Trevor Twells

July 24, 2024

What Changed Me?

My name is Trevor Twells, I am an artist, design strategist, and the founder of MakeRoom Inc., a curatorial agency dedicated to exhibiting BIPOC artists and emerging artists around the city. Over the past decade, I’ve hosted solo exhibits with over hundreds of guests, designed solutions impacting millions, and curated art experiences for large institutions like Union Station and The City of Toronto. If you were to ask me 10 years ago what I thought would be up to at age 32, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a straightforward answer.

From a young age, I was always building things I wanted to see in the world.

At 14, I learned how to code because I wanted to make video games. At 16, I attempted to create a social media website with a chat feature, back when Facebook didn’t have one. I was constantly creating, always driven by a desire to improve things or make something people could enjoy.

Looking back, this instinct to build and create was a constant thread in my life.

But this instinct was also accompanied by frustration. Creating things came naturally to me, but understanding how to share them with the world was a mystery. To me, reaching people was a black box that I didn’t know how to open.

That changed with my first art project. Fresh out of school, I worked for an advertising sales company in downtown Toronto.

In parallel, I was developing a side project—a platform for students to showcase their portfolios.

Since I lived in East Scarborough at the time, the 4-hour round-trip commute gave me a lot of time to daydream.

Long before cell reception on the train was a thing, you would have to wait until the small opening on Castle Frank station to check your text messages. This is where the idea hit me for my first art project. As a huge comic fan, I noticed that “Castle Frank” reversed is “Frank Castle,” also known as the Punisher in Marvel comics. I soon started making more word associations with other Toronto stations: St. George station became George Costanza station, Victoria Park became Jurassic Park, and so on.

I realized this could be a cool project to feature on my side platform, and just like that, my first art project, The TTC Pop-Culture Project, was born. I took these associations and created realistic photos of the renamed stations, accompanied by graffiti-like artwork.

I thought this project would be a great way to promote my portfolio platform, so on a whim, I sent it over to a few news sites and went to bed. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I thought would happen — I was by no means a PR person. I just knew that if I wanted to reach people, I’d have to try something. The next morning, I woke to a few dozen text messages and emails, all congratulating me. BlogTO and a few other sites had picked up the story I had submitted for my web platform, or so I thought. They were actually more interested in the art project.

The story read, “TTC pop culture project reimagines subway platforms”, with some sites even calling me an artist, something I never really labeled myself as before.

This is when I realized that I can put things out into the world

and if it’s dope enough, people will notice. This is what changed my life.

This realization both emboldened and affirmed me. It gave me the courage to start an art practice in my early 20s, something I never thought of doing but realized I had always yearned for.

I had so many ideas, things I wanted to build, concepts I wanted to explore, and art gave me an outlet to do so.

Over the next decade, I continued my art practice, hosting multiple solo exhibits, displaying work that was meaningful to me. This realization even influenced my day job.

I became a Product Designer, someone whose primary purpose is to create solutions to problems. Later in my art career, I recognized the inequalities in the art world, especially for those who look like me. So I did what I always do—I built something. I created MakeRoom to support BIPOC and emerging artists and to create meaningful art experiences by partnering with large institutions. And so far, that’s exactly what it has been doing. I’m constantly moved by the impact this organization has had and the artists we’ve supported and championed.

Today, I use this lesson as a guiding principle and a source of strength and motivation.