In the summer of 2019 Toronto was in peak Instagram tourism. All over the city, brands like Dr. Seuss, Refinery 29, and even Banksy were creating Instagram-able installations where thousands of people would visit in order to experience the exhibit and capture the perfect shot for their followers. During this time, the downtown core would be flooded with people, visiting the sights to fill their feeds.

We leveraged this behaviour to create what looked like another instagrammable experience to get people in the door, only to confront them with the harsh reality of this growing online epidemic.

Capitalizing on the trend of Instagrammable installations, we created a highly visual exhibition designed to draw consumers in, then confront them with the realities of this global epidemic. Our initiative was titled Lolli: The Exhibit Nobody Wants To Talk About. The location of our industrial container-sized installation was carefully selected as part of Toronto’s Stackt Market, a popular downtown complex of small, artsy shops and eateries.

Once inside, visitors were confronted with 10,824 lollipops, each representing a new child pornography image detected online every 12 hours. Staggering statistics lined the walls along with quotes found from online offenders. Audio recordings from survivors detailed their pain, shame, and desperate hope for a solution.

The correlation between the problem and number of lollipops created a haunting dramatization. The sweet smell of lollipops throughout the exhibit added to visitors’ visceral reactions and “infinity mirrors” placed alongside the lollipops multiplied the visual effect.