April 25 — June 15, 2019
Opening Thursday, April 25, 6:00 — 8:00 PM
PARI NADIMI GALLERY
254 Niagara Street, Toronto, Canada
Wed to Sat, 12:00 —5:00 PM, or by appointment
Skip Stop invites us to consider the rise and fall of the five towers of Regent Park South. These award-winning structures and their fast‐living architect Peter Dickinson are the apogee of mid‐century modern architecture in Canada. Titled after the architectural curiosity that organizes the towers’ design—maximally efficient “skip‐stop” corridors, permitting two‐storey units that front onto both sides—the work featured depicts the depleted energies present in these buildings immediately prior to their demolition.
Skip Stop Facade is a series of eight triptychs depicting interior spaces and details of 14 Blevins Place, the last tower left standing. The building was still partially occupied at the time the images were captured, one month before its demolition began in August 2014. The final compositions have been processed from memory nearly five years later. As arranged for the exhibition, the images reconstitute the building’s skip-stop arrangement of exterior windows. (Inkjet prints, dimensions variable.)
Skip Stop Site Plan is a digital video that juxtaposes two views from above at different scales. The first view depicts the tiled floor details that marked the Regent Park South tower elevator landings—on floors 3, 6, 7, 10 and 13 only, requiring residents of other floors to access their units via stairs. The second view depicts 13 years of Regent Park demolition and new construction, 2005–2018. (Digital video, 2:00.)
Skip Stop 2019 is a series of images captured and processed immediately prior to the exhibition, in order to register the current state of Regent Park’s ongoing process of change. A central tenant of the redevelopment plan is to reconnect the street grid: the resurrection of Oak Street, immortalized in the 1953 National Film Board production Farewell Oak Street, bisects the first image. The second image depicts the former Regent Park South site, with new towers in place of the old, while the third image depicts the opposite corner and condition of Regent Park during a pause in demolition. (Chromogenic prints, dimensions variable.)
Also on view are the most recent completed Iterations, a collaborative project with Toronto-based media artist Tori Foster. Iterations (2009-2019) are panoramic images of familiar built forms and their surrounding environments, in which consistent elements are reinforced through repetition, while the unique circumstances of each site create visual interference. Each image uses one of the two historic Regent Park building types as its subject; both were both captured ten times between 2010 and 2013. As with Skip Stop Facade, the final processing took place years later, as the demolished sites were fading from city memory. (Chromogenic prints, 96″ x 32″)
