Tag: downtown

Perspective

Katharine Asals5 Comments

The other night I went out in the dark of the night to begin the project of refreshing the animals, the “critters” I’ve been installing, here and there underneath the Gardiner, along Lakeshore.

I’d done a couple of first instalments on the most front facing pillars on the west side of Sherbourne, and had waded in a little deeper, into a bit of a cavernous wasteland of concrete structures and detritus and so on, looking for another pillar that might hold a bear or a grackle…

And perhaps it’s here that I should mention that it’s the first time I’ve gone out on my own, a lone female at night?

Somewhere a few evenings into the project I realized we didn’t really need to be two people – two people is great if you want a ladder to go higher, or if you want to do larger posts with two parts that need to line up properly, or if you want someone to document what is happening. But it’s not strictly necessary…

I figured it was time to get efficient. To just get out there. Why not just do it on my own.

So there I was, a bit deeper into the gargantuan dark underneath the Gardiner, laying down layers of wheat paste, getting the image straight, when I sensed there was someone to my left.

I turned towards my sense of a figure, and must have jumped visibly, as he said, “sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”

He was leaning on his bike – a bike loaded down with what looked like probably all the stuff needed for navigating an entire life in a series of bags and compartments, living out in the city in precisely such liminal spaces as underneath the highway.

“I just wanted to come say, Hi”, he explained.

“I’ve been around here, in this neighbourhood for about four years, and I’ve seen your artworks around, and I just wanted to say, I appreciate you. I appreciate you, I appreciate your art.”

So very sweet, so pure of heart.

If ever I’d had a moment of doubt about the project, if ever I’d wondered if this little project mattered at all in these odd and difficult days in the world, it all vanished in that one sweet tiny phrase, “I appreciate you”.

More about this project – Downtown Critters

Lens Artists Challenge – Perspective, Depth and Scale

First thing

Katharine Asals4 Comments

Morning on the balcony the other day, and the first thing I noticed was that a fellow had gone through the break in the fence and was digging around in the scrabbly dirt.

For a couple of summers now, as the site sits empty, we’ve fantasized about and throwing sunflower seeds or wildflower seeds in there to get a field of colour rather than the bleak dust of it, but I think the truth of the matter is there’s more pebble than soil, as even the weeds that have started to grow here and there around the edges only get so far.

So I wondered what exactly was he up to in there? I imagined a scientist taking soil samples to measure quality, or toxicity levels, something…

And then he stood and went towards a pile of random junk against the fence, and a bunny rabbit shot out from somewhere inside the stacked stuff, and froze.

If I don’t move, you can’t see me.

He’s a tiny dot there, to the right of the man, by the first bend in the fence. I went inside to get my DSLR, but alas all batteries were dead, so I was stuck with only the phone camera, waiting to see what would happen next.

Well, not so much, it turned out.

After some moments of observing the bunny from where he stood, the man slowly went back to scrabbling around in the dirt, and the bunny stayed frozen in his spot. They each did their thing without interfering with the other.

It made me think of some drawings I’d been working on recently, based on bunnies in the neighbourhood, and / or the idea that bunnies live in this ultra-urban neighbourhood and how stressful it must be for them, the highway, the cars, the bikes and scooters, the rotating base camp across the street.

How often are they in the if I don’t move, you can’t see me response?

Lens Artists Challenge – The First Thing I Thought Of

Cinematic dreams

Katharine Asals13 Comments

The taxi driver refused to go any further.
I was staying at a hotel near Spadina and College – El Mocambo territory – and wanted to get further down towards Dundas, into the deep and winding medieval streets, but the driver turned the car around and let me out, saying “most people don’t want to go down there – it’s too dangerous”.

In the dream, downtown T.O. was like one of those neighbourhoods in Mexico City – Colonia Doctores or Ciudad Neza  – where all taxi drivers refuse to enter cause anything could happen.
So I got out and walked.
The streets were deserted and dark, and I walked and walked, way south, walking all night until I got down near the very bottom of the city, almost to the waterfront, where the sky was wide and the road opened up into a kind of rock quarry or a crumbling Colosseum, a part of the city that had long been abandoned and was just big open empty raw spaces  –

I ventured up onto the first layers of the rocks, rambling happily until I sensed movement in the shadows of the quarry. And as I looked, creatures took shape.
They were lions – stone lions.
They were living animals – their large bodies moving and rummaging about – but they were made of stone, the same stone of the the quarry.

At just the moment that it registered in my mind what I was seeing and the danger I was in, a large lion sensed me too, the hint of movement in his peripheral vision, and his head snapped up in a snarl.
Then there was a pounce, the running jump of the massive creature coming after me.

big biting lion

Suddenly I had a large plywood board in my hands which I lay underneath in a crevice in the rocks, pulling the board flat on top of me, effectively disappearing into the ground.

The lion lumbered heavily over me, not finding me, scrambling over and away, somewhere beyond where I lay hidden.
The fear was so huge – one of those nightmares that wakes you up in a sweat, blinking in the dark of the bedroom.

* * *

Today I had one of those days, out and about in the ‘hood and, while taking photos of the various construction and rehabilitation projects happening all around us here, here down at the bottom of the city, in an area that had been abandoned for decades, I remembered this dream again.

A dream from more than 10 years ago.

What I still don’t quite understand is where does this dream exist in time?

Because it’s as if some part of the dream knew where I was going more than 5 years before I moved here, before our building was built, before this abandoned part of the city was on its way to being brought back to life.

But now, having remembered the dream, and feeling as if I am somehow somewhere inside of it, I remember also some of the wise words of Robert Moss regarding the animals we meet in dreams :

Our animal guardians are hunting us in our dreams. If we will only stop running away, brave up, and remember, we can claim their power …

Lens Artists Challenge – Cinematic