WATERLOO — When Paul Roorda installed his art along utility poles in the Mary Allen neighbourhood on Saturday, he wasn't expecting they would garner him a visit from police and bylaw officers.

"Monday morning I got a knock on the door from a local police officer asking me to remove them," said Roorda. He was told a neighbour had reported the art looked threatening.

The Waterloo artist was also told he had broken a bylaw by not getting permission from the city to display the pieces.

The curio boxes were meant to make people stop and contemplate the effects of climate change. "For me the urgency is, there's serious climate change happening and how do we feel about that? What are we going to do about that?"

The "Time Stops," are displayed inside six, old, metal cash boxes — their tops replaced with glass.

Each locked box is different, but includes a variety of vintage items such as postcards, pictures of flooding or weather forecasting, old clocks, barometers, vials of water, and collages.

One includes a vintage box that once held ammonia inhalants "to suggest that we need to be woken up from our complacency about climate change," explained Roorda.

He also attached windup music boxes to each piece, which are altered for a more mysterious sound. "It's not typical art," said Roorda, who was Kitchener's artist in residence in 2007. "I would call them tiny, micro galleries."

It isn't the first time he has installed the pieces. They had been hanging in another uptown neighbourhood in June — without any complaints.

"I didn't ever expect that people would see them as a threat," he said, adding that the first time they were displayed he received positive reaction on Facebook and from people who approached him as he installed or removed them.

So when bylaw told him Monday the boxes had to be taken down, Roorda admits he was a little disappointed. He took them down himself and said a bylaw officer followed him as he did.

"When I was taking them down another neighbour came out and thanked me because he and his neighbours were so delighted with them," he said.

That neighbour was Larry Turnbull who has lived in the area for about 50 years. Turnbull didn't know Roorda but was quite taken by one of the pieces hung on Herbert Street.

"The neighbourhood was just absolutely enamoured with it," said Turnbull. "Everyone was trying to find out if there was a hidden meaning to it."

When Turnbull found out why the display had to be taken down, he wrote a protest letter and taped it to the same pole. The letter explained that the art was taken down because someone complained it was threatening.

"The people who saw this piece were thrilled to see the imagination and humour it displayed!" he wrote. "One person's opinion (warped though it may be) can override the joy of the rest of us. And we call this a democracy?"

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Roorda said he will seek permission from the city to put his art back up. In the meantime, he has had time to reflect.

"I think what it speaks to is the level of anxiety people have in public space now," he said. "It makes me wonder, is art or creativity going to have to be more careful because of that fear?"