A public artwork set up paying homage to considered one of Canada’s most well-known historic painters, created by considered one of Canada’s best-known modern artists, burned down final week in Toronto in what police investigators consider was an arson assault.
Douglas Coupland’s bright-red Tom Thomson’s Canoe (2008), an homage to the Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson, who died in a canoeing accident at age 39 in 1917, was destroyed within the early hours of two April.
In response to a Toronto police report posted on social media: “At roughly 2:42 a.m., officers responded to a fireplace at Canoe Touchdown Park close to Fort York Boulevard and Dan Leckie Means. The enduring purple canoe was discovered engulfed in flames and, sadly, was destroyed.”
In an accompanying video, a police spokesperson mentioned the division is treating the hearth as a suspected arson assault. “That space is surrounded by high-rises and condos,” the spokesperson mentioned, “so we’re asking anybody that has any info, together with footage from safety cameras or should you noticed or heard anythingto please contact @tps14div at 416-808-1400.”
Coupland tells The Artwork Newspaper: “In the intervening time, we all know it was arson, however we don’t know its motive. Artwork is all the time a lightning rod. Was it political? Who’s to say.”
He added that one other of his public artwork initiatives is displayed close by, and was not focused: “Very shut by, there’s my Monument to the Struggle of 1812, which I did in 2008. An English soldier standing above a toppled US soldier. Possibly that’s subsequent?”
Nonetheless, the artist says he has been touched by the outpouring of public help and is optimistic his Canoe can be re-created. “Individuals have been very considerate to me because the canoe bought torched,” he says. “We’re positive will probably be rebuilt, however perhaps out of metal.” (Photographs from the scene present solely the sculpture’s metal body, with nearly all of its resin physique fully incinerated by the hearth.)
Coupland, a Vancouver-based conceptual artist and creator—who, amongst quite a few different achievements, helped popularise the time period “Technology X” along with his 1991 novel of the identical title—works throughout a variety of media from work, textual content artwork and monumental sculptures to expertise and set up.
Canoe Touchdown Park, a privately funded city park in downtown Toronto, was constructed on former railway lands within the historic Fort York space and opened in 2009. It was designed by the Vancouver-based panorama architects PFS Studio in collaboration with the Toronto-based agency the Planning Partnership of Toronto, the general public artwork advisor Karen Mills and Coupland. Along with Tom Thomson’s Canoe—which which was giant sufficient for folks to face in and a preferred setting for selfies and searching over the Gardiner Expressway to Lake Ontario—the neighbourhood’s public artwork installations embrace a vibrant show of huge fishing bobbers and a sculptural beaver dam.
In response to the Toronto Downtown West Enterprise Enchancment Affiliation web site, Coupland’s now-destroyed set up was a civic landmark.
“Considered by tens of millions of motorists travelling the Gardiner Expressway and strolling in and round Canoe Touchdown Park, Douglas Coupland’s startling purple canoe serves as a symbolic entrance marker to the guts of downtown Toronto,” the positioning reads. “Constructed as a part of a complete program of paintings for the park, this canoe is perched over the sting of a landscaped berm that was constructed utilizing excavated supplies from the development of Harmony CityPlace.”
