Eye on the storm
For the Pan Am Art Path, Dan Bergeron takes a data-based approach to a natural disaster
Monday morning was a good time to talk to Dan Bergeron about the weather. The Toronto artist had spent Saturday afternoon unveiling a new mural in the city’s Weston neighbourhood, paying homage to the city’s most significant natural disaster, 1954’s Hurricane Hazel. On Saturday, the forecasted high was in the high-20s; 24 hours later, the temperature had dipped by more than 20 degrees.
“Like all Canadians, I’m interested in the weather,” Bergeron says. “We’re having drastic changes. I’m always checking the weather.
“The way that it’s presented, weather data, there are narratives there. If you can take yourself a little bit out of your normal scope of thinking, it’s like, OK, the storm was angry, and then it relaxed, then it started arguing with this other storm. It’s very much like a story.”
Bergeron applied this sort of narrative-focused thinking to the Hurricane Hazel mural, a commission and one of 14 stops on the Pan Am Art Path, part of the 2015 Pan Am Games’ cultural programming. He and fellow artist Gabriel Specter researched the effects of the hurricane — the 1954 storm had a death toll of 81 and forced a rebuild in the Weston neighbourhood — and met some local residents who had weathered the storm more than 60 years ago. But “after reading about it and getting the info,” Bergeron says, “we didn’t want to do a mural that was going to be a historical recreation of the hurricane.”
So he and Gabriel took inspiration instead from depictions of weather events — charts, animations, graphic representations of data — that most Canadians concerned about rainfall, high winds or low temperatures will most likely be familiar with. The result is a mural painted under an overpass, with a swirling, graphic cyclone of purple and pink connecting one stormy side to the other.
Bergeron has drawn on weather data in his work before, creating a piece in 2014 at the Evergreen Brickworks building in Toronto that charts rainfall levels from the three largest storms to hit Toronto, by water volume: May 29, 2013; July 3, 2013, and Hurricane Hazel, in 1954.
“I think with climate change we’re going to have more extreme weather events,” Bergeron says, “and I am interested in using data in art. It’s a different way of looking at information, graphs and charts. I think they can be artistic.”
He hopes that, when people look at the mural, they won’t just see swirls of colour, but rather, “a talking point.” This is the weather, after all.