A multi-sited audio-visual walking tour is now on exhibition under the Gardiner Expressway.

Following the year-long collaboration between The Bentway and SKETCH Working Arts, the Reconstructions of Home public art project continues with an audio-visual tour, a wandering, which leads visitors through a series of perspectives of those with lived experiences of homelessness/houselessness. Each site on the tour emphasises such themes as recognition, creativity, care, community, and connection. 

a wandering features the vibrant contributions of Toronto’s homeless community to the culture and development in the city, while highlighting the unresolvable tensions of navigating constant displacement, along with the societally-imposed stigma and barriers associated with homelessness or houselessness. Reconstructions of Home aims to shine a light on the resilience and creativity of these important neighbours and members in Toronto communities. 

Co-presented with SKETCH Working Arts.

Part of the delight of being on the street is not knowing what you’ll encounter next…

Inspired by the dynamic convergences and events that transpire in our streets, PARADE is a kinetic installation that infuses The Bentway’s skate trail with the vitality of the city and the ever-shifting variables of the streetscape. A motorised conveyor-belt overhead becomes an artery, soaring and looping around the bents above, carrying objects that march through the space like sorcerer’s apprentices. Everyday signage and objects we might encounter on our morning commute such as stop signs, traffic cones, and bike racks are composed and deployed in a playful and subversive treatment of order and chaos:  a procession of inverted road pylons with cheerfully blinking warning lights; a mobile of one-way signs, spinning aimlessly; a train of traffic mirrors pointing in different directions, multiplying and distorting the images of viewers below. 

PARADE deconstructs the street, and marshals these iconic elements in a celebratory procession, transforming a mundane urban scene into street theatre. Reflecting on the continuous movement of the Gardiner Expressway above, and the bustle of the Bentway below, the viewer becomes a still point amidst the traffic of everyday life.

PARADE is scheduled to be in motion from 1:00pm to 9:00pm, seven days a week. Environmental factors like wind, as well as maintenance activity, may impact this schedule. During periods of idleness, PARADE is viewable as a still sculpture.

Commissioned by The Bentway Conservancy.

There is a tendency for the noun-dominant English language to perpetuate a view of the street as static, cold, necessary. Most objects in the English-speaking world are effectively dead. Certainly, that can be said of a highway. And, yet, for Anishinaabemowin – a verb-based language that ascribes spirit to rocks and trees among many other animate things – we might consider the built environment to be a relative. 

What does it mean to be in relation to the street? To speak to, and through it?

Learning that the space of The Bentway speaks, and you can hear it if you listen closely (salt used in the concrete curing process long ago moving through the structure), pushes us to consider the Gardiner on new terms; what life exists here amid the traffic and the wind?

From ground-level, looking east or west, the Bentway resembles a canyon. We imagine the sounds of life echoing through time like the language itself, distorted slightly here, mispronounced there, bouncing back and re-forming like an echo. This is true of so many of the words and phrases in our language. As Anishinaabeg, we privilege mobility – our fluid movement through time and space – but sometimes we must also stop and listen carefully to hear the authentic. Perhaps this reflects the “living” nature of our language, written and reflected in concrete and salt. 

Weweni Bizindan is a large-scale public art installation – a dialogue with the street –  that contributes to discussions of the animate nature of our language and the world around us.

– Ogimaa Mikana Project (Susan Blight and Hayden King)

Created by Ogimaa Mikana Project. Commissioned by The Bentway Conservancy and hosted by Fort York National Historic Site as part of Indigenous Art Festival.

The Moko Jumbie theatre and seating designs, designed for the Mas Camp, are inspired by the mathematical shape vesica piscis otherwise known as mandorla (pointed oval), which consists of two intersecting congruent circles.

The circles and their intersections are considered sacred geometry that have inspired symbolic designs and architecture throughout history. They represent the unity, partnership, and collaboration required for balance to occur. The circles also represent eyeballs that are a metaphor for the increased vision the Moko Jumbie student gains as they become more comfortable at new heights. The mandorla design pattern is also repeated in the red/orange seating units.

The community practice of balancing on sticks requires specialized areas for practice. The street furniture is designed for the ergonomics of Moko Jumbie seating, mounting, and training. The seating arms of the theatre embrace and welcome families and friends during the process of learning to balance.

About the Artist

Michael Lee Poy is an Assistant Professor at OCAD University and an Afro-Caribbean artist/designer/activist/architect from Trinidad and Tobago and Canada. His practice and interests are centred on post-colonial Caribbean design and fabrication in the festival arts – especially Carnival. A graduate of Pratt Institute of Technology in architecture (B. Arch.) and the Yale Graduate School of Architecture, Environmental Design (MED), Michael aims to use interdisciplinarity to augment the innovative, creative, and collaborative process of design. For the past five years, Michael has been incubating the Moko Jumbie Mas Camp workshops for children aged 7-17. The masquerade (mas) camps are designed and implemented as socially conscious design/build and fabrication/studio/lab workshops.

Follow Michael Lee Poy on Instagram.