Leala Hewak: HEADQUARTERS

Leala Hewak, The Quiet, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Leala Hewak: HEADQUARTERS

Core Public Art Exhibition, CONTACT Photography Festival 2026
May 1 – 31, 2026
Tour: May 14, 2026, 4pm
Bay Subway Station, 1240 Bay Street, Toronto

The CBC describes HEADQUARTERS as “Severance-like” and “Lynchian”, a time capsule of the Mad Men era which is connected to the Davisville stop. Wood-panelled offices and pink-tiled bathroom stalls serve as an eerie backdrop for an Agent Cooper-ish corporate character whom Hewak’s dubbed the Chairman.

Leala Hewak, The Three, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Toronto artist Leala Hewak’s HEADQUARTERS is a portrait of a fading Modernist workplace, built in an era when no one worked from home. Presented in a public installation at Bay Station, the images feature a Mad Men-era executive, the eternal “Chairman.” A ghostly stand-in for the ubiquitous bureaucrat, he wanders halls, commands boardrooms, inspects the bowels of The McBrien Building, the TTC’s head office. Like the television series Severance, HEADQUARTERS immerses the viewer in a now-receding environment at once familiar and distant, banal, and intriguing.

In late 2025, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) invited Hewak to document the William C. McBrien Building, at the corner of Yonge Street and Chaplin Crescent, above Davisville Station on the subway’s Line 1, Yonge-University. Opened in 1958, the building was named in honour of former TTC Chairman William C. McBrien, a key proponent of Canada’s First Subway, the original Yonge line. The building’s seven stories dominated midtown Toronto in the late ’50s, until other highrises began to proliferate. Now it often goes unnoticed as people hurry by or pass under it.

Images (Left to Right): Leala Hewak, The Meeting, 2025. Leala Hewak, The Artist, 2025. Images courtesy of the artist.

A frequent TTC rider and area local, Hewak often enters the building’s lobby to access Davisville Station, always intrigued by its quiet elegance. Few people get to see the edifice’s interior, and Hewak was thrilled at the opportunity to share this experience with the public, offering a unique behind-the-scenes look. To create the images in the installation, Hewak visited the building four times with her partner, actor and artist Don Hewak—the series’ “man in the suit.” She worked with TTC employees operating in the space, who were excited to showcase the remaining original areas and features that ground Hewak’s images, such as the wood-panelled executive offices, certain rarely used linoleum corridors, glass-louvered windows, mid-century wall sconces, and the “fan favourite”—a pink-tiled washroom.

Presented in the hallways of the TTC’s Bay Station, the 20 images that make up HEADQUARTERS immerse the viewer, putting them both in the place of the series’ protagonist—wandering the past, and, finally, lost in thought at his wooden desk—and at a remove, watching from the “outside,” a growing distance of time and space between them.

Hewak thanks the TTC employees whose kindness and good humour made this project possible, with a special “thank you” to those who appear in the images. A book containing these and other photographs from this series will be available shortly through the artist’s website or Instagram.

Curated by Laura Lehming, Christine Harron, and Hayley Waldman, in collaboration with the artist.

Courtesy of the artist.

About the Artist

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.

For more information contact:
lealaronahewak@gmail.com
416 949-8584
www.lealahewak.com
Instagram @lealahewak