In April of 2019, the Ontario government announced a 50% cut in funding to public library services. It’s a devastating cut that led to immediate layoffs and cancellations across various programs and services. This budget crisis will affect people across the province and will impact remote communities even more. Public libraries are an important resource, especially for low income and marginalized populations. Save Our Libraries is a grassroots movement started to bring concerned citizens together to put pressure on the Ontario government to restore funding to public libraries. Many Ontarians read during their daily commute, so we used media space on the inside of bus shelters. While commuters waited for their bus, they were hit with our message and call to action.

The art direction for the Save Our Libraries campaign revolves around still life images of classic library books, laid open to the most iconic passages. The books themselves are gently worn, to reflect the use a real library book would show — bumped at the edges and loved page by page by multiple people. Not old, but with the soul of a well-travelled volume. Each book rests open on a surface someone is likely to put it down on for break, such as a wooden coffee table, a fabric sofa, or a slate countertop. Corporate advertising features prominently in each open book, where the product and message are contextual to the story and theme of the book itself. Each advertisement is crafted to feel modern and genuine for the marketplace today. As a whole, the shots have an eerie familiarity with our everyday interactions with brands in online spaces, but the placement feels ominous and wrong at the same time. There's a sense of overstepped boundaries as these classic works of literature are cheapened by corporate messaging, leaving the viewer to feel upset by the desecration of classic art and concerned about the possibility of such a fate.