HOTEL ADIPOSE: About
Hotel Adipose is an interdisciplinary art platform that exists between digital and physical space. It supports people interested in maintaining creative and artistic lives, connecting with others through personal experience, the creative process, and art-based inquiry. Hotel Adipose provides a framework for sustaining and developing artistic practices with the support of recurring live online sessions—drawing, writing, reading, discussion, and meditation.
This is a space to participate in workshops, readings, discussions, in-person art actions and performance; experiment with methods and materials, and sustain a steady foundation for art and community. Open to adults aged 18+ across all abilities; no prior artistic training required, though an interest in art in some form is recommended. Facilitated by artist Jessie Holmes—founder and concierge of Hotel Adipose—with additional artists and facilitators to follow.
Modeled loosely on hotels occupied by artists of the twentieth century—places where people shared corridors, resources, and artistic pursuits— Hotel Adipose functions as a contemporary version for creative experimentation, and collective self-preservation.
Hotel Adipose can be thought of as a living, collective performance taking on different forms over time through art; one that potentially could lead to a physical hotel in the future, with a neon sign flashing its name in the night.
To become a member at Hotel Adipose, click "become a member" at the bottom of the page or go to "suites" on the main menu to select your suite and enroll. If you have any questions, please reach out anytime via the contact tab in the main menu.
History
In an era of endless digital pings, Hotel Adipose emerged as a parafictional destination shaped by two decades of artist‑led communal experiments across Canada and Europe. Drawing on the concept of parafiction—an artistic mode that exists between fact and fiction, prompting people to question what they accept as “real.” —the project functions as a conceptual hotel for art practice and creative process.
Hotel Adipose 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. These sessions convened participants in open, spontaneous exchanges, foregrounding creative resets and connection over formal outcomes. Functioning like a quiet Fluxus echo in the early‑internet era, The Drawing Society’s spirit continues to animate Hotel Adipose’s borderless corridors.
Frankfurt’s Städelschule (2012–2015), with its self‑directed ethos and strong peer‑to‑peer culture, further strengthened this communal impulse, encouraging collaborative, off‑site art exploration. The act of travelling with art and ideas through different portals and possibilities becomes the elevators and staircases of Hotel Adipose.
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, exchanging stories and experiences in passing. From a constellation of influences, Hotel Adipose arrives 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.
Welcome to Hotel Adipose,
Jessie Holmes, Hotel Concierge xx
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, those with underrepresented 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.