Photo exhibit at Bay Station provides behind-the-scenes glimpse inside TTC Headquarters

Toronto artist Leala Hewak has been working with the TTC to capture a series of behind-the-scenes images profiling the interior areas of the McBrien Building, the TTC’s headquarters at 1900 Yonge Street.  

The series, titled HEADQUARTERS, is on display at Bay Station as part of CONTACT Photography Festival. The images feature a Mad Men-era executive, the eternal “Chairman”, a ghostly stand-in for the ubiquitous bureaucrat who wanders halls, commands boardrooms, inspects bowels of the McBrien Building, and other individuals who portray a time when working in the office was the daily norm. Visitors to the exhibit will see images of wood-paneled executive offices, certain rarely used linoleum corridors, glass-louvered windows, mid-century wall sconces, and a pink tiled washroom, all of which are the last remaining original areas of the building.

Artist bio:  

Leala Hewak is a Toronto-based artist working primarily in photography and video. Her practice often explores relationships between people and their built environments, particularly Modernist and Brutalist buildings. A former criminal defence lawyer, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2017. Since that time, she has participated in more than 20 solo and group national and international exhibitions and published several artists' books. Prior to HEADQUARTERS, her latest series, TOO FUN (2024) documented the demise of Raymond Moriyama’s brutalist masterpiece, the Ontario Science Centre.