KENSINGTON, KENSINGTON at Kensington Market Action Committee Offices (160 Baldwin), and 23 other locations in Kensington Market, to May 31. See listing. Rating: NNN
Curators Venetia Butler and Helena Frei have mounted a unique photographic tribute to their beloved neighbourhood, its eclectic businesses and immigrant history.
Instead of hanging a display in a gallery space, they’ve opted to embed their show in the fabric of the Market’s bustling street life. Photos transferred to DVDs play on an assortment of vintage TVs, some in store windows and others inside shops, cafés and community spaces.
This strategy isn’t without its problems: the images on the continuously running DVDs eventually start to degrade, causing colour changes and the glare and reflections on street-facing screens make them difficult to see in daylight. Still, the castoff TVs fit the nabe’s DIY aesthetic.
Butler and Frei opened their project to BIA members, some of whom display their own photographs, like Caam Hardware owner Herman So.
The owners of many older businesses didn’t make photographic documents, so Butler and Frei chose both archival images from places like the Ontario Jewish Archives and the work of local photographers like Vincenzo Pietropaolo and Yvonne Bambrick.
Lettuce Knit shows children’s art from Kensington Community School pages from a 1980 photo book by musician Buzz Burza play in the window of Model Citizen and Brennan Anderson’s fantastic time-lapse images chronicle a busy day at coffee and spice emporium Casa Acoreana.
It’s a true community effort, one that Butler hopes will lead to a heritage museum space like New York’s Tenement Museum that would preserve the history of this vital district and help address threats of development and gentrification.
If you head to Kensington for Pedestrian Sunday on May 27, keep an eye out for the TVs.
