For Nuit Blanche, this artist is digging up Nathan Phillips Square — literally

This year, the theme of Toronto's Nuit Blanche is "Breaking Ground," and come Saturday night, that's exactly what you'll see at Nathan Phillips Square. There, Jenine Marsh will be unveiling an art excavation of sorts. The project is called Wellspring, and to bring it to life, Marsh is removing much of the concrete that forms the plaza outside of City Hall: approximately 200 slabs measuring 6 x 6 feet each.

It's a monumental intervention, and Marsh says she was inspired by a little-known nugget of Toronto history: the square, which opened in 1965, was originally designed to be an ever-changing public space, and the ground itself is a modular system of concrete pavers which can be lifted and shifted to make room for parks, buildings — whatever the city might imagine. Until now, however, that's never really happened, and Marsh expects she'll discover decades of detritus as the project comes together. 

"Even though I've been working for three months on this — pretty much full time —  it's still going to be pretty subtle," says Marsh, discussing her vision for Wellspring. "But if people choose to spend more time looking at the details, they'll find, like, 200 sculptures of feet — and things that they can touch and engage with in other ways."

On top of the excavation, Marsh has created original sculptures that will be installed throughout the site: life-size flowers and feet, coins and a couple of burbling fountains. (Visitors are encouraged to make a wish.) 

Born in Calgary, where she earned a BFA at the Alberta University of the Arts, Marsh has lived in Toronto for a decade, but in all those years, she's never paid much attention to Nathan Phillips Square. She tends to avoid crowds; so she's never there for festivals or farmer's markets — or Nuit Blanche. (Saturday will mark the first time she's ever attended.) It was always a concrete wasteland to her: a space she might cut through while shuttling from Point A to B. Inviting, it was not.

But that all changed when Marsh was commissioned to create a project for Nuit Blanche's downtown exhibition. We'll let her tell the story from here …

How and when did you learn the history of how Nathan Phillips Square was designed?

It all happened through the process of Nuit Blanche. The curator of the downtown section is Kari Cwynar; she's a great curator and I've worked with her before. We started brainstorming about sites, talking with city liaisons and contacts, and they started talking to us about Nathan Phillips Square because they didn't have an artist for that site yet.

They kind of offhandedly remarked that, you know, if I wanted to put something in, they could lift up the pavers. I was like: wait, wait, wait! (laughs) Tell me more about this — this thing that you thought was just something uninteresting. I started researching: why is this space here? How did Nathan Phillips Square come to be? 

When are they typically removed? Does the city ever remove them?

They only do it to access water and electricity, so it's sort of like a hidden outlet; that's how it was described to me by the city workers. I haven't been able to find actual written documentation of this, but apparently the whole square was designed with this modular, utopic kind of vision: it can be anything. We can lift up the pavers; we can put in a building. We can lift up the pavers; we can put in a garden or plant trees. We can lift up the pavers and put in a temporary water feature — you know, shift things around, let it be altered over time and altered by different needs and purposes.

But Nathan Phillips Square is only used for a revolving door of events where each event is maybe a day or two — maybe a week. It's only the site of things that come and go and vanish. So I really was interested in these residues that are left behind.

Why did it trigger your imagination: the fact that you can flip over the pavers?

When I was invited to do something for Nuit Blanche, I had just finished three exhibition projects as a sculptor and installation artist. They all occurred in sort of commercial spaces, project spaces — not in public, outdoor space. But I was thinking a lot about the utopic ambition, I guess, of how we use public space or of how we build cities.

I'm a socialist, so I have this politicized view of how public space is used and sort of capitalized. Like, for instance, a public fountain: we still have them, but they have lost a lot of their original purpose-use. 

You used to go to a fountain to gather water and maybe wash your kids, water your animals, wash your fruit. It's where you would go to gather and rally — gather and talk and gossip. We can still go to these public sites — sites like Nathan Phillips Square or the dog fountain [in Berczy Park] that's famous in Toronto — but you can't use them. You're not allowed to gather water at them. They're meant to be public spaces, but they're also the most heavily policed spaces in the city.

I hope people who visit this project will see the space differently afterward. Although the pavers will be returned to their places — and [the square] will be returned to this flat, empty void — they'll still know what's underneath it. They'll know that it's like this sort of drain where all the residue of all the festivals ends up there — the Canada Days, the protests. It's like this drain in the bottom of the sink of the city.  

What did you actually find down there? 

It's pretty gnarly. I found lots of coins. I found a phone, a sim card. I found little pieces of, like, signs and banners from events. I found a silver ring. There's all kinds of things — from value-less to valuable — because they've never cleaned it out. It's probably 60 years worth of trash. If I started digging in the dirt, I'd probably find stuff that's been there since this was a brand new square. 

We can't lift all [the pavers] up until the week of Nuit Blanche, so there'll be a lot of surprises, I guess. There are apparently areas with huge pipes and wiring and areas where there's, like, lots of garbage.

What has it been like, working at this scale? Has it changed how you work?

Oh yes. It's changed how I think! I'm used to making art for a smaller audience, and a very targeted audience — like, a very contemporary-art focused audience. And I'm used to project spaces or commercial galleries where anyone could walk in, but generally they don't. It's not like Nathan Phillips Square, which is truly accessible to everyone. 

I don't know if that's altered how I make the work, but it's altering how I — I wonder how to frame it and talk about it to a more general public.

I think that the response will at least be amazement with the architecture — the fact that it's capable of being opened this way.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Nuit Blanche Toronto. Saturday, Sept. 23 from 7 p.m. to 7 p.m. www.toronto.ca/nuitblanche