We sought out sites with past lives to match with uniquely compatible artists' works.
Yorkville Park, with its Big Rock and innovative plantings, was once part of the "The Strangers Burial Ground" (1826-1855) and Toronto's only non-denominational cemetery at the time. It welcomes Ron Benner's feast of roasted corn, both harvest celebration and memory of other presences.
Floating high above Yorkville are three huge, pill-shaped blimps, Pharmaİopia by General Idea. Somber reference to the AIDS pandemic, they remind us that the building at 100 Yorkville Avenue was the original Mount Sinai Hospital (1923), soon to become the façade for a new condominium.
The Toronto Heliconian Club hosts all-night readings of Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies. Built as a church in the Carpenter's Gothic style (1875), the building became a meeting place in 1923 for professional women in the arts and letters. Yorkville was an early incubator and home for Canadian writers in the 60s, with important new publishers nearby.
Building, re-building and change are constants here. Once a crossroads well north of the Town of York, then a mixed nineteenth-century neighbourhood with tree-lined streets, Yorkville became a 1960s Hippie haven, then a cultural focus and high-end shopping destination, now it is festooned with building cranes and dramatic new towers. A film by Mangaard and Holubizky recreates coffee-house days, while animation by Lippmann and Hofstetter, a whirling edifice of pick-up sticks and fragmented spaces, is projected against Daniel Libeskind's long-awaited ROM "Crystal." HOLD THAT THOUGHT is spelled out in lights by Kelly Mark at Church of the Redeemer on Bloor Street and Avenue Road.
In Philosopher's Walk at University of Toronto, a wishing tree by Zealley and Stathacos invites contemplation, while Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture traces the vestiges of Taddle Creek, long ago sent underground. Michael Snow's grazing sheep circle The Planetarium dome, and Jamelie Hassan's softly glowing flowers float with night-blooming lilies in a quiet pool on nearby university grounds.
These are places with a past, now re-framed by artists' interventions. Be here.
Fern Bayer, Peggy Gale, Chrysanne Stathacos
