Wednesday 9 May 2012

Lansdowne Light Box by Dyan Marie


Dyan Marie's Lansdowne Light Box opens at 2 pm, May 12, 2012 with a poetry reading at the Coffee Time next to the phone booth located at the northwest corner of Bloor and Lansdowne Ave. Buy a coffee or tea and stay for some words.

Here is Dyan's description of her installation:

Lansdowne Light Box transforms a phone booth into a lighthouse and listening station. It recalls the stain glass windows of local demolished churches—places where people came to hear stories and quietly put words of their own into prayer.

Phone booths are disappearing and the Bell Telephone logo will disappear from story telling on street corners. Bell relocated their public signature to the Bell Lightbox, home of TIFF, a public space to quietly consume stories in film.

The installation in the phone booth, manifested in various shades of colour, comments on changing forms of communication ( and miscommunication) as well as the comforts, dysfunctions and needs addressed in acts of story telling.

Lansdowne Light Box is located in the phone both at the corner of Dupont Street and Lansdowne Avenue. The rapidly changing intersection is the site of an industrial rise, fall, decay and aggressive re-development process. The nominal centre of this whirlwind of urban evolution is a long-established Coffee Time drive-in restaurant.  Coffee Time’s outdoor public telephone is the site of this project.


About the Lansdowne and Dupont Intersection Location:

South-west corner Dupont and Lansdowne
The Standard apartment complex was an American Standard toilet factory until the late 1990s that sat derelict for several years until it was renovated into the current large-scale rental unit.
South-east corner Dupont and Lansdowne
Formerly a parkette fashioned from a previous TTC turnaround loop, the site has been a seven-story condo building since the early 2000s.
North-west corner Dupont and Lansdowne
This classic early-20th-century factory structure is now flagged with advertisements announcing plans to sprout a multi-storey high-rise condo tower from its center core.
North-east corner Dupont and Lansdowne
Just north of the telephone booths, 1011 Lansdowne is an infamous rental high-rise known as one of Toronto’s 10 worst buildings in press stories that have reported its various transgressions and tragedies. In recent months, improvements efforts are underway to stucco the building’s exterior.

Coming very soon are Dyan's poem and installation images...



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