Arts and Entertainment

Maggiolly’s window display features multi-media artist’s latest work, focused on social commentary

August 28, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

A Caledon-based artist, who goes by the name MP, got his start a long time ago, when he was inspired by the works of 1960s pop artists Basquiat, Haring, and Warhol.

Like them, the art MP is producing now is “kind of both serious and funny,” as he said in a recent interview with the Citizen.

Putting together strangely imagined figures that carry messages in quotes by famous people, MP delves into the combination of rhetoric and his own melting mechanics and humans.

He commented, “It’s easier to paint a pretty picture if you have the talent, but I have no talent and so I do this. I am working on a line that is out of a song, I saw your green hair with the video by Chappell Roan. I decided to use it – I call it ‘Trains.’”

MP has connections in New York who are interested in seeing his work.

The interview turned to the job of installing his piece into the window at Maggiolly’s, which was challenging given the variations of the work and the window’s space. Tricky it may have been, but MP was very pleased to have the space to show his creation and how well it looked once it was set up.

He does a great deal of research before beginning to work on his pieces. By listening to and reading Apple News and leading newspapers from Europe and the Middle East. He makes current affairs the jumping-off point for what goes into his pieces. MP is a fan of the Atlantic magazine as well.

In Maggiolly’s window, a metal man, capped by a multi-pointed crown, “The Clanker” he is called, is about AI, born from a quote online on MP’s phone: “a spy balloon in your phone.” The image is covered with notes and questions.

This is multi-media art, possibly at its most frenetic. Anxious to tell as many tales as he can, MP draws on a wide scope of influences, analyzing and dissecting them into his own many images.

They are made with fabric and paper – and odd things, sticks, buttons, his own curious mini sketches, all laid out most meticulously in his studio, arranged and rearranged until they fit his purpose. Then, he takes a number of photographs to be sure of his designs, takes the piece apart, and begins to glue, using a wide array of glues as he learns what works best.

“The four panels at the bottom are fabric on hard board,” he said, explaining further that in the middle space above them is the Senate Chair, showing the Liberals as the party in power on the right and the opposition party on the left. Power hangs tenuously between them.

In the yellow frame are Musk on the left and Trump as a red stick man to his right, with his red hat, of course. This feature makes fun of the feud that flourished for a while between them and someone’s quote: “the girls are fighting again!”

Musk has his arms crossed to either offer Trump a drink or perhaps another rebuke.

Ominously, those four blocks across the bottom are painted in shades of brown, a serious reminder of those brown shirts worn in Germany, in a time of history when there were threats against civilians, and a hint at what is happening in the US now is a reflection as Trump sends ICE to arrest people.

The character’s round head and stick on the right is an introduction to what MP is hoping to make as his signature character, a bringer of satire and a poignant reminder of the foibles and worse of public figures and national leaders.

The “buzz feed” of normal Americans just making comments has been his source for quotes, although he has taken some quotes off as a friend in New York thinks it’s dangerous and conducts all the bits brought together that do and do not go there.

Trump went on about the 51st state, and a few weeks ago, Rod Stewart was on tour in Canada, and at the end of his concert, he blurted out, “We do not have states!”

Working on his next one on trains and then a Taylor Swift is to be done, MP said, “All my stuff is glued on. If I move something, when I take it apart, everything is layered. I photograph it all and then take I have to put it back together,” he explained. “I listen to research many times and then layer; it’s starting to get really good.”

“Picasso was very decorative,” he commented, “everyone starts from someone. My friends call my art unique, I have no art training but my work influences my art and my art influences my work. You can see where my art comes from – now I’m using songs.”

MP said, “What I’m trying to do to is come up with a sort of style that people would recognize as ‘art by MP.’”

You can see MP’s wild window display at Maggiolly’s until the end of this week and over the weekend.

Catch up with MP on Instagram – @trashtalk_art.

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