[URBAN NOTE] "This Arts Festival is Revitalizing Ontario Place"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist features Beatrice Paez' lovely photo-heavy feature on In/Future and its Ontario Place site that makes me wish I could have visited it this year. Maybe next year?

Ontario Place opened to much fanfare in 1971, hailed as an icon of the province’s progress. Decades later, its stature in the city’s consciousness has since faded. In/Future, the much-hyped arts and music festival, hopes to bring Ontario Place back onto the public’s radar after a long hiatus.

More than four years ago, Ontario Place temporarily shuttered its doors with an eye to recasting itself as a multi-purpose site. It will reopen in 2017.

Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton are the creative conspirators behind In/Future, which sets the stage for the park’s return from irrelevance. The festival opens the grounds to artists and musicians to project their take on how the site might appeal to a broader audience—beyond those prone to fits of nostalgia.

As much as it reimagines Ontario Place’s potential, In/Future also takes a retrospective gaze through several site-specific installations. With “Still,” artist Max Dean’s photographic installations offer up a narrative constructed with the props and mannequins salvaged from the out-of-commission Wilderness Adventure Ride. The inanimate objects—moose, bears, and miners—reassemble themselves into a tableau, continuing to take up residency in the deserted complex.

More futuristic is Laura Millard’s “Recursive Traces,” which displays images of snowmobile-etched circles, captured using a drone. Against the backdrop of her illuminated sketches and Styrofoam icebergs, Philip Glass’s “Étude No. 1” is played on loop. The piece is performed by Millard’s collaborator, Simone Jones.