Public Art Therapy
How Dyan Marie uses creativity to awaken community pride.
INTERVIEW BY Andre Mayer
Dyan Marie’s work lies at the junction of art and activism. The 50-year-old painter, photographer and sculptor has been exhibiting her work in Toronto for more than two decades but, in recent years, she’s acquired a reputation as one of the city’s fiercest community advocates. Marie lives in the Dupont-Bloor West district in Toronto’s west end. Thanks to the convergence of three railroad lines, it was once labelled the most toxic neighbourhood in Canada. Her work not only documents urban squalor, but also attempts to awaken community pride. A January 2004 show called “Brilliantly and Everything Else” featured oil paintings of street scenes with web addresses superimposed on them; the URLs were working sites that detailed various improvement initiatives in the Dupont area.
Marie has created no fewer than 14 websites, including digin.ca, a directory of local programs, meetings and cultural events, and walkhere.org, an appeal to artists, landscapers, architects and urban planners to help build a footpath in the neighbourhood that would serve as both an art exhibit and a physical link between two parks.
What first compelled you to take action?
When I first moved to Lansdowne and Dupont, I was working from home. But when I got this studio, it meant that every day I was walking through the neighbourhood, and it just became apparent that there were issues. At one point, the street we were on had many accidents. Because the parks were unsafe, kids were playing on the street. There was a girl who was killed a couple of years ago, and there were so many kids being hit that we started to count them. I think there were 12 [pedestrians struck] in the time we remember. We also had lots of problems with drug users in the alleyway. My two teenage boys were always being hit up by prostitutes. The neighbourhood was further stigmatized by the murder of Holly Jones in 2003.
How did you try to deal with the area’s negative self-image?
I did a project that got 250 cameras out to the neighbourhood. At that point there was nothing planned for it, just give these cameras to people with the mandate that they go out and walk around the neighbourhood and photograph whatever they see. This was an opportunity to invest some energy to make people feel like they were engaged [with the neighbourhood] rather than feeling a sense of isolation or defeatism. With this project, at the beginning, it was just about getting people to go for a walk, because, at first, people were afraid to go out. In the end, you have all these photographs. People came in and sorted through all these photographs and found their favourite one.
What do you believe is the function of public art?
What you’re really trying to do with art is open up questions. It’s not just about making things attractive. Sometimes that’s the furthest thing from your mind. With [the camera] project, it had nothing to do with finding something that was beautiful; sometimes it was about finding a question you want to ask, or about looking at something. Photography is amazing in that you can walk by something many different times, but if you frame it carefully, you see it in a fresh light. With public art, instead of just making a monument, you can actually change the way people see something.
