Neighbourhood Nuit (2023)

It was the first opportunity to explore Staging Grounds, a new public space pilot designed by architectural studios Agency-Agency (New York) and SHEEEP (Toronto). The site features an inaugural visual art commission by local artist Logan MacDonald.  Fountain Monumental is a series of 20-foot-tall images that re-imagine the original shoreline of Lake Ontario, which traced the same path as the Gardiner Expressway today. MacDonald challenges the notion of historical accuracy and authorship by creatively collaborating with digital tools to produce these arresting images. He presents a revisionist history and a speculative, fantastical present and future.

It was also the last chance to experience Beyond Concrete, our summer exhibition exploring the broader ecosystem under the Gardiner, where human-made infrastructure intertwines with resilient flora and fauna, growing in spite of, and because of, the concrete. Artwork was presented at both The Bentway Skate Trail and The Bentway Studio. Throughout the evening, Leeroy New’s The Aliens of Manila landed for an electric performance at the Bentway’s Skate Trail. If you missed their performance in May, we hope you were able to catch them at Nuit Blanche before they left Toronto!

Alongside this, we were pleased to present installations with Concord at their Under-Gardiner space at 470 R Lake Shore Boulevard West, and return to light up the Canada Malting Silos at Bathurst Quay with a projection of New York-based artist Mark Dorf’s ambitious film A New Nature. The piece, which recently flooded the screens at Time Square for April 2023’s Midnight Moment, proposes a new way of understanding humans’ role within a larger ecological system and how that system is increasingly mediated by technology. Come to Spadina Pier to consider the transformation of the historic silos, the city, and the waterfront in the context of a broader urban ecosystem and its hybrid future.

Inside The Bentway Studio, Montreal-based emerging designers Studio Rat continued the Bentway’s exploration of  the role that waste plays in the larger Gardiner Expressway ecosystem.  For Nuit Blanche, they created the immersive installation Shared Space that reuses single-use plastics in unexpected ways to explore the possibilities of inflatable architecture and circular design. Step inside Shared Space and experience a snapshot of our shared consumer habits transformed into a gathering space, with a mesmerizing soundscape by Toronto’s experimental pop-duo MONEYPHONE.