Midsummer Mix Vol. 1 sees GTA pixel artist Nelson Wu playfully transform the everyday icons and landmarks of Toronto’s waterfront — from the CN Tower to the Toronto Island Ferry Terminal, Billy Bishop Airport to the Toronto Music Garden — into unique levels of an intimately local video game.

Here, flying fish, fierce dragons, and other fantastic creatures inhabit the spaces once so familiar to us, encouraging us to see the waterfront in another way. Rendered as street banners along a length of the lakeside Martin Goodman Trail, they hint at Toronto’s tourism industry: both local and international. Amidst COVID-era travel restrictions, this is a journey to spark the imagination and explore a world unknown.

Accompanying audio by Wu’s frequent collaborator, GTA composer biosphere, creates a nostalgia-infused yet distinctly contemporary soundtrack to our waterfront journey. Ranging from dreamy to energizing, biosphere’s sounds seamlessly blend fantasy with reality. Signaled by Wu’s visuals, and accessed by personal device through a series of QR code prompts along the path, biosphere’s audio invites us to turn on, tune in, and level up our waterfront experience — within a summer where we could all use a power boost.

Listen Here!

About the Artists

Nelson Wu is a Chinese Canadian artist who is interested in animation and video games. Graduating from OCAD University, he is currently working in the gaming and entertainment industry. He has produced a variety of illustrations, pixel art, and animations. A sense of dystopia, nostalgia, and surrealism are often themes present in the work.

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biosphere is a Taiwanese Canadian composer and producer based in Toronto. He started out experimenting with lo-fi hip hop and orchestral music, but is now focused on branching out into R&B and hip hop. Although his ultimate dream is to compose OSTs for anime and movies in the future, he is more than satisfied creating beats to make a listener’s day a little bit better.

Welcome to Dream Street! Use the different backdrops to create and record your own stories using #playinginpublic. From the urban forest to the local store, there are many places to explore.

Dream Street is a vertical playground open to all, inviting visitors to experience the city from a child’s perspective. This utopian cityscape mural is co-created with youth from Paris and Toronto. Like an outdoor film set, the different backdrops are perfect to play, to imagine, and to record stories. Mixing scales and perspective effects, the mural offers a fully immersive experience.

Dream Street was produced as part of The Bentway’s Playing in Public exhibition. Created and designed by The Street Society (creative urban agency based in Paris), with Bérénice Milon, Margaux Grappe, Eloïse Gillard, Edoardo Cecchin, Justine Lipski, Clémence Chapus and Alice Cabaret.

About the Artist

The Street Society is a creative urban strategy agency based in Paris. Structured around a global network, its multidisciplinary team of urban thinkers and designers, writers and illustrators, artists and architects create strategies to transform underused spaces into new places. The Street Society provides strategic solutions to build, transform or activate public spaces, buildings or neighbourhoods – through research, urban design, community engagement and art installations. At the heart of The Street Society approach is the willingness to explore the link between people and places, and to always design contextual, bespoke interventions.

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Nil:Nil is a portrait of play in pandemic times. As our work and play move online, our human interactions become subject to a comprehensive enframing.

While technology facilitates our personal connections, granting us access to each other’s faces and voices, it also creates subtle “rules” of engagement. These rules frequently have the effect of flattening the emotional, imaginative, and practical possibilities of our interactions.

Furthermore, technology alters the terms of the most basic rule – who can play — as the same privileges are not afforded to everyone equally.

In Nil:Nil, technology allows the game to go on, overcoming lockdowns and closures, and also ensures that the result is never in doubt.

About the Artist

Studio F Minus creates public conversations through art. The studio is the collaborative public art practice of Mitchell F Chan, Brad Hindson, and Michael Simon. Since 2008, they have created dozens of public art projects across North America.

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Pierre Poussin’s Jax reimagines one of the world’s oldest and most widespread games by amplifying its scale and colour, inviting visitors to see the game anew. The popularity of Jacks endures as it’s a portable activity that’s playable by all ages. It is traditionally played by tossing a ball, and collecting as many small objects as possible before the ball hits the ground. Here those “small items” are scaled up by a factor of 25, creating a larger-than-life playscape where passersby can assume the role of Jacks’ iconic red rubber ball, hopping from one zone to the next.

Tetrapods, an architectural element found along shorelines, are re-appropriated for new and playful purposes. Here, their bright colours reference the most recent 2SLGBTQQIA+ flag, signaling an inclusive play space where all are welcome, and where chance encounters serve to better unite us.

Play. Laugh. Embrace Silly. Encourage Love.

Co-commissioned by Concord Adex and The Bentway Conservancy.

About the Artist

Pierre Poussin creates public art that unites abstraction, functionality, and fun. When approaching an opportunity, he considers the physical site and the interests of the community, and then works to create a piece that both defines the space and provides an engaging and immersive experience for the audience. Within that exploration he juxtaposes elements of nature and industry, past and future, and dynamic and static. The result is artworks that resonate within the urban environment and bring continued long term interest to a site.

As insatiable and compulsive collectors of found photographs and keen observers of sociological patterns, both Dutch artist and designer Erik Kessels and French multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender take the absurd and ridiculous very seriously. Joining forces for this collaborative project, they draw from the photographic archives of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) to activate their constructed urban playscape.

Play Public (2021)—a part of The Bentway’s Playing in Public season—integrates a quirky selection of these archival images, spanning the 1950s through the 1980s, onto large wooden structures suggestive of the remains of a fairground site, with various components arranged like a parkour course. Neighbouring The Bentway, the CNE is a longstanding late-summer staple in Toronto (unfortunately cancelled for a second year due to COVID-19), and its midway of games, rides, and attractions remains one of its most popular features. The installation reinvigorates the idiosyncratic images, bringing this past back to life in a contemporary environment.

Set within Canoe Landing, Kessels and Mailaender’s intervention is proximate to schools, playgrounds, a community centre, and vertical urban neighbourhoods where thousands of people live and work. While the pandemic has altered lives and cities, it has further highlighted the importance of public space as a site for play and well-being.

About the Artists

Thomas Mailaender (born 1979) is a French multimedia artist living and working between Paris and Marseille. Known for his use of a wide range of techniques including ceramic, photography, collage, and installation, he employs diverse materials, often re-appropriating images from the internet or his own huge archive. One of Mailaender’s attributes is his ingenuity and ability to conceive curious and creative exhibitions using everyday materials and his curated shows teem with humour and originality.

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Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, designer, and curator with great interest in photography. Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and London. As an artist and curator Kessels has published over 75 books of his ‘re-appropriated’ images and has written the international bestseller Failed It!

Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty, Unfinished Father and GroupShow. His mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Düsseldorf, Budapest and he exhibited this year in the SFMOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Voque (Italia).

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In 1968 the architect Lina Bo Bardi produced an evocative illustration of her design for the Museum of Art, São Paulo (MASP), depicting a number of play objects occupying the public space created by the structure of the building itself, which was elevated on four striking ‘stilts’.

The sizing of the play objects is unusual, depicted as they would be in the imagination of a child, rather than to any realistic scale. This is a fantastical universe, one rendered impossible by the political context in which MASP was built, where such collective expression writ large was in reality unthinkable. As such the drawing is a tool to speak about civic life under military rule and the power that the lens of childhood allows in thinking about the making of alternative worlds and a space designed for inclusivity.

Inspired by this now famous drawing, this project interprets and makes real one of the play sculptures from Bo Bardi’s original illustration acting as a device to challenge the civic context found at The Bentway. Assemble considers play to be a form of critical enquiry; Bo Bardi’s image is inspiring because it demonstrates a way to imagine, create, and live an impossible reality.

About the Artists

Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art.

Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen.

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If COVID-19 has proven anything, it’s that cities need to adapt and change. This past year cities across the world have moved quickly to prototype new ways to experience and explore the city during a global health crisis. They’ve become more pedestrian and bike-friendly, embraced the use and creation of outdoor public spaces, and offered safe moments of fun and delight.

Created for and during the pandemic, Walk Walk Dance is a series of music-making lines that explore how participation and interaction can create new spaces for play even amidst physical distancing rules and COVID-19 protocols. It’s simple: step, jump, roll or dance on the lines to trigger music. Play with physical distancing rules, one, two, three steps at a time. This project was designed to be accessible to everyone, whether they are on foot or on wheels.

Walk Walk Dance is a roving project — designed for struggling cities that need to quickly revive their public spaces in the wake of COVID-19. Created for temporary displays, the installation adapts to all pathways and streets, making it easy to deploy in diverse urban settings. Walk Walk Dance is presented for the first time at The Bentway, as part of the Playing in Public exhibition.

Because every city needs a dance strategy.

About the Artist

Daily tous les jours leads an emergent field of practice combining technology, storytelling, performance and placemaking. For ten years, the Montreal-based art and design studio founded by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat has signed over 40 original artworks in more than 30 cities around the world.

Daily’s work invites humans to play a critical role in the transformation of their environment, building more resilient cities. They created the world-acclaimed Musical Swings, a large-scale urban artwork that invites passersby to make music together. By integrating interactive technologies with urban infrastructure, such as benches, swings, sidewalks, and traffic lights, their work creates context for vibrant social connections.

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Through the illogical use of basketball motifs, Toronto artist Esmaa Mohamoud transforms The Bentway into a surreal basketball court. Double Dribble is comprised of basketball nets of varying diameters — from half the size, to 3X the size of a standard net — and court lines running dysfunctionally throughout The Bentway site. Nets are installed at heights impossible for a human to reach, as well as low enough for a toddler.

With basketball as an access point, Double Dribble is a surreal inquiry into the accessibility of play. Do social identifiers affect our role in play — race, gender, wealth, ability… and how? Are certain demographics encouraged/discouraged to play — whether through abundance/lack of resources, or social grooming/socialization? Further, is “public space” actually public if it is not designed to be welcoming to all — i.e. through visible, physical barriers like space being broken down, or not inclusive of mobility needs, or invisible barriers like what happens to marginalized and racialized communities through gentrification?

Double Dribble pushes the public to reinvent play and even dismantle the rules to play. Without rules, there is a democratization of play with entry points for all communities. Double Dribble is familiar, but invites a reimagining of what’s possible. It points to the creativity and resilience born of what happens when the rules of the game don’t validate our experience — when, instead, we make our own rules.

Commissioned by The Bentway Conservancy.

About the Artist

Esmaa Mohamoud (Canadian, b. 1992), is a Toronto based African Canadian artist. She holds a BFA from Western University (2014) and an MFA from OCAD University (2016). Mohamoud has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal. Recent exhibitions include: To the Hoop: Basketball and Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG, Greensboro, NC, USA and Human Capital, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK, Canada. Upcoming projects and exhibitions include: Artworx TO Year of Public Art, Toronto; and, Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA. Currently on view: Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play In The Face of Certain Defeat, Art Gallery of Hamilton – travelling through 2023, organized by Museum London (publication forthcoming); Esmaa Mohamoud, The Brotherhood FUBU (For Us By Us), mural for Scotiabank Contact Festival, 11 Bay Street, Toronto; and, Double Dribble, The Bentway, Signature Public Art Commission, Toronto, Canada. Mohamoud will be participating in 2021’s Black Rock Senegal Artists-in-Residence program, taking place in Dakar, Senegal.

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