HOTEL ADIPOSE: About
Hotel Adipose is an interdisciplinary art platform operating across digital and physical space, a structure for people interested in sustaining creative and artistic lives, and in connecting with others through personal experience, the creative process, and art-based inquiry.
Current
The current offering is the Tiny Time Suite, a monthly membership built around short, consistent drawing and creative writing sessions, organized around prompts and themes with an emphasis on world building and storytelling. It is framed as a series of departures, arrivals, and spaces in between. Members are equally welcome to use session time toward their own projects; the sessions can function as space for creative accountability as much as practice. We begin with drawing and writing. Small, consistent arrivals into your own creative landscape, while collectively building the heartbeat of the hotel. Foundational practices, low-barrier methods for tracing your own creative process and imagined destinations. Open to adults of all abilities, no prior training necessary other than an interest in art. If drawing and writing are not accessible to you or of interest, experiment with alternate ways of mark making, for example: using voice, voice recording, movement, anything that will assist and benefit your process. Facilitated by artist Jessie Holmes, founder and concierge of Hotel Adipose, with additional artists and facilitators to follow.
Concept
Modeled loosely on the artist-occupied hotels of the twentieth century, places where people shared corridors, resources, and artistic pursuits, Hotel Adipose functions as a contemporary iteration of that structure: a space for creative experimentation and collective self-preservation.
Conceptually, the hotel will evolve as a transformative and performative space encompassing art sessions, guest talks, readings, discussions, artist hospitality, and destination projects, with the possibility of a physical hotel to follow, its neon sign lit up against the night.
Membership
To become a member, click Become a Member at the bottom of this page or navigate to Suites in the main menu. For any questions, reach out via the contact tab.
History
Hotel Adipose emerged from two decades of artist-led communal experiments across Canada and Europe. The project operates as a parafictional destination, an artistic mode between fact and fiction that invites participants to question what they accept as real. Within that mode, Hotel Adipose functions as a conceptual hotel for art practice and creative process.
The project builds on The Drawing Society (2009–2011), an itinerant series of in-person art actions co-founded in Berlin with Canadian/Swedish artist Laura Piasta, open, spontaneous exchanges that foregrounded creative resets and connection over formal outcomes. A quiet Fluxus echo in the early internet era, its spirit continues to animate Hotel Adipose's borderless corridors.
Studies at Frankfurt's Städelschule (2012–2015) further developed this communal impulse through its self-directed ethos and peer-to-peer culture. Travelling with art and ideas through different portals and possibilities becomes the elevators and staircases of the hotel. The Guest (2018–2020), a talk series co-created in Toronto with Canadian artist Erica Stocking, traced artists' transient passages through places, spaces, and projects, stories and experiences exchanged in passing.
From a constellation of influences, Hotel Adipose arrives as a space that subtly subverts reality by exploring collective and individual imaginations. It enacts the creative process as formative action, where connection, experimentation, and self-preservation coalesce into method and manifesto.
Bio
Jessie Holmes (b. 1982, CA) holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver), studied at Städelschule (Frankfurt am Main), and earned an MFA from OCADU (Toronto). Her interdisciplinary practice spans performance, poetry, and painting to explore character development and parafictional narratives. Through projects like Hotel Adipose, she produces transitional scenographic sites that explore re-imaginings of late modernity—at the intersections of technology, work, relationships, and identity.
HOTEL ADIPOSE GUIDELINES & CODE OF CONDUCT
This space welcomes LGBTQIA+ people, BIPOC communities, disabled and neurodivergent pals and those with under represented identities or experiences. Hotel Adipose is a platform that supports people interested in sustaining creative and artistic lives, that centres diversity, equity, and inclusion by welcoming artists and allies of all races, genders, sexual orientation, abilities, body sizes, backgrounds, and treating lived experience as expertise. Value is shared, not measured by productivity, credentials, or expertise. Difference intrigues imagination and resilience; a path to learning and expansiveness.The Hotel Adipose Guidelines & Code of Conduct ensures safety, accountability, and respectful exchange for all.
Disclaimer: This is a peer, art-based support space. This is not therapy or a substitute for therapy, medical care, or emergency services. If someone appears in crisis, encourage them to seek professional help immediately. Facilitators may share crisis resources but cannot provide emergency intervention
Membership registration here
Click to select your suite and become a member.