Toronto's Kensington Market has been many things to many people. For the thousands of immigrants who landed in its narrow streets and worked in its tightly bundled shops during the past 100 years, it was a place to escape from as soon as prosperity made escape possible.
Yet when the market was threatened by extinction some 40 years ago — proposals included an expressway to bury it and public-housing blocks to replace it — all of Toronto rose up and stopped this proposal for civic vandalism dead in its tracks. Even people who rarely go there and would never live in it regard the market as a unique Toronto treasure — a vivid, funky refuge from the city's steel-and-glass modernity, and a welcoming zone for urban oddballs and political dissenters of every stripe.
But, these days, the market is menaced again — this time by the pressure of continuing immigration and the real estate boom that is driving up land prices everywhere downtown. It's a dilemma that has given Will Alsop — British artist, architect and a frequent visitor to Toronto since the completion of his famously unusual building at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) — much to think about.
"How can you absorb more people and keep what is there?" he wondered during an interview last week. "I am exploring relations between buildings that might be absorbed into Kensington Market without destroying it — slotting in houses, creating three-dimensional spaces above the market, filling in some gaps."
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Landscapes of Learning, 2006, mixed media.
Means of Support, 2007, mixed media on paper.
Cultural Fog, 2006, mixed media on paper.
(OLGA KORPER GALLERY)
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The early results of Mr. Alsop's creative ponderings about the market — 16 engaging works on paper — are on view (through July 28) at the Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Avenue.
Don't expect sentimental picture-postcard vignettes of life in the neighbourhood, or detailed architectural schemes for buildings.
Like much abstract art, these relaxed, high-spirited drawings mainly depict, not things in the real world, but states of the soul and mind confronted by the density, conflict and pleasure of big-city life. They reach out to capture, not the literal streets, but the jostling, sweaty rhythm of the market on a busy summer Saturday, the hectic variety of its sounds (from blues to hip-hop) and even its smells (cheese, fish, fresh vegetables, the odd whiff of marijuana). The artist beautifully evokes the jam and swing of the market's visual culture — quiet Victorian side streets abruptly joining avenues bustling with people of all colours, tribes, nations and tongues.
But in his art, as in his architecture, Mr. Alsop is no purist. Into the simmering mix of blots and swatches of paint and swirling abstract signs and scrawls, he often throws the ghostly, tentative skeletons of buildings — embryonic, still gestating in the imagination, waiting to be born. And in these drawings are little scraps of narrative, like snippets of overheard conversations, that relate someone's — anyone's — thoughts when strolling among the market's shops and stalls.
"The whole of the market area attracted life in all its forms," reads one reverie tucked into the corner of a drawing. "James ... felt he could do things in this cultural fog." Another, more surreal this time: "I parked by house in the car park, converted it to a forest." Yet another gives us the words of an imaginary woman who looks down on the street from a dwelling place "between the trials of earth and the dangers of heaven."
"Her new house rekindled the excitements of danger and revitalized her ambition to create."
Such is Mr. Alsop's vision of Kensington Market: An unlikely place precariously suspended in time and space, between Toronto's aggressive urban rationality and obliteration, decline into a slum, and the equally baleful fate of gentrification. While these expressive drawings celebrate the vivid pulse of the market — its excitements, its encouragement "to create" — they also remind the viewer of its fragility, and our obligation never to take it for granted. In that sense, these works on paper are moral works of art, inviting us to cherish and preserve the market's irreplaceable human and architectural fabric.
Mr. Alsop has long been interested in finding and making places "between the trials of earth and the dangers of heaven." His OCAD project, boosted up toward the sky on steel stilts and contradicting the low mumble of buildings in its vicinity, is a literal example of the kind of high-wire exploit he enjoys. (He could probably fashion sublime tree houses for kids.) But in his professional life as well, he likes the thrill of a balancing act between traditional roles. "I tend not to distinguish between the work of the artist and the work of the architect," he told me. "It's the bit in between that interests me."
