Art Toronto

Revitalizing and refreshing Art Toronto, Canada’s largest art fair.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

Art Toronto is Canada’s international fair for modern and contemporary art. Since 2000, they have been dedicated to supporting art in Canada, connecting audiences to local, national and international galleries, and promoting diverse creative practices. 

Art Toronto looked to Puncture to evolve their look and develop creative marketing strategies to attract ticket sales for their 2018 event. We worked within the confines of an existing visual system to create a fresh, elegant look and feel that spoke to a wide audience. We then rolled out the updated brand on-site, in print, and in an effective out-of-home and digital marketing campaign that attracted new audiences. From 2018–2021 we worked with Art Toronto annually to create unique identities for the fair.

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plazaPOPS Website
Dream in High Park
Scarborough Proud
Patel

Exploring Hindi letters to create a unique wordmark for an art gallery.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

Patel Gallery highlights alternative perspectives and encourages experimentation and innovation in both its programming and operations. Identifying gaps in representation and opportunities guided by collaboration and community; the gallery’s program will look to traditions in culture and identity, and how they are increasingly challenged by the globalized world.

In collaboration with owner Devan Patel, Puncture embarked on crafting a simple yet distinctive identity that encapsulated these principles. Drawing inspiration from the elegant forms of the Hindi alphabet, we designed a wordmark that unified these ideals, with a connecting bar at the top. This identity serves as a visual embodiment of Patel Gallery’s commitment to innovation and cultural dialogue.

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Workshop
Tangerine
JCCC
JCCC

An intimate portrait of architect Bruce Kuwabara

Industry
Arts & CultureDesign & Architecture

Service
Video

Created for the 2026 Sakura Gala at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, this 12-minute documentary offers an intimate portrait of Bruce Kuwabara — architect, cultural thinker, and founding partner of KPMB Architects. The film traces the personal history and cultural experiences that shaped Kuwabara’s worldview, exploring how identity, memory, and community became foundational to both his life and his architectural practice.

Through candid conversation, archival material, and cinematic storytelling, the documentary reflects on the experiences of Japanese-Canadians during and after the Second World War, the lasting effects of displacement and assimilation, and the evolving search for belonging across generations. Woven throughout is Kuwabara’s own journey into architecture and his longstanding relationship with the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, including the tensions, ambitions, and hopes surrounding the institution’s growth and evolution over time.

Rather than focusing solely on buildings or professional accolades, the film examines the human and philosophical ideas behind Kuwabara’s work. Themes of pluralism, diversity, public life, and collective identity emerge as central forces in his approach to architecture and his understanding of Canadian culture itself. The result is a deeply personal and reflective film about the ways history, community, and lived experience shape not only the spaces we build, but the society we aspire to become.

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CAMH Virtual Tour
Sidewalk Labs
Herb
JCCC / Art Gallery of Ontario

Capturing the spirit of Naoko Matsubara in film.

Industry
Arts & CultureCorporate

Service
Video

Naoko Matsubara, whose name poetically translates to “straightforward girl of the pine tree field,” is an artist whose life and work intertwine with profound simplicity and creative curiosity. Born in the ancient capital of Kyoto and the daughter of a Shinto priest, she discovered her passion for art early and cultivated a practice of woodcut artistry.

In this intimate portrait, Matsubara reflects on the delicate balance of creation—embracing the unexpected beauty of mistakes and the profound joy found in the tactile nature of woodcut printing. Her story reveals a personal and artistic journey shaped by cultural dualities, self-discovery, and the powerful interplay between intention and intuition.

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Shorefast
Choice Eastway and Caledon
Bentway STREET
Waterfront Toronto

A floating neighbourhood market becomes a symbol of arrival, exchange and shared experience during a moment when the world gathers in Toronto.

When Waterfront Toronto released a call for proposals for a floating public artwork at Harbour Square Park Basin, we immediately thought of artists Trevor Wheatley and Cosmo Dean. We’ve collaborated with Trevor and Cosmo before and have long admired the way their work brings typography, sculpture and landscape together. Their installations often remove familiar words and symbols from the places where we expect to find them, allowing their meanings to shift and become spectacle.

For this project, we wanted to create something at the scale of the waterfront. Something immediately recognizable, but strange enough to stop people in their tracks.

During one of our first conversations, Trevor mentioned that he and Cosmo had always wanted to make a floating flower shop. That became our team’s starting point for Global Convenience.

The convenience store is one of the most familiar spaces in the world. Its appearance changes from city to city, but its role remains remarkably consistent. These modest neighbourhood businesses are shaped by migration, labour, exchange and daily ritual.


They are also informal community spaces. You see the same person behind the counter. They begin to recognize you. Languages, products and traditions exist side by side. Over time, small repeated interactions become part of the social fabric of a neighbourhood. Both Rashad and Spencer’s families started convenience stores in Toronto after immigrating.

With Toronto preparing to welcome visitors from around the world for the FIFA World Cup, we began thinking about the convenience store as a cultural crossroads. It offered a way to reflect the city’s global identity through an everyday space rather than a grand civic symbol.

Following the schematic design phase, Trevor and Cosmo began fabricating the structure in their west-end Toronto studio. The build required a constant balance between appearance, weight, durability and safety. The store needed to look substantial while remaining light enough to float and move. Engineering became central to the process, with the team working through buoyancy, wind load, lifting points, anchoring and structural stability. Materials and details were adjusted continuously as the project moved between design, fabrication, engineering and logistics until the object finally worked as a whole.

The store’s identity was built through accumulated details: barred windows, flowers, produce, decals, price signs and illuminated graphics. Drawing from the crowded visual language of neighbourhood convenience stores, we created an original mix of compressed typography, competing colours and printed and hand-painted signage. The inconsistencies were intentional, making the storefront feel accumulated over time rather than formally designed. Because the work is visible but inaccessible, we also created flyers and printed materials that extend its visual language onto land.

Industry
Arts & CultureDesign & Architecture

Service
Branding

Installing Global Convenience was a major undertaking. The completed structure had to be moved out of Trevor and Cosmo’s studio, loaded onto a flatbed and transported to the waterfront, where it was lifted by crane, lowered into the lake and secured to submerged anchors. Once installed, the work immediately began attracting attention. People stopped, pointed, photographed it and tried to determine whether it was real. During a moment when Toronto is presenting itself to the world, Global Convenience looks toward the smaller spaces through which a global city is actually made.

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SafeFest
CAMH Campaigns
plazaPOPS