Downtown Yonge Artwalk

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Urban Fabric

  • Blown glass
  • 2020
  • YC Condo, 454 Yonge Street, Toronto

About the artwork

From developer Canderel and brought to life by internationally-acclaimed artist Catherine Widgery, this glass art installation captures sunlight and radiates and reflects two colours back, creating a magical light feature on the sidewalk below. Called Urban Fabric, the artwork is made from dichroic glass which has a micro layer that filters out wavelengths of light so that they bounce back in reflection while allowing others to pass through. When there is more light behind the glass than in front, one can see the reflected surroundings through a veil of colour. When there is more light in front of the glass than behind, the artwork reflects ambient movement as if seen through a dusky mirror.

The inspiration for Urban Fabric is the architecture of the YC condo building with its language of repeated horizontals that are woven together with subtle contrasting colors and depths. These lines wrap the building in a ‘fabric’ of syncopated patterns. The canopy art glass is also a woven pattern of horizontals but has been skewed at an angle to the building as a counterpoint to the architecture’s rectilinear visual vocabulary. The colors also provide a counterpoint to the current muted colors of the building to suggest a lively interior life within the complex. The other inspiration for Urban Fabric is the animation of the city itself — bringing the city’s energy into the building façade through the art. Urban Fabric uses the ever changing existing light and the reflections of all the activity nearby to become animated and always surprising.

Images by Shermond Sylvester Photography.

About the artist

Catherine Widgery is an American artist and is known for both her studio-based sculpture work and her public sculptures. Widgery has lived in different parts of the US, Canada, London and Rome. She lived in Toronto from 1975 until 1999, when she moved to Truro. Widgery has built more than 40 public art installations across the US and Canada. Her practice of creating site-specific art works for the public realm spans over 30 years. She has built her career around making public art because she is inspired by the richness of new places and meeting the people who will live with the artwork. Her works support multiple levels of meaning and experience. Widgery believes that giving her viewers something unexpected or intriguing helps awaken them to their surroundings. She enjoys engaging viewers through mystery, ambiguity, changeability, animation and altered but recognizable imagery. The interpretation resides within the participant. Visitors are embraced by her artworks that often exist as shimmering light or movement in a shifting environment. Permeable, dematerialized, appearing and disappearing, her works in the public realm are never the same since it is nature’s energies and the viewer’s participation that determine the art in any given moment.

Fun facts

  • Catherine grew up wandering the forests and creeks around her family’s home outside of Pittsburgh and passed huge rivers and roaring steel mills each day on the way to school in town. This mixture of nature with built urban environments shaped her perceptions of the ever-changing balance between the two.
  • Her award winning projects have been featured on the covers of Sculpture, Landscape Architecture, Espace and World Sculpture News magazines.