Installation a home run

TORONTO — Downtown Toronto has the blues in the most buoyant ways.

It’s not just the royal and navy blue in banners, hats and jerseys seen everywhere in celebration of the Toronto Blue Jays’ rise to the MLB World Series for the first time in more than 30 years. It’s Winnipeg artist Dee Barsy’s signature aqua, splashed all over Union Station in a dozen or so bird-themed murals greeting 300,000 average daily visitors.

With Union Station right beside the Rogers Centre during a momentous playoff season for the Jays, Toronto’s most iconic subway and train station is truly a sea of blue.

“It’s a happy accident. I was there during the first round and I walked around the ballpark through (to) the Union Station. It was really exciting,” says Barsy, a member of Skownan First Nation.

Debuting in late September and running until mid-November in the station’s historic West Wing (with support from TD and the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund), Westerly Winds is deceptively simple.

The murals’ clean lines and vivid monochromatic depictions of natural scenes add a dash of eye candy to the bustling station.

Barsy’s work brings to mind the Woodland School’s artists, with their quasi-modernist approach to traditional Indigenous art. (Barsy mentions Malevich, Kandinsky and Russian suprematists as early influences.)

For those who have seen Barsy’s dozens of public installations in Winnipeg, there’s no mistaking her refined work, always bearing the Barsy blue brand, for anyone else’s.

Westerly Winds likewise delights as public art, but as with the Woodland School, there’s more going on than the inviting surface suggests.

Barsy says her experience as an Anishinaabe-Ojibway foster child adopted into a non-Indigenous family leads her to draw connections and contrasts between different worlds: natural and technological, modern and traditional.

Westerly Winds explores the relationship between trains, birds and people in transit.

“I was thinking about migratory birds and things that they bring to their new environment as they travel across geographic lines and different areas of the country and over the border internationally,” she says.

“They make little stops on their ways and contribute to their environment and keep on going. And I want to be a good neighbour from Manitoba heading into Ontario with good energy.”

She talks about “blowing in” from Manitoba with this spirit — and a modest hope to inspire a little environmental reflection among those living in Canada’s largest city.

Barsy’s mixture of representation and jagged abstraction, with her kinetic zigs and zags, might also recall the Italian futurists of the early 20th century, at least at first glance.

But while the futurists worshipped speed, locomotives and destruction in the name of modernity, Barsy’s work here suggests a much more symbiotic relationship with nature.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

The Wrap

Weekday Evenings

Today’s must-read stories and a roundup of the day’s headlines, delivered every evening.

Sign up for The Wrap

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

“I wanted to think about the beautiful, natural design of birds. And then I was trying to relate that to trains and track designs and hoping that people might make a connection between the natural design of birds and our human inventions,” she says.

Union Station executive director of programming Syma Shah says that Westerly Winds demonstrates how the station — known for its arts installations, live performances, culinary and retail experiences and cultural celebrations — is more than a transit hub.

“It’s our civic duty to make Union Station a cultural hub and a destination where we can connect communities, and when we work with artists, we say, ‘Hey, being Union Station with 300,000 people walking through the space every day, what’s the story you want to tell?’” she says.

“And (Dee) came up with this beautiful Westerly Winds, and it’s just so serendipitous of how well it ties into the story of the station, but also with the Blue Jays.”

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca

Conrad Sweatman
Reporter

Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.