Sitting in front of the Gardiner Museum at 111 Queen’s Park is a curious ceramic and bronze sculpture entitled Cracked Wheat. Created by artist Shary Boyle in 2018, this quirky and cracked flask-shaped vase stands tenuously on two little gold legs.
The gold cracks serve as an homage to the 16th century Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The tradition celebrates breakage and repair as part of an object’s history. This detail is a tribute to the Kintsugi collection at the Gardiner Museum, a place that is known for showcasing craftsmanship and quality from all over the world, in addition to commenting on colonialism and object valuation.
In contrast, the Canadian Wheat pattern on the front of the vase is a nod to mass-produced tableware designs that were made popular in the 1960s, work that would not likely be on display at the Gardiner Museum. Here, Shary Boyle has aspired to create a work that speaks to the universality of ceramics and show us what they can teach us about our history.1
Installed in 2020, Dreaming is a fairly new creation residing at the Richmond-Adelaide Centre, 100 Adelaide Street West. Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is known for creating large-scale public art installations in major cities, including New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and now Toronto.
Dreaming is 3 storeys high and was commissioned by the Oxford Properties Group Inc. in 2016. The artwork alters the area’s streetscape and anchors a reimagined public plaza called The Terrace at Oxford’s Richmond-Adelaide Centre. The piece is a cast stone portrait created with white marble and resin, installed on top of a base that serves as a public bench to encourage the public to enjoy the outdoor public space.
This portrait of a young girl with her eyes closed in quiet contemplation was created with the intention of passersby looking inward. Plensa’s vision is for the art to act as a metaphor for humanity’s dreams for the future and for a shared human experience; a concept needed now more than ever before.
As you circle the piece, an optical sensation occurs and the effect messes with your mind and visual senses. Seen from the viewer’s left, the work’s proportions and dimension seem as they should be. As you circle around your right side Dreaming seems to suddenly narrow and it becomes evident how flat the work is in actuality. Viewed directly from the back, Dreaming appears as a small sliver of material.
Dreaming, as it appears from the rear
Here is a short video of the artist speaking about his vision and creation of Dreaming, and the efforts to install the work in the Richmond-Adelaide Centre:
Click here if you’d like to visit the artist’s web page.
On the Front Street Promenade in the Canary district there resides an interesting sculpture entitled The Water Guardians. Created by Toronto artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, the painted steel and concrete piece was installed in 2015.
The Water Guardians is an integrated artwork, landscape design and play project. It depicts three towering abstract figures, keeping watch over a stylized river made of recycled rubberized play surface, which flows underneath them. The riverway runs on the same axis as Front Street (east to west within the artwork site) and is punctuated by green mounds of rubberized play surface.
Is it a whiskey still? A droplet of liquid? A man and woman dancing?
Myself, I’ll go with the idea of a whiskey still. The sculpture in question – Still Dancing – is by artist and creator Dennis Oppenheim. He describes Still Dancing as a “combination of sculpture, architecture and theatre”.
Installed in the Distillery District in 2009, the piece seems to be an acknowledgement of the Distillery’s brewing/distilling past (if you go with the interpretation of the piece as a whiskey still, that is).
The installation is quite large – the top of the copper apparatus reaches almost 40 feet in height.
Located at the very foot of Yonge Street at Queen’s Quay East/Lake Ontario sits a curious sculpture entitled Between The Eyes. Established in 1990 by the artist Richard Deacon, this enormous piece resembles a mangled egg beater on steroids. Its gentle curves and angles make for an inspired photoshoot; the structure looks interesting from any direction.
The sculpture is called Between the Eyes. The idea for it developed after my preliminary site visit at which point the site was just an empty lot. I don’t know if they even started breaking ground yet. And there were a couple of things that kind of struck me kind of forcefully at the time. The one was the location at either the beginning or the terminus of the longest street in Canada – Yonge Street – which goes for two thousand miles as an old fur trading route. And, also across from the square is the departure point for the ferries going out to the Islands. So, the site had an implicit kind of focus to it. And the title of the sculpture, Between the Eyes, is somehow reflected ideas about centrality, about distance travel as you came down Yonge Street with your sled load of beaver furs ready to raise trade.
Richard Deacon, Sculptor
The sculpture’s huge but I hadn’t wanted to make a huge lump. So that’s why it’s a skeletal structure, to lighten it, to make it something you can look through rather than it always being something you look at. And the seed of the idea was probably as much to do with just some idea about walking as anything else. The sculpture was intended to look itinerant on the site – that it had arrived and could depart or was going somewhere or had just arrived from somewhere. And that seemed to be the essence of the place, that it was a point of arrival and departure.
On the waterfront, behind the Canada Malting Co. towers on Eireann Quay, sits Ireland Park. The Park commemorates the Irish Famine migrants who arrived on Toronto’s shores between 1846 and 1849.
An Unfortunate End
During 1847 alone, at the peak of Ireland’s Great Famine, some 38,500 Irish men, women and children landed at Dr. Reese’s Wharf in Toronto, then a city of about 20,000. Weak from hunger and stricken with illness aboard overcrowded sailing ships, approximately 20% of those who embarked upon the long voyage perished at sea or shortly after their arrival at sites along the St. Lawrence River, including the quarantine station at Grosse Île, Québec.
Within months of the migrants reaching Toronto, the city recorded 1,186 fatalities due to contagious disease, including the deaths of compassionate local clergymen, government officials, and medical workers who came to the migrants’ aid. Their names are inscribed upon the park’s sculptural memorial columns, which are composed of limestone from Kilkenny, Ireland:
Memorial ColumnsThe Fatalities
The Park Opens
Ireland Park was opened on June 21, 2007, by Mary McAleese, President of Ireland and Robert G. Kearns, Founder of Canada Ireland Foundation. The park was designed by Jonathan M. Kearns, Kearns Mancini Architects.
Arrival
Situated within the park are five bronze sculptures commemorating the migrants’ arrival in Canada. The sculptures are collectively known as Arrival, created by Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie:
Departure
The Arrival sculptures form a companion group to seven bronze sculptures, entitled Departure (image below), situated on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin.
Departure Banks of River Liffey, Dublin, Ireland (Image in Public Domain)
Barbara Barrett Lane is located just south of Bloor Street West, running between Brunswick Avenue and Borden Street.
The Lane is home to this wonderful mural by Elicser, one of Toronto’s brightest street artists. This scene is dedicated to musicians and the people who listen to music.
By creating this blog I’ve discovered the Toronto sculpture works of Canadian visual artist and novelist Eldon Garnet piece by piece. As it turns out, over my years of photographing Toronto I’d been unknowingly capturing shots of Eldon Garnet’s work. Going through shots both old and recent I realized I have enough to publish a post focusing on Eldon Garnet’s collective sculptures in Toronto, soooooo… here we go.
Eldon Garnet is a true Torontonian; he was born here in 1946. His prolific sculptures and photographic work has been held at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Amsterdam Center of Photography. He is also a Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design located in the city’s core. Eldon Garnet is represented by the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto and the Torch Gallery, Amsterdam
The Toronto Sculptures
To Serve and Protect
To Serve and Protect is a three-part sculpture surrounding the Metropolitan Police Headquarters in downtown Toronto. The three pieces are located at the main Headquarters entrance at 40 College Street, the southeast corner of Bay and Grenville Streets, and the Grenville entrance. The sculptures were erected in 1988.
The first part of the “To Serve And Protect” trilogy is a policewoman with a police radio and trowel in her hands.“Little Glenn” is the second part of the set. He’s depicted pulling a 22-foot-tall stone obelisk in a four-wheeled cart. On the obelisk are carved the words “To Serve And Protect”, the motto of the Toronto Police Force.The third sculpture in the “To Serve And Protect” trilogy is a male figure balancing books and blocks on his shoulders.
If you’d like to read my post dedicated to this 3-piece sculpture, click here.
Time And A Clock
This bridge on Queen Street East, which crosses the Don Valley Parkway, bears an inscription across the top which reads:
This river I step in is not the river I stand in
The text is based on a quote from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said: You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. Basically, change is the one constant in life.
The overall textual theme of the work is Time, its substance and ambiguity. Time And A Clock is 1 part of a 3-site art piece, with the second part appearing as words embedded in the 4 corners of the Broadview Avenue and Queen Street East intersections. The last part of the work appears on 4 metal banners further east at Jimmy Simpson Park. Unfortunately I have no shots of the other 2 pieces of the installation (I’m thinking there just might be a further post on these), but as a whole the work is presented like this:
1) At the location Queen Street East/DVP location:
THIS RIVER I STEP IN IS NOT THE RIVER I STAND IN
2) Each of the 4 corners at the intersection of Queen Street East and Broadview Avenue, bear 1 of the following text embedded in the sidewalk:
TOO SOON FREE FROM TIME
TIME IS MONEY : MONEY IS TIME
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
TIME = DISTANCE X VELOCITY
3) Near Jimmy Simpson Park (872 Queen Street East) 4 steel poles hold banners which read:
COURSING
DISAPPEARING
TREMBLING
RETURNING
On a less artistic note, this current steel Truss bridge crossing the Don Valley was built in 1911 by the Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company of Darlington, England.It was higher in elevation than previous bridges at the location and streets on each side of the river were graded higher to meet the level of the bridge. The bridge was opened for streetcars on October 8, 1911, and for other road traffic 5 days later.
The bridge was renovated in the 1990s; Eldon Garnet’s public art was added at the top of the bridge in 1996.
Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial
Created by Eldon Garnet and Francis LeBouthillier and erected in 1989, this monument is located at the intersection of Blue Jays Way and Navy Wharf Court.
The sculpture depicts 2 life-sized Chinese workers precariously moving a beam into place to complete the construction of a railway trestle. The boulders at the base are from the Canadian Rockies. Three pairs of rocks from the original transcontinental rail route are parallel to the pedestrian pathway and contain a small plaque stating One by One the Walkers Vanish.
Between 1880 and 1885, 17,000 men emigrated from China, most from the province of Kwangtung (Guangdong), to work on Canada’s burgeoning railway. By some estimates, more than 4,000 workers died during the construction. In addition to facing racist discrimination, the immigrants were often given the most dangerous jobs in the already dangerous task of blasting through the Rocky Mountains to lay the Western section of the track. Many were killed by landslides, cave-ins, disease and explosions. Despite the high risk involved in their work, Chinese were paid half as much as other workers.
The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial was erected to commemorate the contribution and sacrifice of these workers, who remained nameless in the history of Canada. After the railroad was complete, many of the immigrants who survived could not find new jobs. To that end, a plaque on the memorial reads:
With no means of going back to China when their labour was no longer needed, thousands drifted in near destitution along the completed track.
Equal Before the Law
This sculpture is located at 21 Osgoode Lane, behind the Courthouse and adjacent to Nathan Phillips Square. It features the scales of justice on which balances a lamb (left) and a lion.
The text on the piece reads:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination
A description from the artist’s website:
The lamb often signifies purity, innocence, meekness. It often represents either pure thought or a just person. The lion is rich in symbolism. In common correspondence, the lion is the “king of beasts,” the “natural lord and master,” the possessor of strength. It also can represent earth and at times “philosophical fire.”
The context in which the lamb and lion appear in this sculpture direct the interpretation of these two symbolic representations. One is large, one is small and yet the scales balance. The mis-weighted yet balanced scale invites us to question why and how. The answer is simple – on the scales of justice each individual is equal. One is strong and one is meek, one is powerful and one is weak, but the law treats both equally.
To borrow some further explanatory text from the McMurtry Gardens of Justice website:
The scales are also represented symbolically. The tower and the platform are constructed symmetrically yet askew. The tower is twisted to a 60 degree angle to the back of the courthouse, to which the platform is parallel. The ends of the platform are cut at 30 degree angles in correspondence to the support tower. The tower is constructed such that the dimensions from the top to the bottom are angled.
Everything about the mathematics of this scale is calculated to be in perfect proportion, balanced, but turned or angled 60 or 30 degrees, as are the proportions designed to range from 1 to 2. The final effect is a scale that is balanced yet in a complicated fashion, possibly a metaphor for the law itself.
The scales are constructed of brushed stainless steel. The lion and the lamb are life size, realistically rendered in bronze.
Inversion
In Inversion, you will see upside down moose, foxes and wolves in front of the James Cooper Mansion condos, 28 Linden Street (Bloor/Sherbourne area). Placed in 2011, they are made of bronze.
But what exactly does it all mean? From Eldon Garnet’s website:
This sculptural work is a comment about our current, local relationship with the age-old Canadian, and particularly urban, interaction with nature. Simply put, nature has now been turned on its head. The threat has gone, the desire is not to fortify our existence against the wilderness which has been tamed to disappearance, but rather, it is now a nostalgic desire to embrace what no longer exists. Our current longing is to return a sense of nature to our environment, not to build walls against its presence, but rather to embrace nature.
Artifacts of Memory
Near the corner of Yonge and St. Joseph Streets stands Eldon Garnet’s sculpture Artifacts of Memory. Unveiled in 2016, it consists of 5 lines of text stretching out into interconnected yet disparate strands:
FROM ONE NARRATIVE TO THE NEXT IF NOT TOMORROW TOMORROW LUCKY ENOUGH TO FLY INTO THE FLAME SLOWLY SURELY DISAPPEARING FOLLOWED BY MOMENTS OF EQUILIBRIUM
The piece highlights the conditions of living in the modern world with a focus on the passage of time. The sculpture is meant to captivate the observer’s curiosity and reflection as they walk toward and under the artwork.
Eldon Garnet has expressed that Artifacts of Memory materially espouses the difficulty of coming to terms with history, time, and death.
Art critics have commented on Artifacts of Memory:
Sprouting a multiplicity of civic narratives, the sculpture resists the comfortable and easy sense of resolution – of certainty – often dispensed by less playful and less daring public art.
Well, that’s about it for Eldon Garnet’s sculptures in Toronto – at least the ones I know about. If you know of any I may have missed please let me know.
And exactly where is Clover Hill Park you may ask? Situated in the northwest corner of Bay Street and St. Joseph Street, it is nestled in amongst the University of Toronto buildings and St. Basil’s Catholic Parish at U of T. It’s kind of small and easy to miss but has a few interesting things to offer.
At one point, neighbourhood residents were incredibly frustrated with the park’s development. In the late 2010s it was finished and ready to enjoy, yet remained closed for months surrounded by fencing. City Councillors at the time – Mike Layton and Kristyn Wong-Tam – received many letters of complaint from area residents. At the time, both Councillors cited issues with payment of the developers, Saddlebrook, which had prevented the City from opening the park.
The building of the park was part of a master plan in 2006 for new condos in the area along with a green space for residents tied to the 50 St. Joseph Street parkette enlargement. Construction of the park began in 2017; in November 2020 it was finally opened and warmly welcomed by the community as a much needed green space.
Although it looks pretty dismal in mid-January, as below, it’s a green and inviting park in the summertime. There’s a little bit of something for everyone at Clover Hill Park:
Mushrooms of the non-magic variety
Bunnies, snails and foxes, oh my…
Sculptures
This piece is entitled Zen West. Created in 1980 by Kosso Eloul, the stainless steel sculpture was donated by Father Dan Donovan of the Basilian Order in 1980.
And of course, the beloved Primrose!
Shameless self promotion: If you’d like to learn about her story, please visit my Primrose post here.
I discovered these on King Street East a couple of weeks ago while walking over to Sumach Street to photograph the Cube House (if you’d like to read that post you’ll find it here).
Above these supports lie the Richmond and Adelaide Street East overpasses:
Not underpass art per se, but very cute nonetheless
I came upon this by accident with a friend when it was under construction. At the time we said we…