Installation under Gardiner lights up the pulse of the city
A near-ancient Toronto right of way is about to be re-opened for a massive interactive art project involving 3,000 light bulbs underneath the Gardiner expressway.
As colonial Toronto goes, railways count as ancient. The Grand Trunk Railway fed the city’s growth beginning in the mid-1800s, and its main corridors are still used by GO, UP Express and Via Rail trains today.
Yet down along the south side of Fort York, a now-abandoned spur line led to the Queen’s Wharf at the foot of Bathurst, once located around where Lake Shore Boulevard is now, before landfill extended the shoreline south.
Though the rails were ripped out, the ghost path of that spur can still be seen under Strachan Avenue and through the “bents” holding up the Gardiner Expressway.
The Bentway, the public space project named after those bents, is mounting an exhibition in a series of “secret rooms” under the Gardiner on the western, Exhibition Place, side of Strachan. They will be using the old rail corridor to bring people from the eastern, fort side, to see it.
Though temporary due to ongoing Gardiner rehabilitation plans, this passageway could become a permanent connection in the future, further knitting this ever-growing part of the city together. Those secret rooms? They’re not actually so secret, but rather have been off the radar as bricked-off areas underneath the Gardiner and used as storage by Exhibition Place, the CNE and the Royal Winter Fair.
The Bentway has invited Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to set up “Pulse Topology.” His 3,000 lights will be suspended from the underside of the Gardiner, creating a “landscape of upside-down mountains and valleys” that will react to the pulse of visitors’ heartbeats using touchless biometric technology.
Think of an undulating ceiling of light connected to your Fitbit or Apple Watch.
“Part of the intention was to let the space be on display,” says Ilana Altman, co-executive director of The Bentway. “People will enter an open room and be able to take in the other one where the lights are.” When inside these Gardiner rooms, the sound of the highway above is muffled, with a reputative ker-thunk of vehicles crossing the expressway’s expansion joints.
The steel-on-steel screeching sounds from the trains also make their way inside, almost as if it’s an intentional industrial soundscape to match the very human pulsing of the lights.
On a visit this week, about a quarter of the lights had been hung, each bulb attached to a wire strung from the ceiling and leading to a control switch. If you think the back of your TV or computer is a mess of wires, this might give you nightmares, but the scale and complexity of this project is part of its appeal.
Lozano-Hemmer often works with the rhythms of the human body: back in 2007 as part of the Luminato festival, his project “Pulse Front” lit up the Toronto skyline with 20 powerful robotic searchlights that were connected to the heartbeat of people passing by.
David Carey, the other coexecutive director of the Bentway, calls all their work here “hybrid reuse” versus “adaptive reuse,” the term people might be more familiar with when old buildings and infrastructure are given new uses. “It’s not dead,” he says of the Gardiner. It’s a much different condition than the Highline project in New York City that took over a defunct, elevated rail line. The Gardiner, as we all know, must carry on at all costs. Carey hopes that by opening up the rooms underneath for the first time, it’ll spark more creative projects there. “What can these spaces be?” he asks.
The project involves a number of different agencies, including the City of Toronto’s transportation department, Fort York, and Exhibition Place. “These partnerships are a kind of work of art,” says Altman of the complexity of bringing together groups that see and have very different uses for the same place. This is an underutilized edge of the Exhibition property, and as Altman pointed out, a number of the buildings along Manitoba Drive here are quite handsome.
Once the connection under Strachan along the old Grand Trunk spur becomes permanent, people will be able to seamlessly flow from the Fort York neighbourhood, now connected even better to the north via the Garrison Crossing bridges, to the Exhibition property, the TTC streetcar stop, the GO Station and the proposed Ontario Line subway terminus. All of that, then, connects to Liberty Village to the north. A permanent pathway will also reconnect a tiny triangle of the Fort York National Historic Site on the west side of Strachan to the rest of the site.
It may seem small in the vastness of the city, but knitting these parcels together with a passage like this are what make cities both convenient and fun to explore. You could say a lightbulb turned on with this connective idea.
Pulse Topology runs from Oct. 2-31 —
Passageway under the Gardiner could further knit this ever-growing part of the city together