Jed Lind’s installation opened last month at the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Gold Silver & Lead, a totemic painted steel stack of first generation Honda Civics, marks the 30th anniversary of the small parcel of land that serves as public testing ground for visual artists. To celebrate, we thought we’d look back at some of the most exciting installations to grace the 115 King Street East lot.
+ Recess by Lee Paquette, 1983
Two years after the garden’s inception, Paquette created a colourful playground with an oversized teeter-totter, tree house, hopscotch board and other childhood memories, alongside a “seed room” that offered a dark, quiet space for visitors to have a recess from the recess, as it were.
+ The Arc & The Chord by Hugh LeRoy, 1987
Some of the coolest stuff to be installed at the garden interacts not only with visitors, but also with the surrounding climate and environment. LeRoy’s strip of wooden blocks featured grooves in each block that collected and absorbed rainwater, making them expand into a self-bracing arch—a symbol, said LeRoy, of the “eternally parallel mind.”
+ Chaotic Encounters by Douglas Buis, 1990
Buis invited users to play God with his Plexiglas-enclosed world of found objects that visitors could cover, encase and unearth with sand using fans at either end of the tunnel.
+ Reinventing the Wheel by Charles Courville, 1993
An early attempt to address environmental concerns and the excessive lifestyle of city-dwellers, Courville wove a giant wheel out of willow tree branches, recycled wire, rags and plastic. “In the process of time,” said Courville, “the wood components of the wheel would biodegrade; the leftover segments would be the reminder that we have not found a way to conserve and recycle our precious resources.” Hmm. Has much changed?
+ Messenger by Liz Magor, 1996/1997
Magor installed a full log cabin—complete with porch—within the garden to explore the idea of how what once represented settlement, growth and community, became almost exclusively associated with hiding, solace, and solitude.
+ Craft by Ben Smit, 1999
Smit’s crudely built UFO is designed to bring a concept that has always been a household word into the tangible world. Smit opted to build a child’s concept of a UFO to illustrate how “the idea realized is at once unreal,” he says.
+ The Tower by Euan Macdonald, 2004
Inspired by the final scene of Planet of the Apes, where Heston sees the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, Macdonald built a full-scale replica of the top 25 feet of the CN tower as though billions of future years had buried the other 1,790 feet.
+ Mist: from the Space Crystallization Cycle by Ludwika Ogorzelec, 2007
Arguably one of the most otherworldly exhibits to be installed at the garden, Orgorzelec’s plastic film, bamboo and steel wire structure aims to intersect the space into smaller “crystals” that are manoeuvred through by bending, twisting and ducking in turn altering the visitor’s psychological state.
+ Reading the Green by Josh Thorpe and David Court
Writers Thorpe and Court joined forces for this project, which offered single-sheet newspapers at boxes situated at the park entrance. The text in the paper is intensely localized—really only relevant if you were sitting in the park—and encouraged visitors to pay more attention to the surrounding built environment and space.
The Toronto Sculpture Garden is located at 115 King Street East and opens every day at 8am. Gold, Silver & Lead runs until September 30, 2012
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Paige Magarrey is a regular writer on design for Toronto Standard.
