Photography by Mike Ford

YorkU Magazine - page 28
February 2010

Carl Tacon
Sculptor
Off the Old Block

What weighs about 50 tons, is 42 metres long and is made up of 20 individually hand-carved, 133-centimetre-high sections of Vermont Mountain White marble? Answer: Carl Tacon’s public sculpture, Shift, an imposingly beautiful work sited at 1 St. Thomas St. in downtown Toronto near Bay and Bloor.

The sculpture’s marble drapery makes reference to classical imagery while balancing that backward glance with a form-meets-function contemporary experience (the sculpture acts as the property line of its host, One St. Thomas Residences, a luxury condominium building).

Public sculpture hasn’t had a very happy existence in Canada, or in Toronto for that matter, so how did Tacon (BFA Spec. Hons. ’88, MFA ’96) get commissioned to create Shift? “When the city gives developers concessions in the municipal zoning bylaws, the developer gives something beneficial back to the city in exchange. So one per cent of the project’s total building budget goes to funding public art,” says Tacon.

Shift’s drapery imagery stems from the idea of a building’s facade or surface being merely a perceptual skin, he says. “That skin empowers a building with a sense of authority and stature. It has an elusive quality that can be used to suggest the transitional space between the interior and exterior facades of a building.” Tacon says a large part of his work is about “how surfaces, any surface, can be deceptive.”