When it finally opens its doors, Edmond Place will be the house that art helped build.
Design Hope Toronto raised $15,000 from its second annual fine art auction gala for the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre's (PARC) cause at St. John's Parish Hall on April 16. Roughly $265,000 is still needed to finish the project. The event was hosted by neighbourhood broadcaster Peter Armstrong of CBC Radio One and featured a 15-minute set by the PARC band followed by Waddington's bid caller Bill Kime who auctioned off 23 works garnering over $10,000 by night's end.One of the most expensive pieces sold was "Untitled", a mixed media piece by Grade 12 Parkdale Collegiate student Mary D'Cruz who learned to do acrylic transfers at PARC. It sold for $860."I've lived in Parkdale my whole life and I wanted to create something to show that everyone was welcome in the community," she said. "So I decided the best way to do that was to show the different types of housing in the neighbourhood and Edmond Place making its home in the community." Bill Ford, who co-founded Design Hope Toronto five years ago, said while his group was successful when it started by throwing auction galas for Dixon Hall, what they raised in funds over those three years they lacked in rapport. Finding PARC last year and seeing people with mental health problems wandering the neighbourhood when he first moved to Parkdale in the 1980s, Ford said the circumstances of the groups fostered the relationship they were looking for."The idea behind art is that I guess we partly feel that there are a lot of artists who are borderline could be in a similar situation with the people we're helping," he said. "They know they could be in that situation or that a lot of them have been in that situation or even are in that situation. We just feel artists can sympathize a little more with the cause and it's nicer, since we're artists, to engage that community."The other draw for Design Hope Toronto was that the recreation centre goes beyond working with psychiatric patients by giving them opportunities to become part of the process, like helping out in the soup kitchen, volunteering in their ambassador program or even contributing art for the event, which Ford said a few did."So just the way that they involve their members and try to, as they say, 'rebuild their lives' by integrating them back into the community," he said.Executive director Victor Willis said many of the people he's come across during his 21 years at PARC have had long and interesting histories and art is how they tell their stories."At PARC, if you walk around, you would see the walls covered not unlike this," said Willis pointing to the works on display that would end up on the auction block an hour later. "It's how they express their hopes, dreams or their nightmares. It either talks a bit about where they came from or it also starts to talk about what they would prefer to have. Sometimes it identifies the things that they lost."Art and people with mental illness are closely linked."Shedding its crumbling past, Edmond Place, the revamped 29-unit residence at 194 Dowling Ave. that the neighbourhood's current and former psychiatric patients will eventually call home got its namesake from Edmond Yu, a schizophrenic patient evicted from the address in 1996.He was shot dead by police on board a TTC bus in 1997 after displaying hostile behaviour stemming from being homeless and unable to take his medication.