Archives /// Inner Space
Some things that have made me love Toronto in the past few weeks: The City Beautification Ensemble spray painting dull bicycle posts with pretty colours; the clay, true-to-life-sized sculptures of cartoonish heads that the artist Kristi-Ly Green has been leaving on street corners; learning about a group of local men named Bill who printed up flyers with famous people named Bill on them (Bill Gates, Bill Clinton) which they stuck on the temporary walls of construction sites under the stamped injunction: Post No Bills (see article on pg. 23). And I was really surprised today by a pencil-crayon drawing of ...
Sometimes I feel an urgent need to get out of Toronto, and this is one of those times. The strain does not come from difficult friendships or celebrity magazines or the noise, so much as my relationship to my fellow pedestrian. The crisis is almost always a crisis about strangers; it's a crisis of eye contact. Someone approaches and the problem of whether to look away or look at them — and if to look, how long to keep looking for — does not resolve itself easily, quietly, in the background. It becomes a loud problem, and as people pass ...
In September 2004, local artist Maura Doyle had a nine-tonne rock moved from its resting place in the Kawartha Lakes to the Toronto Sculpture Garden at the corner of King and Church. For the next six months, less than a blink of an eye for a billion-year-old granite boulder, it would sit at the heart of downtown Toronto as part of Doyle's art project "There's a New Boulder in Town."
The project is more than just the six-month exhibit at the Toronto Sculpture Garden; her work also includes a map and guidebook which catalogue 20 erratic boulders scattered all over downtown ...
In the craziest billboard jungle in Canada, advertisers will go to extreme lengths to get noticed. A lucrative business has been growing strong for the past 17 years, as shrewd companies have targeted an ideal captive market — motorists stuck in gridlock on Toronto's Gardiner Expressway.
The densiformus plant, a small needled evergreen, spells out logos of companies like FedEx, Chubb, and TD Waterhouse in attempts to nab the attention of passersby on the busy thoroughfare. A reported 350,000 people take in the ads in the course of their daily grind. With land leased from CN Rail, the ten-metre long ...
RACE = MORALITY. This was the line that began my eight-year relationship with a Toronto phone booth. I was 18 and had ducked into a booth in the downtown core to make a call and escape the summer clatter of road repair and the press of sweaty people crowding the sidewalks. The cool tint of the Bell Canada swinging doors reduced the humid stew of midsummer Toronto to a cool, muted grey. I punched in the number and listened impatiently to the dial tone, wishing I'd bought cigarettes.
My fingers neurotically traversed the edges of the phone. They tiptoed their way ...
The sky is grey, filled with a fine mist of rain, but my students seem energized. They are huddled in groups behind Roy Thompson Hall gazing up at Bernie Miller's waterfall sculpture The Poet, the Fever Hospital. Figuring out how the sculpture works is the only thing standing between them and a Grade 11 Physics credit.
Miller's sculpture is composed of stacked granite boxes that eject a ribbon of water into a reflective pool, and my students are looking at it through the eyes of a physicist: How much water streams from the top every second? How much does the water ...
