As Trevor Wheatley, one of the artists behind the store, and Rashad Maharaj, the managing director of the design studio Puncture, who served as the project’s producer, described it, “Global Convenience” was inspired by the idea of convenience stores as everyday places of cross-cultural exchange.
Such exchanges are amplified in a global city like Toronto during the World Cup, they said.
“When we were thinking of convenience stores, you know, there’s these daily interactions; you hear different languages, you see the same people, you start talking,” Mr. Maharaj, 39, said during a joint phone interview with Mr. Wheatley on Thursday.
The World Cup, Mr. Maharaj said, “kind of has that same thing, where you might not know the person, but due to it, you kind of like start speaking to each other and you start building those kind of personal interactions.”
In deciding to anchor the store 60 feet offshore, Mr. Wheatley and his collaborators — who also include his longtime artistic partner, Cosmo Dean, and Spencer Cathcart, Puncture’s creative director — tried to balance the need for people to see the store’s design details with the desire to dissuade them from jumping in the water to appreciate them up close. (Swimming in Toronto Harbor outside designated areas is illegal.)
But Mr. Wheatley stressed that he was unconcerned by the stranded swimmer and others like him; someone else, he said, swam out to the store and graffitied it in the days before the rescue, despite the keep-off signs on the store’s dock, which is secured by six 3,000-pound anchors.
