Monument to the War of 1812

On my way back from Harbourfront on Sunday, I happened to cross the corner of Bathurst and Lakeshore at the new Condo Building which has goine up there. It has been a new trend with the condos being built in the downtown core of Toronto to house outdoor sculpture exhibits and I was happy to see a public art installation by Artist Douglas Coupland of his "Monument to the War of 1812". The building is quite close to Fort York and it is very appropriate to have it at this corner, which will get more visibility by passers by than having it up nearer Old Fort York a street to the north.

I loved it! It reminded me of a larger than life replica of those little green plastic soldiers that my son Eric used to play arm with so many years ago. One is standing up - in gold coloured metal and the other in silver coloured metal is lying down. I guess the British is the yellow figure, since as the artist said at the opening - he did the sculpture to remind everyone who won the war.

Eric has always had a fascination with toy soldiers. To this day he spends his spare time creating and painting army stuff for his Warhammer game collection, which is an adult equivalent of his childhood passion with Toy Soldiers. The installation at Fort York is especially nostalgic for me as Eric used to also do war re-enactment of 1812 battles and has practiced at Fort York on occasion.

Eric blogs about his army creations at his blog site The Manufactorum - A blog documenting his Warhammer 40,000 model and army building experiences.

15 Tons of Rice!

I had a wonderful walk from my condo to the Harbourfront area to see the Rice Exhibit. I took some photos on my walk along the Martin Goodman trail along the lake and will show those along with some observations in another blog. Let me get right into telling you about the Rice Exhibit!








The exhibit is actually titled "Of All the People in All the World" According to the Harbourfront Website:

Using 15 tonnes of rice, this company brings local, national and global statistics to startling and powerful life. Each grain of rice equals one person and each statistic is represented by a finely counted and weighted pile of rice. From the number of military serving in Afghanistan to the number of Canadians who eat fast food every day, this ever changing and interactive landscape of rice will give new insight on how one measures up in the world.

Basically, some very clever folks have used piles of rice to represent statistics. They are clever because of the statistics they have chosen to depict. I have shown here some of the piles of rice which offered some intersting social commentary and historical information by their comparative size.

- The pile of rice representing customers who ate at MacDonalds in one day in 2008 beside the pile of rice which were the number of Canadians who were registered as Clinically obese in 2007.
- The pile of rice "number of millionaires" beside the pile of rice representing the number of people living in South America and the Carribean who live on less than $2.00 US per day.
- The number of people who died in WW1 (large pile) WW2 (smaller pile) and who died of the Spanish Flu of 1918/1919 (largest pile).
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The exhibit is a creation of one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, Stan's Cafe. Their internationally acclaimed performance installation runs until May 24th and is free! BTW, they are donating the rice (full bags hidden under the loose grains) to food banks.

If you want a few good chuckles over some silly translation of signage for tourists in various locations around the world go here and read Jim Byers of the Star and his travel blog. Skip down to the May 11th blog where he has a dozen or more of these things which had me rolling on the floor with laughter.