisa Hirmer.

The aim of this residency was to create meaningful, experiential encounters with the community, to activate multiple under-utilized spaces along the lakefront, and draw new audiences to the waterfront. This residency creates an opportunity for artists to expand their practice and develop innovative ways to integrate art into the fabric of the city. It also contributes towards the ongoing dialogue on public art and civic space.

The focus of the 2022 residency was climate change, as described by the residency call:

Climate change – a code red threat to humanity, according to the recent United Nations report – requires us to think differently. It challenges us to imagine alternative futures. Highlighting the urgency around the loss of biodiversity and ecological collapse, as well as intersectional equity issues related to the unevenly distributed impacts of nature, is critical. However, just as important is a call-to-action that offers solutions. Public art can help us reckon with the crisis and provoke creative responses, helping us push the boundaries of what can be possible. This artist residency will address climate change through thematics, and will focus on sustainability and the environment by exploring practices, processes, materials, and reuse as important mitigation solutions towards impacts on nature.

Learn more about the residency at Waterfront Toronto and The Waterfront BIA.

About The Artist

Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist working in visual media, especially photography; social practice; performance; and occasionally writing. Her work is focussed on collective relationships—that which exists between things rather than simply within them—both in human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. Much of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency, on the edge of planetary collapse.

Hirmer’s practice is unapologetically sincere in its engagement with the world and deeply connected to the sites, communities and circumstances that surround its creation. Her work finds home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces. It is always created with a keen awareness—informed by a mixed Mexican- and European-newcomer Canadian background—that multiple realities exist alongside one another.

Her work finds home in traditional galleries as well as in other public contexts and has shown across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, Cambridge Art Galleries, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, , Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others. She has done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne (TimePlaceSpace: Nomad), the Santa Fe Art Institute (Water Rights), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Rising Waters), the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (Soil Cultures), BIGCI, KIAC (the Natural + Manufactured) and the Camargo Foundation. She has received numerous grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, among others. She has a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.