WADE COLLECTIVE

Founded in 2001 by Christie Pearson and Sandra Rechico

Presented Art at the Hub, TAC Foundation, Universities Art Association of Canada

Supported by YYZ Artists Outlet, City of Toronto Culture, Parks, Forestry and Recreation Departments, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Trillium Foundation, Laidlaw Foundation

The Wade Collective researches immersive environments in installation and performance art. We began with a mutual interest in contemporary art in public spaces with a mandate to open dialogues between the arts, the community, and our public spaces. Grounded in the premises of art as experience, the situationists, and the participatory artworks of the late 20th century, we trace interventionist and temporary lineages, relational aesthetics, and the turn away from the object and towards living networks. Quotidien community life and the space constitute the spaces of intervention with a tactical approach to urban transformation. The Collective produces the Wade Festival for Performance and Installation Art in Toronto’s public pools to create a dialogue between artists and communities through cultural activities in public spaces. By encouraging community members to engage playfully in their environments, emphasizing the importance of place to the social and cultural life. Toronto’s identity as a collection of communities is emphasized, and as people tour the events they connect to the whole of the city’s fabric. Temporary events staggered over the weekend permit people to move from one to the next. The nature of the project creates parallels between the city, the pool, and the public, raising awareness of pools as public space. We wish to highlight our natural and social resources through vital experience. Wading pools relate to a neighbourhood scale and a city-wide network, offering ideal locations for interventions spread throughout the city fabric. The project creates a temporal urban infrastructure superimposed on the loosely-connected network of parks and pools, drawing attention to underused resources and opening up possibilities for urban inhabitation through the participation of seasoned and young artists from Toronto, Canada and abroad. The project poses questions about public art and its potential agency in day-to-day life. Wading pools typically have a well-defined use, time, and user group that could be expanded, exemplifying the under-use of many of our shared resources. We saw in the wading pools the potential for temporary projects that would challenge peoples’ expectation of these places. The recreational places of the city, places for contemplation and pleasure, form a spatial disjuncture within the continuous fabric of the working city: the festival is its temporal counterpart. Unpredictable events link the pools as a networked system in time and space within the city’s metabolism. WADE creates a ripple effect of engagement in city spaces, which would travel beyond the pools into the park, the communities they serve, and the city as a whole. The participatory invitation extends into other public spaces and spheres of activity.