Skyline review: Elgin’s Street’s new public art

Robert Smythe

A gathering of free-floating heads and hands has recently appeared on Elgin Street.

For over 30 years, the City of Ottawa has set aside a small percentage of the budget for major public works projects to pay for the commissioning, fabrication and installation of public art. The total public art budget for the renewal of Elgin Street was $150,000.

Artists are selected through a peer review assessment process. Once complete, these art works enter the city’s permanent art collection.

For Elgin Street’s new public art, Ottawa opted for a five-month artist-in-residency by Montreal artist Francis Montillaud. It was an exercise in collaboration intended to engage diverse members of the local community. The resulting work is supposed to provide a visual identity that responds to the street’s distinctive character.

Montillaud told artsfile.ca that the project involves “themes of body language and social interactions through a series of video production workshops. … I am trying to democratize the portrait.”

People on Elgin Street were selected for recording sessions at SAW Video. Molded impressions of their faces and bodies were also taken for later castings.

Ottawa’s public art program said that the project’s intention was “to capture snapshots of a laugh, a grimace or any of the many expressions of people who live, work or play around the Elgin Street community.” However, it’s doubtful that you will recognize denizens of Elgin.

Some of the patinated bronze castings of various body parts (hands) have been miniaturized to half-scale, isolated on stainless steel mini-plinths, and situated in secluded settings–at Gilmour, Waverley and McLeod Streets–well back from the sidewalk’s edge. In order to discover a discernible expression, they require the viewer’s careful study, after a short detour from the travelled portion of the street.

The collected bronze visages in Boushey Square, caught mid-grimace, are definitely expressive if not pained, possibly verging on the grotesque.

The less than playful, not immediately arresting and unexpectedly sombre impact of the street’s three west side pieces doesn’t spell Elgin Street for me as a denizen of the street. They demand a deliberate standing stop for contemplation and are more to be admired than enjoyed.

The art in the western end of Minto Park–stacked and strung-out linked heads fashioned from laminated laser-cut aluminum plates–is another matter. Riotous might be the right description. These should make you pause and smile.

That all of these pieces have been fabricated with meticulous care, display obvious effort, are representational, and ostensibly have a back story, should protect them from the public scorn that’s accompanied many of Ottawa’s previous more obscure installations. It’s best to remember that public art can’t always be straight from the carnival.

Judging from his online portfolio (www.francismontillaud.com), Montillaud’s work has frequently taken the form of big, bold and bright humanoid figures suitable for animating public outdoor spaces.

One can slightly regret that Elgin Street did not benefit from such joy, but Centretown’s fun strip can always use a serious corrective.