Drawing a Line Scajacquada (2010)
Drawing a Line Toronto (2011)
Performance
Drawing a Line: Scajaquada Creek (2010) was a duration-based performance on September 23, 2010 where the artist traced the pathway of a buried section of the Scajacquada Creek using a push broom and water from the creek itself. The drawing began begin at Forest Lawn Cemetery and wove through the Hamlin Park District, along Main, East Delavan, Jefferson, Florida, Wolhers, Northland and Donaldson Street, and across the Kensington Expressway.
The Scajaquada Creek was buried in the 1930s and is covered by streets and rights of way that weave through the East Side. Daylighting is the process of uncovering diverted or buried streams to their original pathways. Throughout the US, daylighting initiatives have sought to \ improve neighbourhoods through the restoration of creeks, rivers and streams, while respecting property rights, local businesses and the structural integrity of existing buildings.
By redrawing the pathway of the creek through the East Side, a series of historical Black neighbourhoods that have been ignored within public policy, bisected by freeways and scarred by race riots, Thompson’s performance reintroduced the Scajacquada to its surroundings through temporary gesture, the systematic marking of territory, and ritualized artistic labour.
On April 30, 2011, Thompson created a second version of this performance at Broadview and Queen, the neighbourhood where her father grew up, using water drawn from the Don River. In the performance, the artist performed a series of actions to mark the location of Napier Street, a small street originally extending west from Munro Street between Thompson and Matilda.
In 1968 homes on Napier, Munro, and Thompson Street were destroyed in order for the city to construct the Don Mount Court Housing Complex. Both homes where her father had lived were demolished – 7 Napier, where the family lived from 1951 – 54, and 33 Munro, where they lived from 1954 – 65. Munro Street was leveled from just north of Queen to Dundas Street, and Napier was destroyed entirely.
Don Mount Court was intended to improve the neighbourhood by providing residents with centrally located low-income housing. Instead, inhabitants were alienated from the surrounding neighbourhood, and by the late 1970s, the development had become unstable, with crumbling buildings and high rates of criminal activity. In 2004, the Don Mount Court Development Corporation (a branch of Toronto Community Housing) leveled the development and replaced it with mixed-use housing. While Munro Street has been partially restored, Napier Street remains a tennis court.
The performance shifts the parameters of site-specific practice from the body’s position within physical space to the liminal space articulated by the moving body. Writers such as Miwon Kwon, (One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity) and James Meyer (The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity) conceive of ‘site’ as a temporary set of artistic parameters that move beyond geography by integrating social, institutional or cultural dialogue.
In Drawing a Line, the line is drawn in segments by pouring water from a bucket and pushing it with the broom until the line disappears. As the gesture is repeated, the line gradually evaporates, leaving no trace of the activity. By marking the location of Napier Street, our understanding of public space becomes more nuanced – gesture becomes a form of personal and spatial encoding, drawing together personal history, public policy, gentrification, and migration.
By performing the imagined locations of the artist and audience, and the remembered locations of her father, Drawing a Line represents a discrete moment in space and time, a temporary marking of territory that disappears as it is rendered.
The artist created the first version of Drawing a Line in 1997, while an undergraduate student at York University. The drawing was made with an industrial blue chalk line, and extended along the length of Thompson Street, where her father played baseball.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
2011 Performing from the Edge of the Body (MFA Thesis Exhibition) p|m Gallery, Toronto
2010 Beyond the Multitude (Curated by Jordan Dalton) Buffalo, New York