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.

In a growing city such as Toronto, scaffolds are a ubiquitous feature of the urban environment. WEEPING CONCRETE is a site-specific project for a trio of performers across two towering scaffolds; asking us to reflect on the streets as we know them and imagine what they might be.

“Sistering” is a construction term for the act of placing supports on either side of a beam to add stability. In WEEPING CONCRETE, the three performers, including artist Hazel Meyer, animated this makeshift, temporary architecture as it “sistered” one of the concrete bents holding up the Gardiner Expressway. Borrowing from activist aesthetics, athletic tropes, and consumer advertising practices; the performers unfurled banners, engaged objects, and introduced elements of queer joy in an ongoing conversation with one another, and the audience. Through these actions, WEEPING CONCRETE presented a reflection on intimacy, interdependence, and infrastructure.

Performed by Moe Angelos, Leah Klingbyle, and Hazel Meyer.

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.

SUSO Skate Co. (formerly Retro Rolla) is a health-forward recreation brand specializing in outdoor roller skate rentals and sales.

Rent roller skates by the hour at The Bentway! Visit susoskateco.com to book.