A Centretown artist has won the City of Ottawa competition to integrate artwork into various O-Train stations across the city.
Stuart Kinmond, a Montreal native who moved to Ottawa almost 30 years ago, won the city’s public art commission for the O-Train expansion project. Kinmond studied painting and printmaking at the Ottawa School of Art and began exhibiting in 2000.
His art installation, called “locomOtion,” will be displayed at the Carleton University station.
Kinmond says he chose this station as his focus because it has the largest amount of riders getting on and off, making his art available to more people.
Kinmond’s proposed design shows large metal panels in the shape of wheels mounted on tall poles, making the station more visible on the university’s campus. The panels will be coated with reflective sheeting that will be able to reflect light in the evening. The mounted panels will be painted red to mark the university’s colours, and the shapes of the wheels are similar to OC Transpo’s logo, says Kinmond.
“It’s about motion and travel,” says Kinmond, former architect who is now a full-time artist. “The wheels are inner and outer circles that are constructed in different ways to look like wheels starting and stopping.”
Kinmond expects the project to be installed before the end of this year once it is constructed and pre-assembled by a metal fabrication shop.
The piece will be Kinmond’s first public art installation, though he said he is passionate about the public realm. Kinmond’s recent exhibition, shown at the Fritzi Gallery in Ottawa, [IN]TRANSIT, used a series of photo-based prints mounted on plates to describe the visual experience of public transit.
In 2012, Kinmond presented a show called The Golden Gate Variations, which re-imagined The Golden Gate Bridge and explored the ways that it is presented within the culture of the city.
“Public art adds a sense of identity to communities,” says Kinmond. “It gives a narrative and history of the place.”
According to the city’s call for artists, the vision of the project is to “integrate visually significant elements that provide identity and distinctive character to the line.”
After the artists’ proposals had been submitted, a jury of teachers, artists and art curators picked a shortlist of the submissions, says Annie Hillis, the city’s project coordinator for the Confederation Line Public Art Program.
Once the shortlist was picked, the artists were asked to make a more detailed proposal that would give an understanding of what their proposal would look like and how it would respond to the site, said Hillis.
These detailed proposals were shown Sept. 16 at an open house at Carleton University where members of the public were invited to share their comments with the jury.
“The public thought that Stuart best responded to transit, mobility, and to the station,” says Hillis.
The O-Train’s Confederation Line includes Greenboro, Confederation, Carleton, Carling and Bayview stations. According to the city’s call for artists, Greenboro, Carleton and Carling stations were selected as the recipients of art installations.
With a budget of $80,000, artists could choose whether to focus on one specific station, or spread the funds over multiple stations.
This budget comes from the portion of OC Transpo’s reconstruction budget set aside for public art.
For Shayne Dark, one of the artists selected for the shortlist, it is important to have public art throughout the city.
“We have millions of people travelling through the national capital, and to have art makes your time in those particular places extraordinary,” says Dark.