Rocky Dobey's plaques, sculptures and memorials are everywhere in Toronto. Here's the story behind them

Once you realize what Rocky Dobey's art looks like, you realize that it's ubiquitous in Toronto. The mostly small, mostly metal monuments, plaques and sculptures that Dobey makes are everywhere in the city's downtown and the neighbourhoods to the west of it. 

Documentary filmmaker Kate Colenbrander says she had been noticing Dobey's pieces around the city for years before she realized they were all made by one person.

"I don't know if I ever really saw them as one cohesive artist," she says. "I noticed them walking around Kensington and Parkdale. I found Rocky's Instagram page and slowly started kind of delving in. And the more I took in — the more I watched videos of the kind of work that he makes — the more you realize that there's a really big story here about the message and the medium. So I cold-called him out of the blue."

The resulting eight-and-a-half minute short documentary is part of a new series about street art called Public Display that Colenbrander is doing with CBC Arts and CBC Creator Network. For Colenbrander, this piece is less "her documentary" than it is a collaboration between her and Dobey. 

"I may be the one who ultimately has the camera and [is] doing editing, but the whole thing is a conversation," she says. "I can't really have a big ego about it because the story wouldn't exist without Rocky."

Dobey has been putting his art up in the streets' of the city ever since he was a shoeshine boy on Yonge St. in the 1970s. He says when he first started, the phrase "street art" didn't even exist.

In his 20s, he started working in construction as an ironworker. The job also gave him access to scrap copper, which he took and began making the plaques and sculptures that now dot the city.

Still, he says that for most of his career, he never considered himself an artist.

"I didn't go to school," he says. "I wasn't part of the art scene. I couldn't talk to people."

Colenbrander says Dobey's first piece that really struck her was a memorial to a homeless woman who died of exposure. 

"It's very different than what people see as street art or public art," she says. "It exists in this kind of space in between what we think of as graffiti and memorial work that the city commissions or governments commission."

"I think what really struck me is that Rocky was memorializing people and places in a city where things are really quickly turned over and forgotten about."

Dobey adds that he wants to embrace the change that is constantly happening in the city while still memorializing and remembering its past. 

"I'm trying to talk about the past, but not be nostalgic and not be romantic," he says. "I'm trying to talk about the past, but also want to move forward… We have to have some gravitas to our memories, what happened here before."

For most of his five-decade career, Dobey worked either anonymously or pseudonymously. It was only in recent years, after his daughter helped him get on Instagram, that he started showing he started to publicize his work using his own name. 

"Now [that] I'm in my late 60s," he says, "I don't care as much."

Working openly has been a mixed bag so far. On one hand, he's connecting with the public and discovering how many people have been touched by his work over the years. He also has not one but two gallery shows booked for later this year — his first gallery shows in his 50-year career.

On the other hand, however, people who don't like his work now know where to find him. He says he recently got a cease-and-desist order to remove an unsanctioned bench he recently installed near Dundas and Ossington.

"Before, nobody would know [who I was] and they'd leave it up," he says. "I have [benches] that have been up 20 years."