The Harbour City Archive / Toronto Pending
"A city cannot be a work of art."
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Toronto is a product of the imaginary. While this city has been greatly reshaped over the past half-century by concrete, glass, and steel, Toronto's landscape and civic identity are equally products of countless megaprojects which were proposed but never built, from a giant waterfront pyramid designed by Buckminster Fuller to a colossal floating airport for Lake Ontario.
The Toronto Pending project responds to this unbuilt city. The finished pieces, painted on and carved into a variety of found construction materials, formally and symbolically reference the unbuilt megaprojects themselves and the political and aesthetic context that fostered their development.
The newest pieces in this body of work reference the unbuilt megaproject known as Harbour City, proposed in 1970 for the site of the Toronto Island Airport. Comprised of abstracted fragments of archival illustrations and models, the forms reflect the plan for Harbour City: a series of modular concrete buildings set amidst idyllic canals, suggesting a futuristic Venice and representing Toronto's response to Expo '67. These artworks act as a simulacrum for Harbour City and invite the viewer to imagine herself a resident of this unbuilt domain.
This body of work is positioned as a critique of the Modernist discourse of Utopia, and pays homage to the countless artists and architects who have proposed outlandish utopian solutions to perceived social ills. Toronto Pending serves to reactivate Torontonians' collective civic memory of the multiple paths this city could have taken over the past fifty years, and to give the wider community a chance to see Toronto's landscape as a place built as much out of imagination as of concrete and steel.
