wade 2006, july 7th, 8th and 9th



1. CHRIS ARNOLDIN & SU-YING LEE

“Amaze” is a combination of water features both decorative and interactive, responding to two models of public water features, which are typically kept separate. A wading pool is turned into a water garden and maze. It is a labyrinthine invitation to adults and children to follow through from start to finish. A Maze offers the simple joy of being in the water without age exclusion.

2. DAVID HOFFOS
Hoffos’ installation will be visible in the evenings. By putting a cutout silhouette of young boy beside the pool and his model boat in the pool, he will create projection screens for a one channel video. The video will be shot on-site at the wading pool. The piece will create the illusion of a boy watching his boat; a melancholy and somewhat lonely reference to children, now grown, who have played at the site.

3. MAXINE HEPPNER
“Boat Ballet” is a performance of four different dance movements within a musical composition to take place twiceduring the weekend at a pool near lake Ontario. Heppner will work with the Toronto Sailing Club to choreograph boats sailing into the harbour. After reaching shore, sailors/dancers disembark and continue to the wading pool where they submerge themselves as much as they can. Once submerged with snorkels, miniature boats emerge for a regatta. In the final movement the sailors crawl back to overturned canoes and creep them (like turtles) back towards the lake, upright the boats, and sail away.

4. CECILIA CHEN
This proposal is for two constructions made of foam pool “noodles”. The first will be a geodesic dome made to arc over the top of the wading pool. The second uses the same number of noodles to form a knotted play toy. The dome mirrors the concavity of the pool form and the toy, the playful nature of the site and its users.

5. COLETTE URBAN & SONYA SCHONBERGER
“Secretkeepers” is a collaborative performance for a varying number of audience participants. It ranges in length from 40 minutes to 6 hours. The performers wear black clothing and carry a listening horn, while floating in black inner tubes. The secretkeepers invite audience members to share their secrets with the silent performers. The audience becomes active participants and contributors to the action. Secretkeepers mimics the ritual of the confessional, while providing a non-traditional approach to this confidential moment. They provide a service by being a safe keeper of a secret given as a public gesture.

6. LISA DEANNE SMITH
“Over and Over and Over Again” is a performance to take place twice during the weekend. It focuses on the use of the wading pools by children and parents.
This work proposes a lighthearted play on the repetitive giving of parenthood. The artist will stand on the edge of the pool with her back to the water. Over her shoulder she throws ping-pong balls into the water, over and over again, counting 1,2…3,4-1,2…3,4-1,2…3/4…Three-hundred and sixty five balls will be thrown in and then announced at the end. The children and adults are welcome to play with the balls, keep them, and count with the artist, aiming to engage the typical wading pool crowd.

7. JULIE FIALA
“Welcoming All Aquaphobes” is a performance to take place three times during the weekend. Fiala will solicit participation of aquaphobes in the community at large via press, email, posters at recreation centres to witness and join her attempt to confront her morbid fear of water. A presentation and shallow water session will be offered during the weekend by an experienced life guard/collaborator. During the sessions, Fiala will wrap and affix flotation devices to her limbs and torso to create a living and inflated instructional prop. After the session is completed, she will float in the shallow water until the pool closes. Through its participatory nature, this performance will blur the spaces and roles of performer and audience.

8. GWEN MacGREGOR
MacGregor proposes to combine the sense of pleasure and fun evoked by wading pools with another childhood treat: Jello! She has developed a formula that will create gelatin cubes that can withstand outdoor conditions for long periods of time. The artist proposes to get the children of her neighbourhood wading pool involved by making the blue gelatin with her.

9. SARAH PEEBLES & ROB CRUIKSHANK
“Music for Incandescent Events: Hanlan’s Sunset” highlights the daily event of sunset at the site of a wading pool which is currently filled in with earth and flowers. The sky’s changing light at dusk is measured by sensors which trigger stored fragments of sound derived from the tones of the shô (Japanese mouth organ).
The piece assembles a unique audio composition with each sunset, played through loudspeakers encircling the wading pool, while rays from the sun are simultaneously fragmented and assembled via an array of small mirrors within the wading pool garden.

10. GENE THRENDYLE
"Dante and the killer Whales" is an installation with inflatable toy sea mammals and other figures filled with helium and floating above the pool in concentric circles like in Dante's Paradise. The choice of killer whales and porpoises plays with the sad fact that these creatures recreated as toys are becoming extinct. The installation will be constructed with the assistance of the children using the wading pool. Threndyle has been involved with the Friends of Trinity Bellwoods and organized lilac and daffodil plantings which involved many of the local children and their parents.

11. FLORENCIA BERINSTEIN
“Flow” explores how water is supplied to people in the city through the built environment. The artist will make visible the intricacy and complexity of the water system as a carefully engineered document of our culture. Painting the underground piping onto the surface of the concrete wading pool, will also bring into focus the unseen labour force that participated in the creation of this municipal infrastructure.

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