From Here Until Now on the Osborne Bridgeby Eduardo Aquino and Karen ShanskiInformation for the media
Contact: Alix Sobler, Communicationse: [email protected]: (204) 943-7668m: (204) 918-0164www.winnipegarts.ca
Photo by William Eakin
From Here Until Now is a new public artwork integrated into the newly renovated Osborne bridge. The design was created in response to feedback from collaborative planning and public consultation. spmb, a firm based on partnership between artists and architects Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski, joined the community-based design strategy for a bridge that marks and celebrates two distinct neighbourhoods on each side of the Assiniboine River.
For the Osborne Bridge Public Art Project, spmb devised a concept based on recognizing the bridge infrastructure as art by integrating art components within the bridge structure. spmb focused its work on the most significant aspects community members identified during the collaborative planning phase of the bridge’s redevelopment, resulting in the three-component theme From Here Until Now.
1. The sidewalk, by integrating the neighbourhood’s physical map, translated into contrasting concrete tones and stainless steel trimming;
2. The bridge handrails, through LED lighting and text inscribed in digitally-cut aluminium plates transforming the existing balusters (pickets);
3. Two illuminated* gateway zones at both bridge entries celebrating four important architectural moments of the neighbourhood’s history (the Legislature, the Granite Curling Club, the Roslyn Apartment Building, and the Evergreen Towers) through renditions fabricated with water jet-cut aluminium plates and LED lighting.
The title From Here Until Now refers to the physical locale of the art (the village and bridge), in the “present-perfect”: a neighbourhood/community that, by continuously recognizing its heritage, lives in an exciting present.
Features of the Osborne Bridge Public Art
• A sense of place, identity and celebration of the cultural life of Osborne Village;
• Art as infrastructure: integrating the art into the bridge;• Engaging and responding to the community through public consultation;
and• Careful site analysis and literary/historical research in collaboration with
Osborne community members.
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Some baluster explanationsThrough the process of collaborative planning and public consultation, spmb designated certain themes, histories and identifiers that the community members strongly associated with the area. Using those, they created the balusters that are illuminated along the bridge, inscribing them with phrases that refer to the neighbourhoods it connects.
Clearly an officer of abilityWilliam Osborne Smith was “clearly an officer of ability”, and a figure of considerable importance in the early history of the professional military forces of Canada. The Prairie MeadowlarkMarshall McLuhan talked about the prairie meadowlark’s superiority through its chant in a conversation with his friend Winnipegger Tom Easterbrook. McLuhan: “I think it has a much longer and melodic phrase. It doesn’t merely chirp; it has a melody. It talks to you. Besides it is extremely musical. It is not just the glug glug of a nightingale. By comparison with the birds I’ve heard in Europe and in England, it is enormously superior.” Growing wild along the riverbankA reference to Winnipeg and its relationship with its rivers. More than a hundred languagesThere are more than 100 languages spoken in Winnipeg, and most of them are spoken in the neighbourhood. Keep the village in the VillageA desire of the community to preserve the “village feeling” of the neighbourhood: pedestrian-friendly, small scale, dense, and communal.
The Hudson’s Bay ReserveThe area north of the bridge was once part of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Reserve was once considered “Winnipeg’s foremost residential district” and home to many large and expensive residences.
Pro Pelle Cutem The Hudson’s Bay Company highly influenced the development of the North side of the Osborne Bridge as we still see today by The Bay’s presence on the corner of Memorial and Portage. The phrase is the motto of the Hudson’s Bay Company “Pro Pelle Cutem”—“A skin for a skin.” That really meant what it said.
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About spmb
spmb [São Paulo-Manitoba] practices in the interstices between art and architecture. Karen Shanski and Eduardo Aquino collaborated for the first time teaching together in 1998, triggering a practice that generated more than 50 projects in the past decade. spmb’s main area of the practice is public art, but expands into education, landscape design, furniture, public spaces, urban design, research, publications, and exhibitions. spmb values collaborative processes and community-oriented projects, which means that ideas develop from dialogic means in order to achieve innovative thinking and ground breaking directions. As artists and architects we are familiar with the conventions of collaboration with clients, other designers, engineers, city officials, and fabricators, giving us the ability to manage technical specifications of large scale projects and to produce/present all deliverables in an effective, professional and timely manner. We are aware as public artists that we are a part of a larger organizational structure, and we understand that to practice in the interstices of art, architecture and public space means that we do not default to subjective/individualistic primers, but we place collaboration as a major force of the process.
For more information visit www.winnipegarts.ca/fromhereuntilnow
For other information and high resolution pictures please contact:Alix Sobler, Communicationse: [email protected]: (204) 943-7668m: (204) 918-0164www.winnipegarts.ca
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