BEAUTY MEMORY ENTROPY

MAKING AND VISUALIZING

 

Zones of Immersion

Stuart Reid, OCAD University

 

ABSTRACT

The spaces we design are layered evocations of our beliefs. Utilitarian space has a subtext…that a mechanical view of life is sufficient for the designated user.  The pursuit of beauty has at its root a belief in the healing interplay and harmony of matter and energy.

To embrace beauty, memory and transience is not to layer essentially utilitarian existence with romantic gloss, but to attempt harmony between an unfolding universe and our evolving being.

Beauty, memory, discovery and passage … it is within this context I would like to talk about my public art project ‘zones of immersion’ for Toronto’s central transit hub, Union Station.   It is a full city-block long glass wall between two subway station platforms (visible from two sides). Perhaps it is the city’s largest and most viewed artwork in a public space. It attempts a fusion of beauty and consciousness, in a holding space otherwise reductively designed for people moving.

The finished artwork was made by enlarging in situ sketches, painting these onto sandblasted glass sheets, then drawing directly upon them to give the images a vulnerable ephemeral presence  - a collage of the ‘naked’ and the ‘fleeting’…

including poetic texts that reflect the experience of the space. The writing ‘channels’ the swelling and dissolving murmur of the chora…echoing the arriving and departing subway trains…in this antisocial space of herding and release.

This environmental artwork attempts to transform the collective isolation of this space of human plumbing, and through an infusion of transparent human empathy, lift it to the quiet of interconnective melancholy; and then, through a harmony of line and verse, colour and composition, it reveals to us the beauty of our human being – of our being human – dwelling within the rhythm and ritual of our everyday experience.

 

1 https://www.canadianarchitect.com/architecture/zones-of-immersion-unveiled-at-torontos-union-station/1003728126/   and  http://momus.ca/public-art-has-to-be-art-first-and-public-second-a-conversation-with-stuart-reid-on-union-station/

 

BIO

Stuart Reid is an interdisciplinary artist and designer (BA, Fine Art, University of Guelph; M.Arch, UCLA) and Professor of Environmental Design at OCAD University, Toronto. Reid’s work includes drawing, painting, architectural glass and architecture. His recent major work, zones of immersion (Union Station Toronto) is the largest and most viewed public artwork in Toronto and has elicited strong and contrasting reactions. Other major commissions include Stations of the Cross, MaryLake Augustinian Monastery; Bloorview Kids Rehab, Toronto; Intercontinental Toronto Centre; Salzburg Kongress, Austria; Mississauga Living Arts Center; St. James Cathedral, Toronto.  Recent exhibitions include Beliefs Gallery Gevik, Toronto; Hacking Time Durham Art Gallery; In Transit Gallery Gevik, Toronto; and Lumière du Monde Centre International du Vitrail, Chartres. Theoretical and built architectural projects include Human Face, Social Form (Toronto 2015) and Spiral Arc House (Lake Huron 2011), Ribbons of Light (West Toronto Junction 2003).