Melissa Goldstein
Transportation and streetscape design are big issues in Toronto.
Public transit, roads and sidewalks are all in desperate need of improvement. Neverending construction is damaging and obstructing roads and sidewalks across the city. Everyone is frustrated by the endless delays and detours...and pointing fingers: drivers blame cyclists, cyclists blame drivers, suburbanites blame downtowners, politicians blame streetcars and the existence of bike lanes. It's a sad state of affairs.
Me, I'm a driver, cyclist, pedestrian and transit-taker. I mostly ride my bike and walk; I use transit when the weather's bad and for longer distances.
Relatively few people ride bikes in the city, and so there seems to be an overall lack of understanding of what it's like to be a cyclist here and the changes required to make it a reasonably safe and effective mode of transportation.
Top of my mind at the moment are the proposed changes to Harbord Street and whether they take into consideration how the road is actually used. My concern is that the changes will create unsafe riding conditions rather than making them safer.
So....why don't I show you? Let's go for a ride!
April 2016
Over the period of a week, Gibraltar point Beach all but disappeared. Suddenly my project turned from a beach archaeology project to a memorial project. I feel like my role here is to bear witness to the erasure of a much treasured part of the Island and to document its disappearance so that this event won't disappear as well.
Shipwreck - watching the sand cover and expose, cover and expose
-perpetually shifting sands
-the irony of the gardiner reciving attention and funding AND the park under it receiving attention and funding
-the last time the island made headlines it was because mammoliti wanted it to be a red light district
I went to Artscape Gibraltar Point for Melissa’s exhibition and open house and spoke with Michael Davies (who Alistair had recommended), thanks to the collage guy who noticed him out the window. Was telling collage guy about my project and he pointed out that photographing the beachcombing would allow me to make collages from my photographs. Michael Davies is an Islander who makes sculpture from beachcombed objects. Michael pointed me to Mark Dion, who, after just a brief look online, seems to be my spirit artist.
The March of Time
In looking at the photos of Toronto Island, I find it remarkable how much Toronto has changed in the past century in some ways, and in others, how it hasn’t really changed at all. For all of our modern inventions, we treat homeless people about as well as we did a century ago, if not worse.
The Sound of Beachcombing
A few events happened in
Went to Soundstreams’ Minimalism Remixed event at the Gardiner Museum.
Looked at the history of ceramics.
Looked at the exhibit about an archaeological site in Panama that had initially been excavated by the property owners who eventually called in the real archaeologists to uncover one of the richest archaeological sites outside of Egypt. I felt for the property owners, letting someone else at their treasures. One issue I've been struggling with is how to pursue this project and tell people about it without exposing my archeological site to plunderers. There are already so many people interested in beach glass and beach pottery, that I was afraid if I broadcast the location of these collecting grounds, that would be the end of my project and a beloved hobby. I also worried that in simply assigning value to something that is largely not valued by people, I would create plunderers from people who wouldn't have been interested in beach bits otherwise. This seems like a common problem in archaeology and I’ll have to look for how they dealt with it…
Then at the event, Kyle Benders read a quote about minimalism in music that resonated with me, it spoke of space and time and pulse, followed by watching musicians make music by playing bowls and dropping stones into ceramic vessels made me think that the music they were making (and the music I was interested in making) was minimalist beachcombing music. Then I started to think about the kind of archaeology I was doing as a kind of minimalist practice, the archaeological site a dynamic site that stretches across space and time as the landscape constantly changes as do the artifacts to be found. Nothing is static, everything is moving all the time. Change is constant. Yet there are patterns and rhythms to be found if you change the timescale/spatiality of your looking. There is music in it.
Minimalist beachcombing music.
The development of an art project
No Mosaics
Photography
Video
Sound
This project is about erosion, fragments, environmental history, narrative construction, time, political ecology, and beachcombing, taxonomy, knowledge, social constructivism
Vince Martonis - antique bottle expert and lecturer - expert at identifying old shards
Great Lakes Beach Glass festival: http://www.relishinc.com/pages/great-lakes-beach-glass-coastal-arts-festival.html
First Story Toronto: Indigenous Tours of Toronto