Softer City, the Bentway’s summer exhibition with free public art in Toronto, brings together artists, architects, and designers from the city, across Canada, and beyond.
The exhibition aims to explore softness “as a means of humanizing cities, connecting communities, and creating space for collective repair.”
Soft Fits is a site-specific installation by Brooklyn-based WIP Collaborative in collaboration with local youth. It is situated under the trees at the edge of The Bentway Studio Terrace and is a project that was designed with teenagers in mind, and the ways that they interact with public space.
As a result, WIP Collaborative worked closely with local youth to create an inviting and inclusive environment that “blurs the boundaries between hard and soft public space.”
This installation is a series of public furniture units built with metal framework and fabric netting.
The project was inspired by the city’s cliffs, bluffs, and forest landscapes, and the installation features netted frames that form shared spaces under and between the trees, creating a relationship to the surrounding environment.
The design of Soft Fits was informed by surveys conducted with local teenagers. Many of the responses indicated that there are several public spaces that are intended to be used by either kids or adults, that do not fit what teenagers look for in a community space.
With varied heights, curvatures, and slopes, the pieces aim to encourage engagement for everyone. Hand-crafted woven textures and fringes introduce a soft materiality on the terrace, which invite users to engage through touch.
The Bentway Studio’s terrace is located on the east edge of Canoe Landing Park and is a ground-level, barrier-free space.
A work by Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Chloë Bass, is also featured in The Bentway’s summer exhibition.
The artwork, called Perspective Alignment, invites guests to reflect on our shared histories and collective well-being and consists of sculptural benches crafted from solid Ontario rock, each of which are engraved with poetic reflections.
The benches draw from the mental health concept of perspective alignment. They also aim to reflect on different forms of recovery, influenced by historical traumas, colonisation, policing, and the imposition of societal boundaries.
Each stone bench features its own engraved text and the silhouette of a tree local to the landscape at one time. According to The Bentway, the texts, taken together, make up a loose poem, which align multiple perspectives on recovery from across time.
The artwork is located across The Bentway site.
Softer City will be on display until October 6, 2024.
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