Musket Partners With Blackwood Gallery for a Third Year
Back in 2018, Musket Transport partnered with the University of Toronto Mississauga’s contemporary art centre, Blackwood Gallery, for their 10-day contemporary art festival The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea. Not only did we sponsor the festival – one installation of which took place at our Southdown container yard – but we also played an integral role in storing and transporting the artwork.
Last fall, we sponsored the transportation of Futurity Island from our Mississauga container terminal to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, and this year, we’re excited to continue our partnership with Blackwood Gallery for a third year.
Musket is set to transport the series of artworks that was initially shown in The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea to the UTM campus, where the gallery has plans to set up a temporary public art program that will run until Fall 2023. Each piece centers around climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience:
Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario by Jana Winderen is an audio composition of recordings from the Barents Sea, a fragile marine ecosystem in Norway that is threatened by climate change due to shifting ice, rising sea levels, and accelerated seasonal change. This piece will be installed in the UTM forest.
Agamiing – Niwaabaandaan miinawaa Nimiwkendaan // At the Lake – I see and I remember by Dylan Miner is a series of seven platforms – which will be installed throughout the campus – made from old-growth lumber, to reflect on histories of resource extraction in the Great Lakes region, and copper, a sacred material by Indigenous nations throughout the region. Each platform urges visitors to reflect on the pasts, present, and futures of this area and land.
Tania Willard’s Liberation of the Chinook Wind consists of four custom-printed windsocks and a large flatscreen TV displaying poetry generated from wind data. Willard’s work reflects on the connection between Chinook language, Chinook salmon, and issues of fish management and water sovereignty in Lake Ontario and southern Ontario. The poetry is generated based on wind speed and direction at UTM and thus changes daily.
Fraser Mccallum, project coordinator for Blackwood Gallery, emphasizes that the installations will “activate the campus in new and compelling ways [by] complement[ing] the natural, forested spaces, featur[ing] high-impact works in urbanized parts of campus, and activat[ing] lesser-used spaces for moments of contemplation and reflection.” He adds that the best part about the gallery’s temporary, rather than permanent, approach to their installations is the ability to be more responsive to current issues.
As the installations will be set up outdoors, social distancing protocols can be easily enforced.
Our expertise in handling artwork and other delicate shipments has enabled us to build long-term, trusted partnerships with Blackwood Gallery, among others, and we look forward to showing our support for the gallery in the years to come.
Blackwood Gallery hasn’t yet set an opening date, but you can keep an eye out for announcements on their website.