Meet the man behind a new Toronto jewel
One man’s trash is another’s handicraft.
Standing in Harley Valentine’s studio recently — a sneaky, punky space just south of the Gardiner, anachronistically magical with its view of the city’s forest of glasscocoon towers — I happened upon a sculpture he’d made using the remnants of a long-lost landmark.
“It’s from a slab of reclaimed limestone from the Uptown Theatre facade,” the 34-year-old said. He discovered the piece of the grand dame cinema in a stone yard.
The old-school theatre, which went up in the 1920s and died in 2003, was a sort of time machine. Movie lovers first discovered Marlon Brando and Boogie Nights there, while the arrival of Toronto’s film festival had celebrities from Al Pacino to a young Quentin Tarantino making a pilgrimage to the building on Yonge St. south of Bloor St.
The bijou lives on in Valentine’s work called Lens.
With an array of materials ranging from reclaimed stone to polished bronze and mirrored stainless steel, the work is a labour of love for an artist on a Toronto mission.
What’s new is old and what’s old is you-know-what again, especially on the cusp of a significant new in- stallation he has going up just a few street lights over, at the base of Daniel Libeskind’s L Tower at Yonge and Front Sts.
Dubbed Dream Ballet, the triptych of columns expected to rise next month is meant to evoke the forms of ballet dancers, an homage to the National Ballet of Canada, which once made its home at the O’Keefe Centre, now called the Sony Centre, next door.
“It’s really, really going to be cool,” Valentine says.
Valentine puts me in his car (a Smurf-blue Mini) and takes me to the site of the coming piece. It’s not exactly a timid work: At 5.5 metres tall, it will likely be seen from as far as the Fairmont Royal York. It’s inspired by its location, a corner where the Grand Truck Railroad (“a bustling confluence of country builders and fortune-seekers,” says Valentine) once stood and would, decades later, turn into the meeting place for a new kind of pioneer (actors, musicians, dancers).
Valentine was born in Grimsby, grew up in Hamilton and is no stranger to the schmoozy circles around Toronto. He is clearly jazzed about the project; almost as excited as the other birth that shook up his life some weeks back. With his wife, Adriana, he welcomed Alfie Valentine to the world.
And with a stream of projects on tap — in Palm Desert, Calif., and in New York, plus the well-received Barbarians at the Gate exhibition at historic Campbell House here on Queen St. W. — this street-level work is the kind of commission that could rocket a career.
Today, he’s introspective about the project, which will sit on a new plaza designed by landscape architects Claude Cormier + Associates. Valentine tussled with its developers, who were fearful of graffiti and suggested putting glass around the sculptures.
“My argument is that, if you create an object of permanence, of beauty, people will respect it,” he says. Besides, “good lighting, 24/7” will, hopefully help build an aura around it and “create a piece of civic identity, as well.”
“It’s amazing . . . with sculptures . . . as soon as you elevate something, it sort of has this sense of grandeur. Just raising it from the floor . . .”
Valentine also has a keen sense of history when it comes to sculptures that act as sturdy icons in this city.
There is the famous Henry Moore piece at Dundas and McCaul Sts. in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario that will soon be moved to a new home in Grange Park.
Similarly, there is Moore’s The Archer, in front of Toronto City Hall, a piece Valentine reminds, “was so polarizing in the 1960s.”
Valentine considers the verdicts to come on his own installation and shrugs. “It’s open season to love or hate.”