The Adam Beck Memorial, Toronto, Canada, 2018. Photo: Eliot Wright.
Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art at Adam Beck Memorial
University Avenue at Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario
Date
Prefix ICA presents a major new public art project by acclaimed Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi. Titled Life’s Little Worries of Sir Adam Beck, this project consists of an intervention into a historic monument to Sir Adam Beck in downtown Toronto.
Editors' Comment
Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi is internationally renowned for his intelligent interventions into and reframings of public sculptures and monuments. In 2012, he made waves in New York when he built a small, domestic-seeming enclosure around that city’s Columbus Circle monument; to experience Discovering Columbus, visitors had to mount 75 feet from street level to enter a room with drapes, sofas, and a massive sculpture of Columbus at its centre. And that’s just one of his projects. Now, six years later, with debate about public monuments taking up increasing bandwidth in public discourse, Torontonians are fortunate to be able to witness his intervention into a statue devoted to one of the forefathers of hydro-power development in Canada (and its colonial implications): Adam Beck.