I don't remember if we had a thread for the Rideau Street renewal project, so I'll just put it here;
Street art has bee revealed, and I have mixed feelings about it. Where is this going? On top of lamp posts?
Quote:
City selects public art for reconstructed Rideau Street
By Peter Simpson and Neco Cockburn, Ottawa CitizenOctober 3, 2012
OTTAWA — Four “colourful glass and light-based sculptures” have been selected as public art pieces to be installed along a renewed stretch of Rideau Street.
The city selected a proposal from artist Mark Thompson as the winner of a public art competition for a section of Rideau from Dalhousie Street to the Cummings Bridge, it announced on Wednesday.
The proposal, titled Cube, Lattice, Sphere, Wave, is composed of “four colourful glass and light-based sculptures that share a common rectangular form,” says a city news release sent out Wednesday afternoon. “Each of the four sculptures contains unique and intricate three-dimensional glass compositions abstractly reflecting the attributes of the surrounding neighbourhoods.”
The sculptures will be installed between Dalhousie and the Rideau River as part of the $16 million Rideau Street Renewal project. Crews are replacing aging underground pipes, rebuilding and improving the roadway and adding new lighting and street furniture as part of the renewal, which is expected to be completed by the spring of 2014.
Pedestrians will see in Thompson’s work a feast of moving colours, which will appear to shift and change as the viewer passes by and which will slowly change at night. The surface of the sculptures will be tempered glass.
“Inside there are vertical strips,” Thompson said during a recent public meeting to display models and drawings of the four art proposals for Rideau Street, “and inside the vertical strips there are sort of graphics that change from the inside to the out and up and down and that sort of thing, and they describe different things. ... The image within the cube relates to the neighbourhood in which it’s located. The one close to the river has the wave motif, the one that’s more residential has the sphere motif, whereas the red cube is downtown (and) symbolizes the arts.”
The announcement is part of the city’s public art program, which sees one per cent of the money for municipal development projects earmarked for outdoor art. The city says criteria for choosing outdoor art proposals include “artistic excellence, experience of the artist, reflection of the site characteristics and sustainability.”
Comments from the public during an open house last month helped a selection committee choose the winner from four shortlisted proposals that included works from Lynda Cronin; Erin Robertson and Anna Williams; and David Watson and Frank R. Anjo.
Thompson’s sculptures, the city said, “subtly mark the diverse areas of Rideau Street by referencing concepts of vitality, integration, community and the natural environment.”
Thompson, who lives near Westport, studied at the Ontario College of Art and has had many exhibitions over the past 25 years, most of them in Toronto and Kingston.
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Video of all the proposals;
http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2012/10/03/pulsing-cubes-of-light-to-be-new-art-on-rideau-street/
We need to revisit this whole 1% for art thing. These pieces are just randomly selected and thrown on the streets; I don't see any relation to the street or improvements to the urban landscape. As long as we have nice lamp posts and street furniture, we should be alright. And while we're at it, demanding developers to design buildings with good architecture would be an expense free way to bring visual interest to our streets.
Same goes for the subway; I don't want any tacky shit in the stations. TTC's Museum station's weird Egyptian looking totem poles and TTC's Bayview station optical illusions are original, but I really would not want to see those every day. Plus, Bayview's architectural features make it look like the original 40s subway stations, all white subway tiles, more money in design, less money in art would have been way better.
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