BY ANDREA CARSON
Unlike many young artists who define themselves by their downtown street cred, sculptors Christian Giroux and Daniel Young harbour a special fondness for the city’s outlying areas. Their latest project, installed in Lee Centre Park in Scarborough, reworks a playground jungle gym into an enormous series of Escher-style pathways and ladders.
This is not the first time the duo has worked on an impressively large scale, or with kids in mind. Their first collaborative effort back in 2003 was Fullerene, a 2.5-metre honeycomb sphere shaped like one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. The circular structure, made of aluminum and polyurethane bicycle tires, is sturdy enough to actually step into, like rolling around inside a giant beach ball. “We wanted it to operate as both an architectural enclosure and a vehicle at the same time,” says Giroux.
Giroux and Young have since made large sculptures for gallery exhibitions. They’ve created some puzzling and unusually beautiful shapes out of aluminum ductwork and industrial lighting panels, but with a sleek modernist look that seems to counter the materials they use. More recently they formed giant cube-shaped sculptures around pieces of Ikea furniture. Mao, for instance, is a large black cube with a white Ikea side table built into one corner.
The jungle gym, which they call Reticulated Gambol, is their largest commission yet. Produced through the city’s Art and Landscape Collaboration program, in which artists join forces with landscape architects to create unique public spaces, Giroux and Young teamed up with PMA Landscape Architects, who drafted up plans for the new park. Once the proposal was accepted, the artists quickly discovered the demands of working in the public sphere. The park, for one, is surrounded by 3,600 condo units and the community was keen that it be useful for everyone. There were also safety guidelines to think about, and the city programmers who “definitely wanted something that looked like public art.”
The artists chose to use powder-coated steel, standard for playground gyms, but to design a usable object that was unique in shape and form. Its scale alone, at nearly 12 metres square, makes it one of the larger playground equipment projects in the city. The multiple ladders and covered gangways create labyrinth heaven for kids. From a distance, the form evokes a series of neatly arranged medieval bridges and towers.
The artists like to think of Reticulated Gambol (a title that, roughly translated, means “network” and “play”) as both a fun object and as architecture. “We were thinking of objects and bodies in space,” says Giroux. “The playground equipment was a found language – we simply clarified the structure.”
Reticulated Gambol will be ready for climbers in October at Lee Centre Park, Scarborough.
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