The artist-criminal is high in mid-air, strapped into a harness in the bucket of a Genie mini-crane lift. He’s mounting a 20-foot-tall photographic portrait of a girl named Joan Brideau onto a red brick wall of the Regent Park housing complex. In the heat-lamp swelter of the afternoon, he glues snaky strips of black-and-white printed paper side by side, slowly piecing together a super-sized jigsaw puzzle of a teenaged giantess.

Down in the grass nearby, rolls of cut-out paper labelled “pink stripe right leg” and “pink stripe left 21.5 x 202” lie waiting their turn. It comes as a revelation to see the secret techniques of one of Toronto’s leading magicians of the streets, Dan Bergeron, also known by the apt illusionist’s pseudonym, Fauxreel.

Joan is one of 11 Regent Park residents Bergeron has photographed and given the Mount Rushmore treatment as part of a commission for the Luminato culture festival. The portraits literally humanize the city’s oldest subsidized-housing project, shouting a loud “we are here” from Regent Parkers to a city that will soon raze their community, supposedly in order to save it.

Such civic spirit and industry isn’t what you might expect from a guy who made his name illegally plastering images on public and private property, a pursuit usually associated with delinquent teenagers or riled anarchists. But the 32-year-old Bergeron has spent several years making photographic apparitions pop up inexplicably in places you might otherwise pass without a second look. Fauxreel’s work has appeared not only in Toronto, but in London, New York, Vancouver and Montreal, not to mention on the many Web sites frequented by connoisseurs of the burgeoning global street art movement, in which he’s among a handful of Canadian up-and-comers. Street art is the next evolutionary step after graffiti in creative vandalism, perceived by area business improvement associations as a nuisance, by anti-market activists as protest, and by art dealers and trend-spotters as a hot new commodity. Bergeron likes to straddle those categories, even though many of his fans—and there are more than you might imagine—want to know which side he’s on.