Secrets spilled on Toronto subway screens

A Toronto art project is inviting dozens of people to tell their secrets – and share them with the city's thousands of subway riders.

Confessions Underground invited passers-by to record their embarrassing moments and guilty deeds in a street-level confessional booth.

Then the artists behind the project put videos of those confessions up on the 300 screens that are in every subway station throughout the city.

Artist John Loerchner says the true confessions make a subway commute into more than a boring space of time between home and work. The art encourages riders to feel more engaged with their surroundings, he told CBC News.

"We kind of wanted to create a juxtaposition to that and really take the people out of that day-to-day humdrum commute and....and create something that's emotional, something they can connect with," Loerchner said.

Working with fellow artist Laura Mendes, he gathered dozens of confessions from ordinary people.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to get complete strangers to open up, about everything from their life ambitions, to the $15,000 they spent on plastic surgery. As Deana Sumanac reports, people love the feeling of telling all in front of a camera.

Confessions Underground is a Labspace Studio project, produced in association with Pattison Onestop and Art 4 Commuters and is being hosted by the Toronto Transit Commission.  Previous Confessions Underground projects have run in Montreal, Chicago and Buffalo.

The video confessions will be screened daily throughout Toronto’s underground subway system from July 2- 15.