A window into hidden, overlapping history
Shellie Zhang’s art piece peels back the layers of the city’s immigrant past
A pair of spare neon forms dangle in a storefront window on College St. near Spadina Ave., their cool glow at their most alive near twilight, when a bath of warm sunlight falls behind the squat brick buildings for the night.
The art-history observant would make a link with Dan Flavin’s minimalist works of the 1960s: fluorescent-tube sculptures that have since become some of the most revered (and pricey) works of an era where, ironically, artists used humble materials to hold a mirror up to an art world bloated on excess to ask what, exactly, “value” meant.
Shellie Zhang asks a similar question of artists such as Flavin. A forefather of a conceptual art era, Flavin was part of a cadre of artists bent on emptying out meaning, replacing it with riddles about material and form. Zhang’s works, meanwhile, are loaded up. Her spare forms, glowing behind glass, embody the faded history of a cross-cultural moment in the city’s urban fabric, cradled in the ragtag blocks that surround it.
Just west and a bit more south, at 285 Spadina Ave., a Rexall drug store conceals an empty theatre, an absent marquee. It was born in 1922 as the Standard Theatre, the country’s first Yiddish theatre, the cultural heart of a newly arrived community that had travelled west from the (former) Ward neighbourhood to Kensington Market, which would become Jewish Toronto’s vibrant heart. Amarquee was drawn up with Art Deco flourish, Zhang discovered, sifting the holdings of the Ontario Jewish Archives, drafted by Benjamin Brown, one of the city’s first Jewish architects, though it’s unclear if it was ever made. So Zhang did; it’s the one on the left, shimmering in blue and gold.
As the theatre’s popularity waned, its audiences drawn more to a burgeoning field of “talkies” than its offerings of Yiddish stage productions, it became, in 1935, the Victory. While it continued to host Jewish productions, it was no lon- ger wholly theirs; by 1961, it had evolved into a burlesque house: the Jewish presence was gone.
Kensington was changing. The Jewish population was migrating north and west, out of the city core, and other groups — Italian, Portuguese, Chinese — were taking their place. At the Victory Burlesque, Chinese groups started staging events and performances on Sundays, when the Toronto the Good’s tut-tutting over such naughtiness put its regular business activities on hold.
Then, in 1975, with the Chinese population here growing quickly, Hong Kong-based Golden Harvest Studios bought the theatre and repurposed it as a movie house to run its films exclusively. It served cuttlefish and dried mango, after a substantial renovation, and became a hub of Chinese popular culture.
Its substantial renovation, done by Jewish architect Mandel Sprachman, seemed to complete a circle: one immigrant group findings its feet around a cultural hub, handing it off to the next.
In the window, beside the shimmering outline of the Standard’s marquee, the Golden Harvest’s signage glows, its orange frame surrounding a golden curlicue. Together, they’re A Place for Wholesome Amusement, the Standard’s original slogan, a noble goal for a cultural diaspora putting down roots. They illuminate a streetscape where history comes in ever-deepening layers, waiting to be drawn up from the darkness.