Dummies make clean break
Mannequins find a home in Unilever soap factory
Less than two years ago, Ontario Place’s long-shuttered gangway reopened to the public, though briefly, to offer a glimpse of its current state through the prism of its badly neglected recent past.
In/Future, an arts festival that presented an array of artist’s projects riffing on the theme park’s antiquated futurism, opened in September 2016 to throngs. It also pried open the door to the park’s modest rejuvenation, which it now enjoys — shut down in 2012, Ontario Place is now open as a public park, with its Cinesphere once again a going concern.
In true Toronto fashion, the revival for some meant displacement for others, and on the move were a gang of animatronic mannequins who, in the absence of their human keepers, took to the maintenance of their corroding bodies themselves under the watchful eye of their chief physician, Dr. Gross.
That’s the story built around the manky old figures — eyes missing, fingers dangling, bits of wire protruding like entrails — by artist Max Dean, who salvaged them from the park’s Wilderness Adventure Ride for In/Future.
It was a riff on The Gross Clinic, a celebrated 1875 Thomas Eakins painting of Dr. Samuel Gross overseeing his students in surgery, tying the park’s shopworn futurism to the grander realm of art history.
Humans having returned to the park, that purpose was pushed aside.
So where do a gang of ragged robots run? To the abandoned Unilever soap factory, of course, to claim squatters’ rights amid the rusty tanks and funnels of the old industrial site where Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway meet.
For the Contact Photography Festival, the bots have turned to biding time: Under one of those massive chutes, three of them blow enormous soap bubbles, scraping up and making use of the scraps, just as they’ve always done, while Gross observes.
They’re wise not to do too much.
In a long-running Toronto serial, Unilever is due to become condos at some point in the not too distant future. It leaves one to wonder where any of us go when, finally, there’s nowhere left to run.