This past fall I revisited the Richard Serra Shift sculpture, found up in King City, and wrote about it in my Toronto Star column. The Ontario Heritage Conservation Review Board had recently ruled it wouldn’t support King Township’s intention that Serra’s work be protected under the Ontario Heritage Act. So once again a great but little-known Southern Ontario landmark remains at risk. Apart from reading the Star column, you can look at some winter photos taken back in 2009 in a post here on Spacing. Summer trips to Shift mean dusty feet but in the sub-zero winter, with no crops in the way, Shift is easily accessible.
Before writing the column I chatted with Sonia Ramundi who researched this piece for her Master of Architecture thesis preparation under Brigitte Shim at U of T last year. Sonia spent an entire day with Shift, setting up her camera and tripod in a number of places and taking a series of photos from sunrise to sunset to study how the light and shadows change the experience. A selection of them follows here, taken from her compete set (seen in the contact sheet below) — you can also look at Ramundi’s laneway housing post here on Spacing from last spring.
UPDATE Feb/2013: King City council has moved to protect Shift.
2 comments
Thanks for keeping this issue ‘alive’ and in a public conversation.
What is the CRB’s reasoning behind not protecting the sculpture under the Heritage Act? They seem to be fairly bad with not wanting to preserve anything that isn’t Victorian.