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Gardiner Streams

Gardiner Streams

Katherine Harvey
b.1963

Gardiner Streams
  • Photograph on Dupont window film using SentryGlas Expressions
  • 2014
  • 22.5 m x 10.7 m
  • 75 Queen's Wharf Road, Quartz Condos Prisma Club, Toronto

About the artwork

From the expressway, the colourful facade of Katharine Harvey’s Gardiner Streams reflects back at the nighttime traffic, transposing the banality of the road into a work of art. Harvey spent hours perched in a building overlooking the Gardiner Expressway to plan her concept for Gardiner Streams‘, her integrated glazing artwork expressively interprets traffic movement on the roadway. The subject of the artwork finds unexpected beauty in the headlights and taillights below it. As cars stream in and out of the city, light trails behind them create a canvas of intermingled colours and patterns.

About the artist

Katharine Harvey’s, is a Canadian artist, painter and conceptualist, working on installation and public art on a monumental scale. Through these medias Harvey explores memory and the sensation of ephemeral, fleeting moments. At the core of her work is a fascination with the unseen, the liminal space between reality, the mind’s eye, and imagination. Her work is exhibited across Canada, as well as in Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Monterey Bay, and Washington, D.C.

Fun facts

  • While walking across the runway opposite to the building, Harvey photographed the cars crossing the bridge. With a single shot camera, the artist was able to recreate the shapes of the cars' light, playing with the abstraction of the lightstreams.

Engagement questions

  • How does the composition of the artwork communicate the central idea?
  • Does the piece bring to mind any of your own life events or memories?