As acclaimed Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s first solo exhibition in Canada, this public art project serves as a guide to the Leslie Street Spit, an artificial peninsula formed by the dumping of waste deposits from Toronto’s construction industry into Lake Ontario. Accordingly, the project addresses a subject of vital interest—construction, development, and the use of the land and water.

In her artistic practice, Almarcegui examines processes of urban transformation brought on by political, social, and economic change. Specifically, she studies those characteristics of cities that are not typically the focus of attention: wastelands, construction materials, and underlying structures. Since the late 1990s, her projects have fallen into two main categories: installations comprising mounds of raw materials of the type that were used to construct the buildings in which they are housed, and guides to the wastelands of various urban centres throughout the world. For the latter category, which is the approach taken for this project, Almarcegui explores the history, geology, and ecology of neglected or overlooked sites, carefully noting their lack of urban planning while cataloguing and highlighting each site’s tendency toward entropy. Her original research culminates in a major installation consisting of a video in the style of a slide show and a publication in the form of a guidebook, the latter of which serves as an interpretive tool which visitors may take away.

For her original commission in the city of Toronto, Almarcegui uses these old-school formats to tell the story of the Leslie Street Spit, as yet little known or broadly understood, in an unexpected and engaging way. Initiated sixty years ago as a breakwater for harbour expansion, the spit was ultimately not required for this purpose due to an unanticipated decrease in lake shipping. Today, it has been claimed by all forms of life, both human and wild. The evolution of the spit—largely accidental and unplanned—provides an extraordinary example of the processes of urban and ecological succession. As such, the site offers an ideal subject for Almarcegui’s practice, seamlessly integrating the city of Toronto into the continuum of her work on wastelands in the cities of London, New York, Rome, São Paulo and Venice, among others.

• Lara Almarcegui