In 2013, Elle Kurancid, an artist, make a lightbox installation fashioned after a familiar commercial icon, cheekily altered: a thick green bar bordered by slimmer bands of orange and red. In the middle, she places a symbol: 8-Eleven.

She called the piece Heaven and Hell, and when nobody bought it after it was shown at the Pari Nadimi Gallery, it found itself in that familiar gulag of work that doesn’t sell: a friend’s basement, in this case fellow artist Felix Kalmenson.

So how it travelled from there to the one-storey rooftop of a small glass-box storefront on Spadina Ave. is a story all its own. But it’s also become a problem. Since last summer, the company that owns 7-Eleven, the worldwide convenience store giant, has been leveraging its legal might to have the piece removed.

Its target? A tiny grassroots art collective that rented the space last year, looking for a place both cheap and visible enough to show. But its emergence as a flashpoint of the conflict between corporate branding and freedom of expression is a story for the Internet age.

Through its legal representation, Gowlings, 7-Eleven issued a cease and desist order to the group last summer after Skrillex, an L.A.-based DJ and music producer passing through town, Instagrammed a photo of the gallery with a pair of inflatable aliens in the window.

Powered by his celebrity, the image went viral, with more than 63,000 likes. But it also brought the gallery to the attention of 7-Eleven, which included Skrillex’s Instagrammed image in its “cease and desist” order dated June 17, 2014.

After responding promptly to an initial inquiry last week, the lawyer representing the company declined to comment further, explaining he was out of the country. But the letter makes clear the complaint:

“The use of the 8-Eleven and tri-colour banded signage is a clear and obvious case of intentional copying and infringement, which cannot continue,” the letter said, demanding it be taken down immediately.

But the collective didn’t. It’s still there and the issues it raises, both about the now age-old tradition of appropriation in art and freedom of expression, are interesting indeed.

The collective, which goes by 8-11, came by the association innocently enough. Local grassroots art dynamo Xenia Benivolski, one of the founders of the White House collective in Kensington Market, had been looking for a new venture.

She had a long-standing affection for Chinatown, with its ad hoc storefronts and tangle of mixed uses. The little glass box, fused to an ungainly heritage house plastered over with peeling signage, was just the kind of random structure that appealed.

So when it came up for rent last spring, she jumped: she sent out a notice on Facebook, asking who wanted to go in on it. She immediately had a dozen takers, one of them Kalmenson. When the group saw Heaven and Hell in his storage, they had an idea.

“We had an empty space for a sign on the roof,” Benivolski said last week. “We stuck it up there and it just happened to fit. We thought maybe it would evolve into a project, but then we kind of left it there. We thought, with the ambiguity of Chinatown, it just fit somehow.”

With that, the nascent gallery had an image and a name: it called itself the 8-11 gallery, and developed an array of programming and merchandise around it. In the age-old tradition of consumer critique and appropriation, they held a membership drive selling “bootleg” T-shirts and mugs using logos similar to After Eight mints (with “eleven” added on) and a website modelled closely after Craigslist.

It started an exhibition program, commissioning works from young local artists (“It’s not a clubhouse,” said Benivolski; “we’re more ambitious than that”) and started to look for international partners to show artists from out of the country. People in Toronto have noticed: two of the artists 8-11 have shown recently, Laurie Kang and Nadia Belerique, are finalists for the annual $10,000 Friends of the Visual Arts prize.

Still, an irreverent, unceremonious spirit reigns. A recent call on its Facebook page went out for artists and curators to lead their “sauna sessions,” a series of talks to be held in the functioning sauna they’ve built out back.

Its eccentricity and art-world bona fides are its best defence, says lawyer Julie MacDonnell, whose firm The Trademark Group specializes in entertainment and trademark law. She is representing the group should 7-Eleven proceed with legal action.

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“It’s a piece of art, similar to what Andy Warhol did with his Campbell soup cans,” she said. “It’s sort of a pop art convention to reference commercial trademarks.”

That being the case, she argued, the signage would be protected under Canada’s freedom of expression laws. “By taking it out of the usual context, it transcends its meaning as a commercial symbol and that meaning is important in law,” she said.

More than that, she says, is the simple test in trademark law whether or not the appropriation of a trademark can reasonably be considered to cause legitimate confusion in a prospective customer. “They’re not a convenience store. That much is obvious. They’re not a competitor by any means,” she said. “There is very little or no confusing their mark with that of 7-Eleven.”

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has also shown an interest in the case and could get involved if the action proceeds.

“We would say that the broad protection for freedom of expression was engaged here,” said Cara Zwibel, director of the association’s fundamental freedoms program. The association’s view is that a well-known symbol used as a means of consumer critique, a staple in art of the past half-century or more, “should be strongly protected.”

This is a well-travelled path, trod long ago most notably, of course, by Warhol. But even his road wasn’t without a few bumps. Even Warhol found himself under threat from Campbell’s at a certain point, which considered a lawsuit in 1962 but demurred when it realized that the publicity Warhol’s work had brought was the best advertising it could hope for. Instead of legal action, the company sent the artist a couple of cases of tomato soup, on the rumour that he quite enjoyed it.

Whatever the case, 8-11 is prepared to defend itself. But it’s more concerned with the kind of environment for art it hopes to create.

“It’s just nice to have this space and it’s nice to be able to show work that would otherwise be in a white cube somewhere,” Benivolski says.

She knows the sign has drawn attention of all kinds, but she doesn’t want legal attention to be the impetus for its removal. “The question for us, I think, is how do you run the place as kind of a gimmick, without compromising the exhibitions you do? That’s why the sign will have to be changed sometime. Because for us, it’s not about that.”