Steele
and
Tomczak
| Current / Upcoming Video Photographic Installation Writing Bio CV Steele CV Tomczak |
Installation / Public Art Projects
| Watertable Memory, when left alone, often creates phantasms, creatures that will not obey reason, insinuations from the past that will not follow the rules. WATERTABLE will raise the dead shoreline to haunt the living, forcing the wall of glass-skinned condo towers to forever check their back. The unsettling presence of the past situated squarely within this futuristic landscape of glass towers creates a sense of urban tension that resists resolution. WATERTABLE with its highly visable shimmering presence remembers the original shoreline and reminds the passers-by of how close the 18th century Fort was to the shoreline of the great Lake Ontario when the first garrison was built in 1793 more info |
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| Street of Heaven Machine-embroidered banner, 76 in long x 15 in wide There is a myth about Yonge Street. The myth says that Yonge Street is the longest street in the world, that it is almost 1900 km long. Up until 1999, Yonge Street was even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. The reality is still impressive. Stretching from the shores of Lake Ontariothrough the various “downtowns” and crossroads of the city of Toronto, throughYork region, Richmond Hill, Aurora, the Oak Ridges Moraine, traversing the Holland Marsh and ending, finally, in Barrie, Ontario. Yonge Street is, in fact, 58 km in length. more info |
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| Love² Love Squared is a public art commission for the large outdoor video board on the northeast corner of Yonge & Dundas. Love Squared works within the existing codes of signification already operating in the media-scape of the Yonge & Dundas cross-roads while at the same time slyly subverting them. In the busy Yonge & Dundas landscape, the ads work together – while each also fights for space and attention to make a “commercial space” for the product/service being proffered, eager to elbow out the competition, yet obediently staying within the self-policing boundaries of public space (these boundaries are both physical and social). |
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| before I wake... With this trilogy - still in production - we have returned to the interrogation of the body and lived experience as witnessed and indexed by the recording devices so prevalent in contemporary 21st century life. Once again, exposing our own bodies to the scrutiny of the camera, we return the camera’s gaze with questions, implied and overt... more info |
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| Lacuna We have used these three words to evoke the sense of this street. We evoke the history of this street – Queen Street. We evoke the memory of the houses that were here, the things that have passed, have gone and are now replaced. We evoke the history of this street, this place, its family, its name. more info |
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| The Miniatures Part of the Miniatures series of DVD installations, 1-1:30 minutes in length, looped, silent, colour, 1998 - 2006. Each combines various scenes from the natural world - landscapes, flowers, animals, fish - with political slogans. Small dissonant juxtapositions. more info |
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| Book of Remembrance In May 2010, we installed an audio art work in the Shaw/Givens school in west Toronto as part of the artist intervention project "Art School (Dismissed)". This work, The Book of Remembrance, features a heavily treated audio recording of a young boy reciting the names of the soldiers from the 123rd and 208th Battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force who died in World War I – ... more info |
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| Becoming... Becoming … considers architecture and changing urban environments. The video installation juxtaposes traditional views and housing styles with the radically new designs appearing in four major urban centres, Vancouver (12:30), Montreal (7:30), Toronto (12:10) (Canada) and Berlin (9:40). Jokes focusing on professional practitioners are interspersed amongst the city views. Distinct sounds from the streets recorded live in each city forms the soundtracks of each of the four videos. more info |
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| Terminus For the "Leona Drive Project” we thought about the site itself – a humble tract containing 5 typical north Toronto (Willowdale) bungalows built between 1948 and 1950 – all about to be demolished. We considered how to make a work that would speak of this demise, this disappearance in some elegiac way – but not with sentimentality. We wanted to make something that would use the vernacular voice of the houses themselves, use their speech, use their own rather chaste syntax of small rooms and cramped 2nd floor bedrooms carved out of crawl spaces and dormers. more info |
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