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Braiding Grass in Windsor

Leesa Bringas (along with some fellow Windsor artists) spent the weekend braiding the long grass at Great Western Park. The process leaves spirals of braided grass around shoots of flowers. It’s quite beautiful and seems meditative (though admittedly, I didn’t venture out to try myself).

Political issues of the strike aside, I quite like seeing the riverfront in a naturalized state, and it’s great that Leesa found such a quiet way to work with the space. Given the other activity in city parks over the weekend, this project is a welcomed intervention to the strike now going into its seventh week.

You can see more photos on Steven’s site, or more video on Darren’s site, or read more about the project on the Windsor Star.

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Parking Tickets – Update

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So, back to the old sly-as-can-be ticket dispensing! It was a beautiful day, so handing out parking tickets was more of a joy than a chore. I’ve been letting my intuition and somewhat-extensive automotive knowledge guide me in choosing the cars I feel are “fuel efficient.” This Toyota Corolla (pictured) averages about 7L/100km, whereas the Dodge Viper (your average over-achieving American sports car, pictured below), averages around 14L/100km. Thanks to all of you who don’t mind sacrificing speed for fuel efficiency!

Continue reading “Parking Tickets – Update”

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New Magnetic Planters Field Test

Broken City Lab Magnetic Planters

Friday afternoon turned out to be more productive than I thought it would. We finished embedding all the magnets we have, which means we have 25 planters either done or drying and ended up with 3 installed on various surfaces to see if they survive the rain this weekend.

If they turn out, I’ll order some more magnets, but in the meantime we’re still working on stencils (the BCL stencil above was just a test), and we should be able to get the rest up in the next week!

Owen over at Windsor Visuals also already made a great post on Friday’s Office Hours, and some of his photos are included in this post as well.

Continue reading “New Magnetic Planters Field Test”

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Memory Lane

memory3

Scott Wayne Indiana set out on Memorial Day to map out the floor plan of his childhood home to try to coax some memories from the space.

Using public space for a large-scale mapping project might be an interesting way to work with some of the long grass around the city. Of course, putting something like masking tape down would be lost, but making paths by walking through the grass might be a different way of thinking about it. I want to spend more time outside soon.

[via Wooster Collective]

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A Mess, But We’re Closer

planters with magnets

Danielle and I spent Wednesday afternoon making some more planters, patching up some of the planters made last Friday, and adding magnets to other planters. Hopefully by Friday these will be dry and ready for departure from my studio.

I’m anxious to see these up (and this project finished, many other things to do!)

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Flyer-box planters

I don’t generally have much use for CRAFT: magazine (now relegated strictly to blog-format). Allow me to summarize: “I made a(nother) cake stand! My T-shirt blinks! Who likes cupcakes?! Aprons rule!” But, for all its disingenuous crypto-consumerism and further-watering-down of the Third Wave, they do occasionally link to something interesting.

flyerbox

The flyer-box planter is nice-enough, in and of itself, though it might be even nicer to see retired newspaper veding boxes repurposed in this way. I mean, in the print-to-digital shift, I don’t think anyone much misses the real estate listings (the free weeklies are another matter), but something like this could conceivably work to draw attention to, say, the problematic bloggification of print journalism, in addition to your standard-issue urban blight.

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Office Hours

Broken City Lab Office Hours

Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, May 29th, at 2:30pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll finish up some projects and brainstorm some others. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!

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Text In-Transit Panels off to the Printers

Text In-Transit folder

The panels for Text In-Transit have been sent off to the printers. We should be able to install these on Transit Windsor buses in the next couple of weeks!!!

We settled on 90 unique panels + 10 title card panels.

Again, we can’t thank everyone enough for the support and participation—I’m hugely excited to see these all printed and installed!

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Windsor Signage

Visit Windsor's Sculpture Garden

I almost didn’t believe this sign existed. The few times I’ve been out to the Windsor Airport, I’ve usually been coming from the south, which (if my understanding of the geographic location of this photo is correct) might explain why I’ve missed it in the past.

Thankfully, Steven has a photo of it and presents two good options for working with it (it’s either a t-shirt or a lightbox (or fodder for Ron Terada)).

Signage has been discussed before at BCL, and while we’ll leave it to Steven to work with this sign in one way or another, it actually collapses two things that I often loosely discuss in introducing Windsor’s cultural landscape (so to speak) to people who aren’t from the area. The level of design (demonstrated above) and this kind of amassing of public art in the form of a dumping ground, ghetto, “tax shelter,” park while the rest of the streets remain the place for bland infrastructure and advertising is a prime example of what may be wrong in Windsor.

And, if you aren’t already reading Steven’s blog on a regular basis, do yourself a favour and add it to your reader.