Toronto announces 2022 Winter Stations winners

One of Canada’s most well-regarded public arts traditions has returned with a unique selection of brand new designs for the 2022 version of Winter Stations. Toronto’s annual installation program is back with a slate of six winning projects taken from around the world and displayed on the city’s Kew and Woodbine beaches. Toronto’s lifeguard stations don’t typically get a lot of use this time of year, and so the push to stimulate tourism in the winter months comes in the form of an artistic competition that can draw attention from local visitors as much as it does entries from international design teams.  Now in its eighth year, the competition is put together through a collaboration between the local firms RAW Design, Ferris + Associates, and Curio. Projects will remain on view for a six-week period until March 31st and strive to be an embodiment of Resilience, which is this year’s choice of theme as selected by the jury that included Brad Bradford, Mark Rason, Bruce Kuwabara, Roya Khaleeli, Jonathan Hilburg, Henry Tyminsky, and Paul Bieska.  Entries were required to adhere to a $15,000 budget at maximum. An honorarium of $2,500 was provided to the winners.  Scroll down to see this year’s stand-out participants.ENTER FACE (cover image) by MELT – Cemre Önertürk & Ege Çakır (Turkey)"The times of pandemic have changed our habits in multi-scalar aspects, but it especially affected the way of how we perceive the world outside of us. More explicitly, it shifted our communication with people, interaction with the environment and the perception of our experiences by means of a single surface: the digital screen. Via offering the isolated a new version of coexistence, these screens not only made overcoming this challenging period possible but also became indissociable parts of lives as mobile 'interfaces.' The project 'enter-face' aims to reveal the dramatic influence of these screens, therefore, presents a spatial atmosphere that brings people together by means of a common vision\image while isolating them physically. It proposes two dark boxes with distant holes for people to get their upper bodies inside and stay detached from one another. Within the boxes, a textured transparent surface is placed through which the distant visitors, who became a group of viewers now, watch the life outside the box as if they are spectating a never ending moving-image on a screen together."Wildlife-guard Chair by Mickael Minghetti, with the guidance of Andres Jimenez Monge (France & Canada)Read the full post on Bustler