For the second year in a row the Beaches have been hosting an art exhibition contest called Winter Stations. 13 exhibitions went up on different lifeguard stations on Woodbine and Kew Beaches and stayed up for about a month, from mid February to mid March.
Toronto’s been blessed with an exceptionally mild spring so I finally got the chance to check this awesome even out this weekend. We spent about 2 hours on the beaches just walking around, checking out the pieces and trying to find the next ones. It’s sort of an explore on your own type of situation. I suspect that because the competition is coming to an end some of the pieces have already been taken down. We got to see 7 out of the 13 pieces and were majorly impressed. I definitely hope this competition gets repeated next year. The setting alone is worth. We stayed until sunset and the beach got absolutely gorgeous. Woodbine Beach is a pretty common destination for Torontonians but I’ve only been on super packed summer days. It was really nice to see the beach fairly empty.
Okay okay, the actual pieces now! Some are interactive like the Belly of Bear where you get to climb inside and Flow where you get to throw parts of the installation back onto it to completely reshape it. Some are better seen at night (like the Fire Place and the Northern Lights one) and some have unfortunately already been partly destroyed. The Fire Place we didn’t get to see lit up but it still smelled like sitting at an actual fireplace which was a really cool concept. I’ve included a bunch of pictures of the installations we saw. The first one is the Fire Place, the second is the Steam Canoe, third one is in the Belly of a Bear, fourth one is Flow, fifth one is Floating Ropes and sixth one is Lithform and the seventh one Aurora Borealis.
The project is scheduled to run until next weekend when a winner is to be selected so I’d highly recommend checking out the pieces!
