Long Division

This large-scale outdoor installation considered the fence as a marker for exclusion and the boundaries that are drawn around public and private spaces, circumscribing movement and subdividing the landscape.

While barriers are often implicated in larger concerns related to control and power structures, fences can also provide security and sanctuary. Drawing out these tensions, site-specific ‘Long Division’ used the fence as a starting off point to consider how the land around Mississauga, Ontario’s Bradley Museum has been occupied, settled and colonized.

The land art installation featured a series of loosely concentric rings with discrete openings, inviting participants to move within the layers of fencing, ultimately drawing people to the impenetrable centre ring. Looking both forward and backwards, ‘Long Division’ called into question the site’s origins and settlement while looking to the fence to expand outward to the current and near-future ideas of nation and boundary, the impermeability of borders, and the shifting relationships and attitudes toward migrant and refugee freedom of movement.

This work engaged in a dialogue with the Bradley Museum site and added a new critical layer that opened up questions about control, exclusion and inclusion, ultimately seeking to complicate the idea of fence through subverting its function and formal qualities, inviting the potential for play and participatory structural manipulations.

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Location
Mississauga, ON

Client
Commissioned for the ‘Public Volumes’ exhibition, curated by Noa Bronstein

Status
Completed 2019

Project Type
Installation

Role
Lead Artist

Photography
Gerald Allain, LeuWebb Projects, Darren Rigo

Text
Noa Bronstein, as part of the ‘Public Volumes’ exhibition catalogue

Press and Awards
CG Concept – “Long Division: frontières, limites et barricades,” August 2019
Building – “Long Division,” August 2019
Floornature – “LeuWebb Projects, Long Division installation,” August 2019
Glocal Design Magazine – “Long Division. fronteras y barricadas,” August 2019
World Landscape Architecture – “Long Division: Borders, Boundaries and Barricades,” October 2019