Welcome to the pumpkin patch of Ghost Landing! Caterwaul Theatre invited a group of local artists to imagine more ghosts of CityPlace (and their own spooky stories) through a series of Jack-o’-lanterns.
HINFOS
Despite our close proximity, living stacked above others, we move amongst one another as ghosts. The building crane is our ghost of past, present, and future, a signal that change is imminent. This work highlights the often unnoticed support structures and underlying infrastructure of this ever densifying urban landscape.
Chris Foster & Layne Hinton (HINFOS) are Toronto based multidisciplinary artists. When they work together, they create immersive, site-specific installations and public projects. They have a DIY approach and often use everyday materials to create kinetic installations of light and shadow.
@laynemarley / www.laynehinton.com
@cfossss / www.chrisfoster.ca
Roxanne Ignatius
As the nights grow longer, flowers die, trees shed their leaves, and ghostly memories of the past shift into view. My lantern is an elegy of a time not so long ago, when the Bentway lands were part of Lake Ontario, and the waters were full of Atlantic salmon. Melting glaciers from the last Ice Age originally carried the salmon from the sea to Lake Ontario. Each autumn, the salmon travelled to upstream tributaries to spawn, creating an important food source for Indigenous people as well as nonhuman inhabitants of the land. By the 20th century, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, and the introduction of invasive species caused the extinction of salmon in the Great Lakes. Recent efforts to reintroduce salmon have been met with some success, but the echoes of our past actions continue to reverberate. The ghosts of the past are felt in the environmental catastrophes of the present. With my lantern, I give these ghosts a corporeal form, and acknowledge our responsibility to protect the natural world. By shining a light on the past, I hope to break the spell of excessive consumption, and encourage a better future for all inhabitants of this land.
Roxanne Ignatius is a Toronto based textile artist who draws inspiration from folk arts, traditional textiles and weaving, and the natural world and our place within it. Roxanne builds unorthodox connections across art forms and looks for audiences outside of the gallery setting. She has created interactive textile installations for Harbourfront Centre, Summerworks Theatre Festival, and Luminato Festival, as well as public parks and music venues across the city. Her set and costume design has been shortlisted for the Prism prize, won the Summerworks Excellence in Design award, and has been featured in NOW Magazine and CBC Arts.
www.roxanneignatius.com
@roxanne.ignatius
Merle Harley
Ghosted Condos. Empty condos left unchecked. Do they quietly wait until new owners arrive or do they develop ghosts of their own?
Merle Harley works slowly, creates continually, and builds alternate visual realities. A chaos-creature with no fixed medium, works include drawing, watercolour, knitting, weaving, comic books, videos, theatre and installations. Merle has had illustrations and comics published in many online and print publications and exhibited work across Canada and beyond. As well as a full arts practice, Merle has extensive experience facilitating workshops and coordinating community art programs. Catch them on the shoreline as they zip back and forth between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Ontario.
www.merleharley.com
@merlesworld2.0
Lizzy Shipman
How many things have we already traded? Trading one sound for another. Trading grass for concrete. When suburbs were the rage that led to urban sprawl. Now our towers scrape the ceiling, and we wonder, how a thing such as keeping up with the Jones, how mowing a lawn, might take up a Saturday afternoon. No more, oh goodbye personal lawnmower. Your incessant worrying. Your buzzing, impossible to escape in a summer soundscape will no longer grace us. RIP. What new sounds will haunt our summers?
Lizzy Shipman is a T’karonto based multidisciplinary artist. Inspired by questions of everyday living, the senses are psychedelic; the emergent and continuous weaving and undoing of community and its supportive structures. Fascinated by metaphors and practical applications of textile arts & earth work; and devoted to eco-erotic embodied writing and movement practices. Lizzy Shipman supports many community arts & culture projects through program design, administration and artistic direction. And is currently writing a story about a time travelling wolf.
www.houseofmystery.org
Sara Torrie
I am thinking about what was here before the condos, and this makes me think about who was here before the condos. Since most of the land that currently exists below Front Street is the result of landfill, I began to think about the communities, ecosystems and proliferation of life found along the shoreline of a freshwater lake. Despite the landfill and heavy industry and highways and population density, this history of the Tkaronto shoreline is alive and literally beneath our feet. I find it endlessly fascinating and often deeply heart-breaking, in my practice of reclamation, to look at and bring to light the stories held by an object or place. I chose to represent these thoughts with an image of a loon in wetlands, as they may have existed before this city was a city. The haunting wail of the loon, the most frequently heard, is made when it becomes separated from its chick or if its mate fails to return. This vocalization is what I heard when I listened to the answer that came when asked ‘what do ghosts in condoland look like?’
Sara Torrie works to reclaim, repair and renew discarded textiles and objects. She is currently in a deep process to trouble the boundary between a commercial creative business and the ethos of her reclamation work. She loves autumn, especially Halloween.
www.sartoria.ca
@_sartoria_
Kay Jones (Moakpi’ksiiakkii)
When approaching the question, “what do ghosts in condoland look like?” I thought of CityPlace and the kinds of ghosts who might lurk in the halls of the condos by the lake. I thought the ghosts might be more fish-like! Lurking out of the buildings and singing with the wind coming off the lake.
Kay Jones (Moakpi’ksiiakkii) is a native 2-spirit/genderfluid queer artist based in Tkaronto. They desire to create and offer art-making and performance as a form of self care and boundaryless expression. Kay is a graduate of Humber College Theatre Production and has been working in Theatre and Community Arts for a decade. Kay’s artistic practice is inter/multi-disciplinary and covers many forms of art and performance, specializing in drawing, painting, fabric arts, puppetry and theatre costumes and props.
@kayosjones
Catharine Moeller
My pumpkin depicts a giant ghost looming over condo buildings, that people do not see unless it visits their condo.
Catherine Moeller is a multidisciplinary artist who leads a community arts program in Toronto’s Weston area. With the core value of inclusion, Catherine’s work is infused with her passion for removing social barriers and interweaving diverse people’s voices and stories. Catherine performs with the radically inclusive community choir, The Gather Round Singers and works in community outreach and arts engagement with Jumblies Theatre + Arts. She adores giant puppets and has created them with Clay and Paper Theatre, Shadowland Theatre, Arts4All, the Weston King Neighbourhood Centre Seniors’ Art Group and the Community Arts Guild. She has also spent time in Pembroke, Ontario as a puppet maker/artist in residence at Studio Dreamshare for the performance The River is Sacred.