SCAMH: Shopping Centres and Model Homes: Part One: Shopping Centres

These books consist of photographs, posters and collages documenting the changes imposed on the Parkdale Toronto neighborhood by the forces of commercialization and gentrification unleashed by the redevelopment (ie., commercialization) initiated by advocates of “brain-disease” psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. These changes happened under various slogans invented by CAMH Foundation and PR firms such as Dentsubos: “transforming lives,” “biggest breakthrough ever,” “defeat denial,” “part of the neighborhood,” etc – which are explored and lampooned in many of these images. Some of these images are portraits of street people, the ongoing reality of whose lives belies the falsity of such claims. Many are of the unsustainable enterprises and condos that have sprung up in the wake of the old Asylum, and in the shadow of the new, as if asserting the progress of the very opposite of mental health.While these books are hard to classify, with their accompanying captions / text they would comprise a kind of graphic novel.