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Green Sleeves

greensleeves

A few people emailed us about this project (thanks for that!!) and I’ve since seen it on a number of other blogs, so it’s about time I got around to posting it on here. Green Sleeves by AT.AW uses a simple pattern to create planters from the layers of old wheat pasted posters.

The method is great—looking around the city (in this case, Toronto) and understanding the specificities that create opportunities for intervention in the city. The results seem to be a mixed bag, in terms of plants surviving longer than 24 hours; in some cases, the plants are stolen, dry out, or are torn down for more posters.

The project is generating a dialogue and for that it is successful and it may be able to translate better to a city where its illegal postering community is less vigilant.

[via Torontoist]

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Field Report from St.Catharines

street banners

Danielle and I have been in St.Catharines at Brock University working with an Ecopsychology class on a public art project (details to follow in coming week(s). We’re only here for a few days to help get the class started, but it’s been incredibly fun working with a bunch of strangers. We’ve explored the campus and the downtown and what I offer you here is a brief report on our findings.

Above is one of many, many banners on streetlight poles, highlighting a number of community members. It would seem that some iteration of this in Windsor would be a no-brainer—and I know it’s been brought up before in conversations, but new banners and some input on the Christmas-themed light sculptures that adorn our streetlight poles in the winter would be a welcomed change.

community board

The downtown itself is a funny mix—it feels on the verge of being vibrant, but during the summer most places close early or don’t open at all. This is truly a university town, where the students seem to almost entirely drive the economy. There’s a rather large number of vacant storefronts, but there’s a decent mix of shopping and restaurants and bars, with apartments above all of them, to make it seem kind of livable. This community board above in particular caught my eye, again likely a sign of a dead place without students, though remnants of a drunken night are on the other side where a downtown map is under shattered glass.

public art

This is public art in St.Catharines, or rather, what public art from the 1980s looks like on the campus of Brock University. The campus itself is sprawling and hugs the Bruce Trail, which winds itself around the escarpment and a wondrous forest. Though much the architecture is what you’d expect for a small university campus—late 1960s/1970s modernist architecture, with confusing layouts, awful interior paints and a sort of assholish sensibility. It’s a nice enough place, the amount of green space really helps you feel a bit better in general, but I suppose we’re also missing a key ingredient in understanding how the place works on a regular basis, that is, a student body. It was encouraging to find out though that not only does Brock have an 8-month bus pass built into its tuition, but that students think it’s the best $150 they could possibly spend.

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Tree Museum: Public Art by Katie Holten

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL4LqJXur48&feature=player_embedded

Kind of strangely, I read about this project in the New Yorker and momentarily confused it with Canada’s Tree Museum, but ultimately thought it was worth noting given a recent conversation we had with Edwin who came by our Office Hours last week about a potential audio-based community project.

The video above describing the Holten’s project is kind of brutal (especially the soundtrack), but it gives a good idea of the way it works—acting as a kind of series of stops on a museum tour, with a variety of trees being the markers in each neighbourhood.

100 trees give voice to 100 perspectives featured in the Grand Concourse’s TREE MUSEUM. Irish artist Katie Holten created this public art project to celebrate the communities and ecosystems along this 100 year-old boulevard. Visitors can listen in on local stories and the intimate lives of trees offered by current and former residents: from beekeepers to rappers, historians to gardeners, school kids to scientists.

You can call 718-408-2501to access the audio guide.

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Lucy Howe’s Wilt

Wilt by Lucy Howe

As part of the Green Corridor‘s Open Corridor festival, Windsor’s Lucy Howe installed a series of wilted road signs, entitled Wilt. The signs themselves reiterate the bend, or wilt, in its respective sign pole and simultaneously comments on some of the many issues surrounding this stretch of road, and the kilometer or so to its north. The signs were originally installed as pictured above, but shortly after their installation, a City of Windsor truck came by to take them down.

Thankfully, the signs were recovered before being carted away and are now installed on the Northeast corner of Huron Church and College.

Howe’s work has an incredibly fun way of intervening with infrastructure and the everyday. All of the work is amazingly labour intensive, but so expertly pulled off that it can make you continually guess at its sincerity in the best way possible. If you’ve been to the AGW lately, you would have seen her work—a drooping chair and melting wall on the second floor as part of the Biennial.

Howe has another work in her archives that I’m hoping she’ll work on again, if the right place can be found. The work involves reshaping a chain link fence’s form and function, how could I not be in love?

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Refining and Reworking the Planters

IMG_2949

Another week and another day in 406 Pelissier, which as it continues is now part of Windsor’s Visual Fringe. It’s tough to find time to get down there, but I think we made the best of a few hours last Tuesday. We’re continuing work with the planters, which is (as they always seems to be) another fairly long-term research and development type of project. However, we made some great progress and some new strategies for designing the planters, and did a couple more test transplants.

Continue reading “Refining and Reworking the Planters”

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Windsor: One of the Worst-Run Cities in Canada

Windsor City Hall

Not that this really comes as any surprise, but a Macleans study found that Windsor is one of the worst-run cities in the country. The low grades comes from two areas in particular, efficiency and effectiveness, where Windsor ranked 23 and 28th respectively out of a total of 31 cities studied.

Now, to be fair to the Rose City, a lot of these numbers were based on concerns that come out of managing the city, that is, things like how much money does it cost to collect the trash and how much does transit cost per kilometer. Really, these are things that are indicative of poor management strategies, with Windsor ranking as one of the highest governmental costs per capita, rather than a true reflection of the ground-level problems in Windsor that one might usually encounter.

In the end, Windsor ranks 26th overall, making it just five up from the worst-run city in the country.

[via Windsor Star]

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Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas

signs

We recently decided to demarcate some of many accidental meadows across Windsor with these Naturalized Area signs. In hopes that these signs might momentarily allow residents of Windsor to look at these naturalized spaces for what they are—that is, wonderful additions to our urban landscape—instead of the result of a politically-charged issue, we spent the earlier part of this week designing the signs, getting them printed, drilling holes, and installing them.

Continue reading “Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas”

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Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach came to Windsor and did an artist talk, almost a couple years ago now. I remember in particular, her slide that stood in for her graduate work—it was just a blank slide, I chuckled and kind of shivered. Beyond that, I can’t remember a lot of her presentation, other than she also worked at a planetarium at some point, and published zines, but something about her practice stuck with me.

Her work that seems to make the rounds most often is pictured above—sweaters with (mostly) political messaging on them. Using a computer-controlled knitting machine, she often makes sweaters and matching skirts and then poses in them. The messages are somewhat immediate responses to current cultural and political climates, and it might be the immediacy of the response that I enjoy so much; well, the immediacy and the text.

Also, I thought it might be a good reference for the fun folks over at CNAP.

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Naturalized Area: Accidental Meadow

Naturalized Area

Installed across the road from the University of Windsor‘s Naturalized Area, our sign highlights one of the many wonderful accidental meadows, created by the ongoing city workers strike.

These naturalized areas allow for a moment in which one might be able to mistakenly believe that Windsor is a progressive city, a place where this type of naturalization is encouraged for its beauty, for its potential to attract wildlife, and for the stories our landscape is capable of telling.

With rumours circulating about a potential 30% of the newly naturalized areas across the city remaining in their naturalized states even after the strike is over, there is the potential for being able to believe that there is hope for Windsor.

Designed with the help of Steven and printed exceptionally fast at FastSigns, these signs will pop up over the coming days in other particularly wonderful locations most suitable for advocating the maintenance of their naturalized state.