A few weeks ago, Toronto city council passed a bylaw freezing retail development on nearby Bathurst St. for a minimum of one year.

For those who live and work in, and generally care about, Kensington Market — who number at least 88,000, according to a recent petition — it was nothing less than a stay of execution. General though it may be, the freeze appears targeted at Walmart Canada , which still plans to install one of its omnibus retail outlets on the market’s doorstep, on Bathurst between Dundas and College Sts.

So when the familiar sign — blue background, white letters, a cartoony twinkle of yellow — appeared on a storefront on Augusta Ave. last Saturday, the shocked disdain that greeted it maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“People were threatening to tear it down,” says Jordan Tannahill, co-director of the gallery-cum-performance space Videofag . “We had to politely explain to them: ‘We’re on your side. It’s a satire. You can step inside and see for yourself.’”

Tannahill and partner William Ellis conceived their own version of a Walmart protest to be launched on the August long weekend. It was here-today, gone-tomorrow. The show lasted only two days. “Part of it was a fear of legal action, if it was a prolonged show,” Tannahill says, wary of Walmart’s army of litigators.

Inside, they mounted a cheekily precious display of Walmart’s wilfully generic product line: $10 sneakers, displayed on a plinth; a column of toilet paper packages; a bag of cotton balls hanging on the wall, like a Minimalist sculpture. In the middle of the space, they put three bags of chips, varying flavours, with the same logo — “Great Value” — festooned across the top in blue and white. “We called it our chip triptych,” Tannahill laughed.

The reaction was surprising but sunk in quickly. “Irony is a very subjective language,” Tannahill says. “Even though there’s something absurd about a pop-up Walmart boutique, Kensington has a long memory. We understand that.”

Indeed, market defenders, who are legion — and among whom Tannahill counts himself — could be forgiven for missing the joke. Depending on who you talk to, the market has either been dying, infected by corporate interests, or under threat of boutiquey gentrification for decades.

And historically, when pushed, the market pushes back. This is ground where Starbucks dared not tread: an attempt by the café chain to install itself in the market in 2008 was rebuffed with such community vitriol that the company backed away.

Such reactions are in the market’s DNA. A Second Cup opened on Baldwin St. in the late 1980s. After repeated window smashings, it decamped for College St. after only six months.

In 2002, mega-shoe company Nike surreptitiously opened a gallery in the market called Presto as a quiet infiltration of its brand into Kensington’s resolutely independent culture. It was swiftly outed and forced to shut down. In 2005, Zimmerman’s, a grocery store on Augusta, partnered with the Loblaws chain and took on the name FreshMart, one of the mega-grocers sub-brands.

After much hue and cry, the company settled on the name “Zimmerman’s FreshMart” in hopes of keeping the peace, but there’s been little of that: across the street, another Zimmerman’s (Freshmart owner Martin’s second cousin Danny, both of whose families have been major landowners in the market for decades) is in a permanent tiff with FreshMart over naming rights and authenticity in the market’s ongoing hurly-burly evolution.

Walmart, though, is the neighbourhood’s perfect storm: the extra-large, ultra-generic global purveyor of everything cheaper and in bulk, looming over the market, one of the country’s last bastions of the independent and unique, with its long, darkening shadow.

Alongside these flashpoints, the slow creep of change has been transforming the market, storefront by storefront, for years. Fishmongers and dry goods vendors have closed; tony prepared food shops , boutiques, restaurants and, of course, art galleries, have moved in.

Windows don’t get smashed, or at least not often. But increasingly, the market is not what the market, historically, once was: a haven for recently arrived immigrants, looking for an all-in-one storehouse of inexpensive staples.

That function is being filled, more often than not, by places like Walmart, which many believe now threatens the market’s existence.

The irony is not lost on Tannahill. “I’m completely in favour of access to affordable merchandise,” he says, noting that, as an artist, he’s among the lowest earners in the country. The show put a fine point on that fact with a semi-permanent installation in the gallery’s window.

In flashing-lightbulb signage — a deliberate nod to another immigrant-friendly discount emporium, Honest Ed’s, which, in a dark omen for the market, went up for sale last month , after 65 years at Bloor and Bathurst, and will almost surely be demolished to make way for something more fitting to its now-pricey postal code — Tannahill and Ellis declare their allegiance: “Long live the working class,” it reads.

It’s a piece by Toronto artists Hannah Enkel and Philip Shelton, who, like Tannahill and Ellis, find the same haven in the market that generations of immigrants have (Enkel’s main source of income is working as a housecleaner, so she knows of what she speaks).

The show was done in the spirit of “keeping Kensington playful, subversive, political,” Tannahill says. He knows the short-lived pop-up boutique fanned the flames of dissent, and that was the point.

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“The only thing scarier than Walmart is an apathetic reaction to it,” he says. “I don’t want to come across as a firebrand but, as consumers, we’re given the very difficult choice of where to shop and voting with our wallets.”

If Walmart’s endgame is a consumer dictatorship, then Tannahill and his market cohorts are having none of it.

“I live very modestly, but where to buy what I buy, that’s my luxury: the luxury to choose.”

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