LAUREN MARSHALL

Viceroy Contemporary is a participatory installation work that engages with the cultural history and existing patterns of use along the West Toronto Rail Corridor, and questions broader public values surrounding art and public space. The physical- ity of the piece (its ‘partition’) draws attention to the corridor’s history as a covert urban seam – a private landscape which o ered protection and freedom to outsider communities, in- cluding street artists. The erasure of this community’s history (as part of the overall sanitization of the railpath) is grappled with by framing portions of a blank, freshly painted factory wall, and then using chalk to retrace the pieces of street art which lie directly beneath the top coat of colour (with the help of archived photos). The composition of this ‘memorial wall’ is mirrored with identical frames on the partitions which sit across from it, however these frames are blank: this component of the work in- vites spectators to pick up a brush or spray can (provided), and ll the canvases with their own ‘writing on the wall’, in a revival of the means and spirit in which the cultural history of street art evolved on the site. These components are combined with other elements found on the site into a ctional gallery setting, lending ceremony and ironic circumstance to the proceedings but also probing at the establishment responsible for determining ‘public taste’.

In collaboration with Richard Freeman, Lauren Marshall, Noah Mcgillivray, and Karima Peermohammad.

University of Toronto, 2016.