Bringing photography to the public

by | 14 September 2018 4:47 pm

By Peter Saunders

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Each May, an increasingly wide variety of digitally printed wide-format graphics are installed in public spaces throughout Toronto to help expand the reach and visibility of the city’s annual Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival from indoor galleries to outdoor environments.

With this year’s edition of the festival, for example, lens-based works by emerging artists, photographers, and photojournalists were wrapped on everything from the Gardiner Expressway’s pillars to Ryerson University’s sidewalks and boulders. In fact, the festival’s 20 primary exhibitions—including collaborations with major museums, galleries, and artist-run centres—were nearly matched in number by 15 public installations.

“As the festival continues to expand its scope with new public art commissions, an array of exceptional work is presented throughout Toronto,” says Darcy Killeen, Contact’s executive director.

A site-specific approach

The festival has reached public spaces for the past 15 of its 22 years in existence, to the point where such applications have become a distinctive facet of the event’s overall identity.

“Public displays are an important and unique portion of the festival,” says Killeen. “The idea behind them is just part of our nature as a grassroots organization. Not everyone goes to art galleries, after all.”

Each year, in preparation for the festival, Killeen and his team commission and curate specific photographers’ artwork with specific areas of the city in mind.

“A public installation has to have relevance and meaning to its location,” he says. “This year, for example, we commissioned massive wrap graphics of canoes for pillars along the Bentway, a new public trail under the Gardiner Expressway. They actually stayed up all summer, as part of an ongoing effort to beautify what was previously an ugly and industrial space, but they also paid tribute to the area’s earlier history as an important Indigenous trade route.”

Titled ‘A Forest of Canoes,’ the series of photos by Dana Claxton were printed by Beyond Digital Imaging (BDI), one of the festival’s ongoing sponsors, in Markham, Ont., on Envision 480 film from 3M Canada, another sponsor. Each graphic measured approximately 1.7 x 4.9 m (5.5 x 16 ft) and was wrapped around the curvature of each pillar.

Repeat performances

Those same pillars have been wrapped for Contact in the past. Indeed, some of the same spaces have been used for many years in a row, including billboards and subway station posters donated by Pattison Outdoor Advertising and select buildings’ exterior surfaces for murals.

Location-appropriate installations in these spaces have included such examples as ‘Toronto: Under This Ground,’ a 2013 series of subway station posters with photos by Michael Cook and Andrew Emond showcasing previously concealed waterway spaces.

“Toronto’s subway stations were the perfect location for the poster project, as this space allows viewers to reflect on a layer of the city to which we are all connected, yet rarely have the opportunity to see,” says Sharon Switzer, director and curator of Pattison’s Art for Commuters initiatives.

“We focus on different stations in different years,” Killeen explains. “This year, we worked with Pattison on Osgoode station.”

Another standout example was ‘Demolition Site,’ Jihyun Jung’s mural depicting a destroyed façade, which Four By Eight Sign Services installed on the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in 2015, when that building itself was slated for demolition and redevelopment. The work drew from Jung’s personal experience of seeing his childhood home in Korea replaced with a high-rise building.

“Rough surfaces like brick and stone can only be wrapped with special, conformable films, which fortunately have become more common and faster to use,” says Jeff Uzbalis, a digital sales and marketing specialist for 3M Canada. “So, wrapping the exterior wall of MOCCA became faster with each year.”

“We also had a giant banner up at the Westin Harbour Castle for three years,” says Killeen.

Seeking new display spaces

Finding new spaces each year for public art installations helps open new possibilities for the festival’s outreach. One example from 2018 that proved particularly challenging and visually striking was ‘Reflection of Hope,’ a series of large-format photographic works by Aida Muluneh, which Four By Eight installed in reflective pools throughout an outdoor park at the Aga Khan Museum.

“The Aga Khan is a magnificent space we’ve wanted to work with since it opened in 2014,” says Killeen. “We are always looking for new and exciting spaces.”

“Those were complicated installations,” says John Kotsopoulos, Four By Eight’s owner. “The graphic frames had to be engineered for the wind load in a space that’s very open, but we could not penetrate the tile below. Instead, we weighed down each aluminum structure with patio stones in the base, then closed them up.”

BDI printed the photos on 3M’s 40C white Controltac vinyl film, which was then adhered to Alupanel-brand aluminum composite panels (ACPs), for the double-sided graphic structures. Each photo had to sit a couple of inches above the surface of the reflective pools, with the rest of the base concealed underwater.

“We used aluminum tube bases, reinforced with gussets, and they were very well-balanced,” says Kotsopoulos. “The water filled those horizontal tubes to help weigh them down.”

For another series of framed graphics, displayed along King Street West near Metro Hall, Four By Eight used beam clamps to install the images in a series of 13 grey steel structures.

Partnering for support

Four By Eight’s involvement in supporting the festival dates back to 2008, when 3M’s Uzbalis brought the team on board.

“It’s also a pleasure to work with BDI, since they have the newest equipment and produce the best-quality prints,” Kotsopoulos says.

“Our partners help us continue to understand the cutting edge of wide-format graphics technology,” says Killeen. “There’s always a lot of back-and-forth discussion between our artists, sponsors, and suppliers.”

When American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger created a site-specific project for the Dundas Street façade of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2010, for example, it was the largest vinyl graphic installation in Toronto’s history at that point, stretching across an entire city block.

“It was a killer job at that angle, as the façade is not flat like a billboard,” says Kotsopoulos, referring to architect Frank Gehry’s new glass and wood façade, which was added to the AGO in 2008. “We had to combine a scissor lift with a zoom boom to work up there.”

While the company’s main focus is sign and graphic installation, relying primarily on Elliott Equipment cranes, it sometimes needs to turn to outsiders for specialized help.

“We oversaw the boulder graphics for Ryerson last year and this year and those are tough!” says Kotsopoulos. “Wrapping them is truly an art, even on their flattest sides. The vinyl is heat-applied, needs to retain its ‘memory’ just like vehicle graphics and is eventually removed. Fortunately, Jeff at 3M refers the right guys to us when needed. Everyone has their own little tricks.”

For the 2018 festival, the five boulder wraps for the Ryerson Image Centre’s Devonian Pond were printed on 3M’s Envision 480, like the Bentway’s pillar wraps, and were part of Scott Benesiinaabandan’s ‘Newlandia’ series. This series also included 30.5-m (100-ft) long sidewalk graphics, printed on 3M’s Scotchcal 3662 film and then protected with Scotchcal 3647 overlaminate film.

Window graphics have also extended Contact’s reach. This year, 3M’s 40C-114, a clear, removable 0.08-mm (3-mil) thick vinyl film with a repositionable ‘comply’ adhesive, was used to bring Sofia Messa’s ‘Guardians’ photo series to the windows of the Allan Gardens Conservatory.

“They complemented other graphics and banners inside the building,” says Killeen.

Finding a way

Every once in a while, a notion for a public display simply cannot become reality, but never for lack of trying.

“Some ideas have not been feasible because a landlord pulls the plug,” says Killeen, “but in terms of the limits of the technology behind the production and installation of graphics, we and our partners have always found a way. It has been a very successful program and we are all proud of it.”

Indeed, one of his next orders of business is to find further ways to build on that success.

“We did everything we wanted to this year and we’ll be using many similar sites next year,” says Killeen. “We will start making those programming decisions this fall.”

With files from Four By Eight Sign Services, the Contact Photography Festival, and 3M Canada. For more, visit www.fourbyeightsigns.com[12], www.scotiabankcontactphoto.com[13], and www.3mcanada.ca[14].

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/bringing-photography-to-the-public/

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