A Monumental Photographic Mural Just Went Up at the Corner of Bay and Queens Quay

A detail from Sarah Anne Johnson’s giant photographic mural, installed at the intersection of Bay Street and Queens Quay earlier this month.  (Image credit:  Sarah Anne Johnson, Best Beach (detail), 2015, Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and Julie Saul Gallery, New York)

POSTED: APRIL 27, 2015
BY: REBECCA CARBIN

At Waterfront Toronto, we view the public realm as being of paramount importance in the revitalization of our city’s waterfront. We see a lively and dynamic art program as an integral part of a vibrant public realm. As such we seek to partner with existing arts and culture organizations to bring their activity down to the water’s edge.

In 2013, we met with the CONTACT Photography Festival and the City of Toronto’s StreetARToronto (StART) to look at some big blank walls on the waterfront. We had the idea that they could become blank canvases for some grand scale photo-based art interventions.

Both CONTACT and StART were excited by the blank expanse of the west-facing wall of the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Centre. Right at the foot of Bay St, just before one reaches the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal and Harbour SquarePark, this wall cried out for transformation. It needed an artwork that would illuminate and celebrate the proximity of the lake, so close and yet not visible from that spot.

Following that meeting, CONTACT and StART joined forces with Partners In Art (PIA) to create the City's first semi-permanent monumental photographic mural. It's by acclaimed Canadian artist Sarah Anne Johnson. It’s on the waterfront. And it's fantastic.

The mural, titled Best Beach, was installed earlier this month and will reside on the west wall of the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Centre, 11 Bay St for the next few years. (Image credit:  Sarah Anne Johnson, Best Beach, 2015, Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and Julie Saul Gallery, New York)

Best Beach captures the promise of the local landscape: the work transforms a mundane urban block into a fantastic vision whose reality seems remote but whose potential is very real.  In keeping with her unique practice, Johnson used both photography and painting to create the image, transforming a photograph into a layered image which conflates fact and fiction, reality and utopia. Covering a full city block, the digital print on vinyl measures approximately 143x36 feet and weighs a whopping 600 lbs.

Join us for an artist talk with Sarah Anne Johnson

We’re pleased to invite community members to come and hear artist Sarah Anne Johnson talk about her work and her thinking behind creating this spectacular image for this site.

Sarah Anne Johnson is widely recognized for her work addressing the conflicted relationship between our natural and human worlds, and the nuances of shared experiences within these worlds. She highlights and makes use of the limits of photography, applying paint, ink, etching and other media in an effort to illustrate the personal and shared emotional experience of place, a dimension the camera cannot capture.

In an interview with Canadian Art, Johnson says: “My general interest in photography is showing what something looks like, but also what it feels like [… by] altering the surface or image in any way, I can describe what a space feels like psychologically, what it feels like to be there.”

And so, needless to say, I am thrilled that Best Beach is showing us the universal and possible right here at the foot of Bay Street, a daily reminder of the vibrancy that is revealed when we infuse our public spaces with the possibility of imagination.

Image credit:  Sarah Anne Johnson, Best Beach (detail), 2015, Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and Julie Saul Gallery, New York

CONTACT Photography Festival Curator, Bonnie Rubinstein says of her work: "Sarah Anne Johnson uses photography to explore communal experiences, taking a playful yet considered approach to the pursuit of the utopian. In this commissioned large-scale, site-specific mural, Johnson’s island scene—part imaginary and part real—transforms a grey city block into an enchanted place. Her evocative image, nestled between towering buildings that hover near Lake Ontario, echoes the natural landscape lying just beyond the edge of the city"

Read more from Bonnie Rubinstein on the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival website.