On the 25th of July 2025 the Common College of Art hosted its fourth One- Hour Masters, the first of its kind in Toronto, Canada.
It was attended by 13 people; friends, friends of friends and strangers who would go on to become friends.
It happened at the lovely On Task Studio in Liberty Village and was also attended by two small dogs and one medium-sized cat.
As with the previous three sessions that happened in London, this gathering was an experiment that started with a provocation. Participants (hereafter referred to as students) were asked to close their eyes and imagine an art school.
George & Charlotte, the two small dogs, sleeping in a sunbeam at OnTask Studio
Why don’t you give it a shot yourself? Wherever you are take a moment and a breath and let your mind wander as you imagine up the best art school you can think of. Do you have it?
I now ask you the same question I asked the students:
“In this art school of yours, what are the teachers like?”
That’s it. That question and whatever thoughts it stirred up are the important bits. You can stop reading here and go sit with your thoughts if you’d like, the rest of this report is just me finishing my summary of the fourth One-Hour Masters and jotting down how I feel about teaching and trust.
After the question the students were shuffled and moved around, so that they were all sitting next to someone that they hadn’t walked into the room with. I would then go through how to fold a zine with them. The rest of the One-Hour Masters was essentially an arts and crafts session and an opportunity to put the thoughts they had been sitting with on paper. The students were told that they were going to be teachers today and that the people at their table were their new classroom. The zine they were making was to function as both teaching aid and dissertation. They were then left alone for the better part of the hour and asked to simply “teach something”.
I invite you once again to join the students. You’ll need to know how to fold a zine first. Find an A4 size piece of paper and follow along:
It would take a fairly larger essay to go over the history and significance of zines. I’ll write that one out and put it on the CCA Website later. Just know that the little 8-page booklet in your hand has been a way for communities, often marginalized and suppressed, to have their voices heard and published for decades now. I think it is pretty cool that every piece of paper has a small tiny book in it waiting to be brought out, filled in, photocopied, and distributed to the people you care about.
You’re in the room with us now. It’s not hard to imagine. You know the sound of a pair of scissors slicing through paper, the smell of glue on old magazines and the brightness of a sunbeam pouring down from a skylight on the roof. You know of all these things separately, simply piece them together and it’ll be like you were there with us.
I think a good art school exists in the space and time between the casual and the incidental. Casual spaces do not demand anything of you, they are softer with their asks. They are accessible. They are inviting. By Incidental, I refer to time. Unstructured, undecorated and waiting to be filled. Serendipity. Accidents. Improvisation.
These two qualities create an environment ripe for art but you need a catalyst, some sort of pressure.
All one has to do is bring a framework, set an intention or throw a provocation in such places and art will occur there. A disruption that directs people’s attention.
With the fourth One Hour Masters, I tried to meet the requirements in a few ways:
The first way to make a casual space is to not charge a person for entering it. This session, like all its predecessors, was free. One could expect to meet good people as I mainly invited my friends and they invited their friends. We’d blocked out two hours, though the workshop itself would only take one, and we left people to mingle and interact. Though we told them they’d only have an hour, we didn’t police the time too strictly.
The provocation around which we all made art together was simple:
Teach Something
At the end of the hour the students came to the front of the room as they finished their zines. I scanned them and then invited the student to present their “thesis” to the rest of the class. What started out as a pleasant and warm gathering turned into something downright magical as people took to the stage nearby and poured their heart out.
One student lapsed into poetry after having been inspired by a sunbeam that poured into the room through a skylight.
Another talked about their experience with having their identity stolen and how they’ve rebuilt their entire life to prevent that from happening.
There were presentations on existential ennui and also how one could keep kids occupied during summer vacation.
How do you pack for a 3-day trip? How does one talk about a good film? How does one create a good character? Become a better public speaker? Start seeing themselves?
Each question, brewed in trust, was a slice of the student’s own life.
It is dangerously easy to write off this whole experience as just a pleasant gathering, a tongue in cheek parody of higher education and nothing more. It was all of those things but it was also an experiment to determine how fruitful it can be to build trust. The trust that grew in the dance between teaching and being taught is what led to people laughing and lapsing into poetry on stage. It left everyone feeling nourished after a mere hour together.
At the end of our time together, everyone lined up to pick up a degree from a collection that I had linocut and printed the night before. On it I’d printed the words “Maybe the real degree was the friends we made along the way”. This made me chuckle to write out but I also do believe it sincerely.
It is important to acknowledge that I’m privileged enough to not worry about my next meal or paycheque and that I can breathe easy enough to chase the almost utopian worldview that making art with your friends is the actual point of everything.
For now, perhaps it is enough to hold the hope that such a world can and should exist, so that it may survive long enough to reach a generation of students who can enact it. For now, I can promise that there will be more One-Hour Masters and more friends to make in the near future.
Notes on the Title:
If you look up “The Speed of Trust”then you’ll find various management books written about how efficiency and success can be optimized by winning the trust of one’s teammates. I’m sure that there is a room somewhere with people in suits trying to quantify trust down to the exact way the chemicals in our brains interact to make us feel it. Perhaps they’ll succeed. This report isn’t bothered with the horrors or merits of such an exercise. I chose to use the phrase “The Speed of Trust” based on Sun Ho Lee’s beautiful syllabus Moving at the Speed of Trust where she mentions the love, care, and time it takes to collaborate with strangers and form meaningful relationships.
Gratitude:
Thank you to Alexandra Howell of On Task Behaviour for so graciously allowing us to use her wonderful space, it gave the Common College of Art a soft space to land in Toronto. Thank you to everyone who attended and gave a little bit of their time towards this experiment in pedagogy and care.
Graduates of the fourth One Hour Masters coming up to receive their degrees (Circa July 25th 2025)
