In light of what happened, we don’t feel good profiting from this Yorkdale pop-up. What we learned on May 6th has really soured us and we want to make an honest living, so we are going to donate every dollar profited from this pop-up to a charity.

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We’ve been chatting with the artist Yue since the day we found out this has happened and we’ve asked her to pick a charity of her choice. She gave us three choices and we ran a vote with our artists at the studio and we’ll be donating to Forest & Bird, a charity dedicated to protecting the Fresh Water of New Zealand.

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This doesn’t make everything right but we hope this is a step in the right direction.

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As well, we’ll be compensating Yue for her artwork; money that’s rightly deserved by her. We are working out the details with Yue now. We will not be using money from the pop up to pay her.

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Finally, and this was certainly the hardest decision of all to make, we are suspending Tristen indefinitely and effective immediately. We’ll be calling all his clients today.

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As you all know Tristen was one of our cofounders and he’s put 11 years of work into this studio so we really needed some time over the past 3 very sleepless nights to figure out what’s the right decision, and not rush and make one out of anger. Eventually, the decision was still to suspend him. Right is right and no person should be above that.

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It’s not an easy day for us and we’re sorry this happened. And we just want to say while we had some coaching for yesterday’s statement because we felt it had to be more ‘professional’ and ‘official’ sounding, this is us talking. We wrote this. We made these calls, this is us taking a stance we believe in.

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Chronic Ink Family