A 6-minute Portage across the Yorkville Quarter from Bloor to Bay-Cumberland Station: Toronto as a New Media Art Installation

Just a block from Bloor and Yonge, the main intersection of Canada's largest metropolis, between trendy Yorkville boutiques and hustling Bloor shops and commerce, directly on top of the main east-west subway line, lies the Yorkville Quarter park, which reproduces in its dozen zones the major topographical features of the Canadian landscape. The park incorporates pine forests, prairie grasslands, stone outcropped herb gardens, birch forests, cherry fruit orchards, a steel/film walkway, an aspen grove, a bridged marshland, a rain/waterfall, and a huge granite Canadian shield rock.

The park is also only 2 blocks from "the Studio Building", the centre of production by the Canadian landscape school known as the Group of Seven, which combined a fauvist palette, art deco design, and impressionist atmosphere in depicting our location. I've juxtaposed "classic" Canadian shield, Ontario cottage country, and Group of Seven works on my photos of the park, along with lines from the attached classic "Canadian landscape poems." One can enter through the ruins of the old Pearcy House restaurant or the Imperial Theatre, which some homeless folks now use for shelter. Black and white images reminded me of their hardship; contrastingly, I "lucked out" in capturing the image of a "walking woman", reminding me of Michael Snow's classic works...injecting people on our barren landscapes...

I believe the park is an excellent illustration of one of my central claims: that increasingly, Toronto itself has become a "new media art installation"! The city itself increasingly is its own wired artistic statement, often in subliminal and subtle ways, only partly self-consciously, our constructed urban environment makes ourselves. Perhaps that is what is meant by terms (much as I abhor them) such as "world-class city"....

When my parents moved to Toronto in 1951, we lived a block away. "Come and join me on my portage..."