HOTEL ADIPOSE: About
Hotel Adipose is an interdisciplinary art platform operating across digital and physical space, a space for people interested in sustaining creative and artistic lives, and in connecting with others through personal experience, process, and art-based inquiry. Based in Vancouver, Canada, with online membership open to artists from all geographies.
Current
Tiny Time Suite is Hotel Adipose’s current offering: a monthly membership of thirty minute, recurring sessions in drawing and creative writing. Sessions are guided and unfold as a sequence of departures, arrivals, and spaces between. The program is open to adults of all abilities, with no training required beyond an interest in art. Where drawing and writing are inaccessible or not of interest, other modes of mark making are encouraged, for example through voice, recording, and movement to name a few. Please contact [email protected] if you need help with any modifications.
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, Hotel Adipose is a space for experimentation and mutual support. Artists/participants have the chance to move between the roles of host and guest, passing through imagined rooms for ideas, conversation, and work in progress. The program includes art sessions, talks, readings, collaborations and destination projects.
Future
A physical hotel for artists with its red neon sign lit 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 or here [email protected]
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, writing, 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 western modernity at the intersections of technology, work, relationships, and identity.
History
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 and uncertain, these exchanges offered creative resets and connection over formal outcomes, a quiet Fluxus echo in the early internet era whose spirit persists in the hotel’s borderless corridors.
Time spent at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2012-2015) extended this communal impulse through the school’s self-directed ethos and peer-to-peer culture. Movement between ideas, places, and practices becomes the hotel’s elevators and staircases. 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, gathering stories exchanged in passing.
From this constellation of influences, Hotel Adipose arrives as a space that subtly subverts reality through collective and individual imagination. It treats the creative process as formative action, where connection, experimentation, and self-preservation coalesce into method and manifesto.
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, not therapy or a substitute for therapy or medical care.
