Moving With Joy at The Bentway Skate Trail, Toronto
December 22, 2021 - February 21, 2022
Photos: Shane Parent
Moving With Joy is an expansion of Maureen Gruben’s 2019 project Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun, which brought together fourteen hand-built sleds that were borrowed from local Inuvialuit families for a short-duration land art piece. Gruben’s installation for The Bentway Skate Trail features seven large-scale, richly coloured sculptural sleds. These display video footage and photographs captured spontaneously during time spent at her spring ice fishing camp in Husky Lakes, part of the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the Western Arctic.
The presence of these sculptures under the Gardiner Expressway creates a parallel to the flow of traffic above; it also offers a counterpoint as sleds work intimately with the land and ice, and don’t require the industrial intervention of roads. The installation emphasizes that joy and beauty can also be powerful critical and motivating systems. It affirms that land can sustain us while remaining a diverse and stunning biosphere, and highlights the multiple potentials that exist for relationships between people, places, and ecologies.