[PHOTO] Twenty-nine photos of Winter Stations and Woodbine Beach (#winterstations, #woodbinebeach)

Saturday, the 21st of March, was a perfect day to see the public art works in the 2020 Winter Stations, the sadly diminished crowds enabling me to have a socially distanced trip down to Woodbine. There, the three of the four Winter Stations artworks that were not destroyed by errant children at play still stood, sounded even when designed to do so. The grey sky hung over the damp brown beach, and the pale green-blue sea lapped at the shore.

[DM] Some news links: public art, history, marriage, diaspora, assimilation

Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.

• CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
• JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
• Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
• Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
• VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family’s earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Netflix, McArthur, Downsview Park, Winter Stations, winter rain

• Netflix is opening up a new production hub in Toronto, creating as many as two thousand extra jobs. CBC reports.
• The inquiry into a policeman charged with unfairly dismissing a 2016 report of an attempted choking by Bruce McArthur continues. The National Post reports.
• Is there a possibility that Downsview Park might undergo a renaissance as a hub of aerospace industry? CBC reports.
• CBC Toronto reports on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations, this one based around the theme of migration.
• Freezing rain is expected for Wednesday night, contributing to a winter that so far as been quite full of precipitation of all kinds. CBC reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: homelessness, Port Lands, housing, Winter Stations, Cracked Wheat

• There will be a new shelter for homeless youth in Scarborough soon, capable of housing several dozen people. CBC reports.
• Christopher Hume at the Toronto Star suggests that much of the controversy, at least, over Google’s plans in the Port Lands is misjudged.
• Tess Kalinowski at the Toronto Star shares some locally new ideas for increasing housing supply.
• Winter Stations is back this winter at Ashbridge’s Bay! Global News reports.
• Sarah Ratzlaff at Spacing interviews sculptor Shary Boyle about her new work, Cracked Wheat, on display in front of the Gardiner Museum.

[PHOTO] Twenty-one photos of Winter Stations on Woodbine Beach (#winterstations)

Winter Stations this year was glorious, and Sunday the 1st of April was a great day to see these seven artworks, stretching out on the wide beaches set against the distant horizons.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: #winterstations, Toronto Islands, King Street, 401 Richmond, coffee

• Muriel Draaisma talks at CBC about the art installations selected for this year’s iteration of Winter Stations, including a “Pussy Hut”.
• The City of Toronto has, unaccountably, decided not to allocate all the money needed to repair the Toronto Islands after last year’s flooding. CBC reports.
• Mayor John Tory talks about the various plans–some new, some I think old–to bring more people to King Street during the transit experiment, over at the Toronto Star.
• This Toronto Star article about changes to taxation that will let downtown arts centres, like 401 Richmond, not get priced out of their homes is older but still quite important.
• blogTO notes local upset in Corso Italia that the local Starbucks, at Dufferin and St. Clair (not far from me!) is set to close. (I’ve never been there, which I suppose helps clear up any mystery around the closing.)

[URBAN NOTE] Matthew Hague on the Winter Stations of Toronto

The Globe and Mail‘s Matthew Hague describes the various installations planned for this year’s iteration of Winter Stations, at the Beaches. I can’t wait.

During the year’s grimmest month – February, when our shoes can handle the salt stains no more – Toronto’s annual Winter Stations event, now in its third and most creatively ambitious year, is a revelation. The public art event in the city’s Beach neighbourhood involves eight teams of artist and designers from Canada and around the world erecting thoughtful, provocative and fantastical structures that draw people out of their hibernation.

The theme of this year’s iteration is Catalyst, and the most exciting installations challenge viewers to change their perceptions on an important issue and even instigate change themselves. One called Flotsam and Jetsam, designed by a team of architecture students from the University of Waterloo, looks like a beautiful, 20-foot high sculpture of a fish. On closer inspection, its torso, filled with plastics, is a commentary about how our reliance on disposable packaging is polluting the environment.

Another, Collective Memory, by a Spanish and Italian team, is composed of bottle-lined walls. Visitors are encouraged to take and leave messages about their experiences immigrating to Canada, using the bottles as the means of exchange. The concept was inspired by the statistic that by 2031 nearly half of Canadians over 15 will be foreign born or born to foreign parents, and through public interaction it should tell a compelling, complex and dynamic narrative about what it’s like to land on new shores.

Inspired by Winnipeg’s Warming Huts: An Art + Architecture Competition on Ice, an annual public art event that has been running since 2009, the Winter Stations competition started in 2015 and interest in it has grown steadily since. This year, the most submissions yet (over 350) came in for the eight pavilions. There are few formal requirements to enter a proposal. The entrant doesn’t have to be a registered architect, professional artist or have a portfolio of projects (“We’ve had children submit ideas,” says architect Aaron Hendershott, one of the event’s organizers). The proposal simply has to incorporate one of the lifeguard stands that are spaced along the shore and be realistically buildable within a $10,000 budget (the funding comes from a variety of sponsors, including Hendershott’s firm, RAW Design).

To stand out, it also helps to take risks, as many of the best Winter Stations have in the past. “The proposals that excite me the most are maybe the most difficult to pull off,” Hendershott says. “Some, on paper, I just don’t know if they are going to pan out. But then they work in the most wonderful and awesome ways.” Last year, for example, there was a public (clothing-mandatory) sauna and a wood-burning fire pit, both of which Hendershott believes became “community assets” for the winter.

[PHOTO] Three photos each of the seven Winter Stations, Toronto (#winterstations)

Yesterday, I shared the selfie standing on Woodbine Beach in front of the Steam Canoe. I had taken this photo at the end of my pilgrimage to the seven Winter Stations. I came down from the north, from Queen Street East through Kew Gardens park, walking south to the Kew and Balmy Beaches. Reaching the easternmost point of Balmy Beach, I then had to double back to Woodbine Beach to their west.

The first I had seen was Floating Ropes, on Woodbine Beach. It created a wonderful self-enclosed space for children to play in.

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I did not get Lithoform.

Aurora Borealis was the first interactive exhibit I came across, with the wheel on the topped that could be tugged around by the playful.

Sauna was an actual working sauna, or would have been if the stove was turned on.

Flow was ingenious, a mound of wooden toys shaped like ice crystals. People had fun picking them up and throwing them back on.

 

In the Belly of a Bear created an interior space, a round wooden globe lined on the inside with fur and with a porthole looking up into the blue sky.

 

The Steam Canoe was ingenious, a beautiful thing of wood that could not have seen its full use. When it’s 20 degrees below, solar panels can melt snow into steam. This was not at all possible on Sunday.

 

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Two more Floating Ropes photos:

 

Two more Lithoform photos:

 

Two more Aurora Borealis photos:

 

Two more Sauna photos:

 

Two more Flow photos:

 

Two more In the Belly of a Bear photos:

 

Two more Steam Canoe photos:

 

[PHOTO] Me and the Steam Canoe on Woodbine Beach (#winterstations)

I took this selfie standing on Woodbine Beach in front of the Steam Canoe, an art installation built by a team from OCAD University, one of seven built around lifeguard stations on the beaches of east-end Toronto in the Winter Stations program. The Steam Canoe is the last one I visited, as I spent the afternoon walking across Kew and Balmy Beaches and Woodbine Beach to their west.

The installations got quite a lot of coverage. Toronto news sites covered it: see CBC, NOW Toronto,Torontoist, the Toronto Star, and Toronto.com. It also got substantial coverage elsewhere: see ArchDaily, Canadian Architect, and Slate. This attention was deserved, these works being at the very least inventive.

It was a beautiful day, so warm that the Steam Canoe could not produce steam via its solar panels. This, yet another record high this winter, is alarming, but was only distantly. I’d had a beautiful time. The extended photo post will be up tomorrow morning.