News from the Archives v02-2
- Created by: Albert Fulton
- Date: 1993-06-01
- Provenance: Collected by members of Toronto Island Connections group, scanned by Edward English, OCR by Eric Zhelka, PDF by Eric Light
- Notes: v02-2
Two of the highlights of our Exhibition were the famous Island quilts of 1974. Of topical
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interest, one of the squares of the Winter Carnival quilt announced,”Sandbagging Today at
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5″, referring back to the spring of 1973!Sandy displayed a diagram listing the creators of a
the squares of this quilt, but her list for the “Long Live the Toronto Island Community” quilt c
is incomplete. I t was assembled a t the Ontario Science Centre by the Island Quilt h
Association. Known contributors are Sandy, Julie Ganton, Barb Ferguson, Ute Lutz, Alice
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Aitken & her granddaughter Susan Buck, Louise Chisholm, Wendi Hanger, and Maureen
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Smith. Sandy would apprcciate hearing of any others who provided sections for this quilt.
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To help celebrate the hanging of the quilts, Canada Postissued a series of 5 large 6-colour l
quilt and robe stamps on April 30! They will be on sale until October 29. The bittersweet y
article overleaf appeared in The Globe & Mail on July 19,1975. The author, James Purdie,
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lived in and wrote about another “Island in the City”, Wychwood Park.o
Aquilt sewn in a community’stwilight
BY JAMES PURD!E
hands i n t he medieval manner, ap- pears at first to generate its own soft i
by pictures of old paddlewheel ferries, a turn-of-the-century photograph of the sum mer tent conuminity on Ward’s Island from the lifesaving tower, a videotaped inter
land continued to develop as changes posed from the mainland favored first one group then another. The archives exhibition demonstrates the pace of community disin
twilight f r o m sources wit hin it s neatly
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stitched seams.
view with Frank Ward, great-grandson Of David Ward, who was one of the first Is
tegration as the character of the show itself changes from a slow, nostalgic, even lyri
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Closer inspection reveals that the imag G
land settlers,’ and an action picture of J. Woodman’s Amazing Diving Horse.
cal, presentation of the quality of commun ity life to a documentary of debate and de- struction.
ined aura is no more than an afterglow. I t R
comes from all the parlor lamps now going E
out on the Toronto Islands, and it lingers A
on at A Space, the non-conformist gallery on St. Nicholas Street, while the last 254
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households of the island community count
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the days to eviction.
• As we move from picture t o picture, through the years leading to 1914 and the Great War, we find the tent community applying for permits to build small rooms for their stoves. The rooms grow bigger, bedrooms and liv ing rooms are added, houses emerge.
Even the most bitter third-generation is- land residents who v is it the show find themselves chuckling at the sheer bulk of • t h e “mimeograph art” that begins t o re
place “snapshot art” in the sixties. These include studies, reports, analyses.
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The quilt, an tmusual example of com I
By 1913 it becomes necessary. to lay out
recommendations and all the charts and
munity art, hangs as the centrepiece of•a L
historic exhibition. Each of its 75 patches .was made in a different island household. T
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It is surrounded by memories of mandolin
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surnmers, shadows from the fires of Sep tember corn roasts and a host of flash
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backs reaching through the generations all s
the way to the paddlewheelers of 1832.
streets, althongh, then as now, nobody at City Hall hod sanctioned ,,the devtloprnent of a perrnanent community. The politicians of that distant time simply found it neces sary for their survival to follOw rather than direct the evolution of the community.
CHANGE OF PACE
graphs that make up the abstract pictures sif the statistician Some
forms of elitist or avant garde a r t are vaguely recognizable t o the average gal lery visitor, but most can only be fully un derstood by those visually educated in the medium—other statisticians. Even the evic tion notices that were “delivered” last year
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These are The Toronto Island Archives, a
One surprising revelation of the archives
by nailing them on doors were standard
mixed-media exhibition that follows none of
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the conventions/of art yet fulfils all its prin cipal functions by immersing the viewer
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for an hour or two in 150 years of commun e
ity experience. Peter Holt is archivist.,
Is the fact that the Toronto Islands—and later generations of city dwellers—actually benefited from demands for more recrea tion and living space. Algonquin Island was created between 1907 and 1909 to form a
form letters from a machine.
At this point, the only relief for the eyes lies i n the slide presentations and video tapes. The television screen tells more about the community Toronto is about to
The show includes hundreds of the usual d
protected channel for small boats—those of
lose than most of the pictures that have
faded photographs and documents—neither
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art nor history when considered in isolation y
—but they share space with videotape, con m
tinuous color-slide projections a n d t he a
quilt. The over-all effect, the art experi ence, is about equal to what a child feels
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in the family attiC.
visitors as well as residents. I n the nine teen-thirties Frank Ward helped float 30 homes from Hanlan’s Point to Algonquin.
From 1832 until the late nineteen-forties, everyone connected with the islands was content to Eve and let live. These were the
gone before. ‘ •
Old men share their memories, children ;talk about schools and trails shared with •rabbits, housewives recall their ferry rides in the dead of winter to give birth in the safety of Toronto General Hospital. We see the emergence o f resistance t o Metro’s
y
As most of us know, the last of the island
years when this handful of offshore dunes
‘plans to introduce with its own bulldozer
residents were ordered back to the main land b y the government of Metropolitan Toronto last year. The 29 acres they occupy was required f or parkland. A t the l l t h hour, Mr. Justice John Osier found ambiguities in the eviction notices and ruled that the leases could not be officially termi nated until Aug. 31 this year. •
STAY OF EXECUTION
Though many island residents hope the display of the archives wi l l rally public opinion to the cause, somehow reversing the victory won by Metro in the courts, the history of big-city politics indicates that a brief stay of execution is all that can be hoped for.
If art reflects the quality of life in the so ciety that produces it, some cOnsideration must be given to the changes in the art of living documented in this exhibition.
The oldest records and pictures are rela tively simple. We drif t backward in our own memories to the security of childhood, th;t, time when fathers were the only law to be feared and mothers doubled as doc tors and defence lawyers. Community rules were followed by custom. The machinery. of government came under the discipline of the people, not the other way around.
This time is represented in the archives
represented for the rich the languor and white-flannel picnics o f summers t h a t would never end, for the families of work ing men a place to live and build on a budget and for the day visitors a place for canoeing and courting.
The visual record of these years changes slowly. Hotels rise and are burned down, to be replaced by other hotels.
The pace and character of the exhibition begin to change as the first color photo graphs of the fifties appear. The handful of winter residents had grown to a community of 1,800 during the housing shortages of the
, Second World War. By 1948 the population of summer residents had reached 8,000. The “main drag” of, Centre Island, wit h it s stores and services, was firmly established and used as a common ground for visitors and residents.
At about the time when big municipal government became fashionable, perhaps necessary in some ways, the evolutionary drift of the islands began to give way to management, controls, planned improve ments. The shadow of the bulldozer crept along the beaches and it helped introduce dissent to an ad hoc democracy that had once made everyone equal from the mo ment they arrived at the ferry dock.
Divisions and quarrels among the perma nent and temporary populations of the is
art the geometry of flower beds and fences to the islands illogical circulation system for the masses.
MASSESSTAYING HOME
And at this point, the surprising truth !about the island takeover begins to take shape. All of us over here on the mainland —the masses deprived of decent parkland by the presence of housing on the islands— are not responding as predicted to the new open spaces being created.
Statistics show that 2.3 million passengers boarded ferries from the mainland in 1940. Although the population of Metropolitan Toronto has more than doubled since then,the passenger increase was only about 125,000 in 1970. •
The exhibition, then, is an event of immersion and involvement, a successor to the “happenings” that became fashionable in the art world a decade or so ago. The difference now is that the viewer, for once, finds art doing a better job than debate or oratory in defining and clarifying complicated public issues. This, surely, is a service necessary to the quality of life in a modern metropolis, which in itself is nothing more than a collection of communities very much like the handful of houses on Ward’s and Algonquin Islands.
ALGONQUIN ISLAND ARCHIVES c/o Albert Fulton 5 Oibwa Ave Toronto M5J 2C9 203-0921 or 537-5006
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