Still Life

Brad Hindson is an architect and lighting designer who has notched extensive experience working with Canada’s top architecture and lighting design firms. Working at internationally-acclaimed offices KPMB and Diamond + Schmitt Architects, Hindson has contributed to the design of numerous high-profile buildings internationally, and served as project architect on prominent public art installations. Prior to moving to Toronto, Hindson was a designer at Gabriel Lighting Design, where his clients included the National Arts Centre and the City of Ottawa. He has since continued to lecture on lighting innovation, artistry, and technical execution to an international audience. Mitchell F Chan is an interactive media artist who has exhibited in galleries across Canada and the United States. He made his American gallery debut in 2009 alongside Robert Rauschenberg at the Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta, while back home his work continues to attract national media attention for its innovative blend of technology and intuitive human experience. In 2009, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago made him the recipient of their highest award as a Merit Scholar in their innovative Art & Technology Studies department. Most recently, his water-vapor sculpture was exhibited in the iconic John Hancock Tower, as part of an exhibition re-imagining the possibilities of public artworks in the city of Chicago. Working in collaboration under the banner of Studio F-Minus, Hindson and Chan have earned numerous plaudits for their work from critics and media outlets as varied as The Toronto Star, The National Post, Boingboing.net, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Richard Florida’s Creativeclass.com. Their first collaboration, A Dream of Pastures, opened to a one-night audience of 60 000 people outside the Art Gallery of Ontario. This debut effort was later exhibited as part of the Corcoran Gallery’s travelling exhibition Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, a retrospective on some of the most technologically innovative and significant art of the past 150 years. Since then, their commissions have included the installation of a sound-responsive, environmentally-themed sculpture in Santiago Calatrava’s Allen Lambert Galleria at Brookfield Place; an exhibition of light-and-shadow artworks for Toronto’s Luminato Festival; and a series of trompe-l’oeil sculptures for a new light rail station in Edmonton, Alberta. In 2011, Studio F-Minus expanded its practice through public art collaborations with architecture firms such as Diamond + Schmitt and Du Toit Allsopp Hillier, and engineering firm Blackwell Bowick. They continue to pursue in new frontiers in lighting, networked technologies, and interactive media.

Sitll LIfe is created by Studio F Minus. In writing about this sculpture installation, the artists say: “Still Life, of course, isn’t still at all. [The work is] a set of six sculptures located in the centre of the grassy space near the Grant MacEwan LRT station. On their own, each is a whimsical, colourful addition to the site. When viewed together from a viewpoint looking through the final sculpture, a picture frame, the sculptures flatten into the classic trope of Western painting: the still life with fruit bowl. The sculptures are spaced with enough distance between them that commuters or students can walk freely between them, entering and exiting the “picture”. In some ways, the sculptures are like a puzzle, one that invites pause in order for curious viewers to solve with their own positioning. However, the piece is designed to also incorporate those who move through it as an equally important part of the experience. The project is titled “Still Life” as a play on the vitality of the site [and is intended] to capitalize on the heavy pedestrian traffic surrounding the rail station by creating a piece that the commuting masses could interact with. The people viewing the piece, or even just passing by, actually activate and animate this Still Life. They turn the installation into a flat image by standing in front of the frame, and change the image by walking amongst the sculptures.