If you happened to be at Toronto’s waterfront on Saturday evening, you may have caught an epic display of billowing multicoloured smoke.
Spectators were treated to quite the show over the weekend, which was a special “smoke sculpture” installation put on by legendary artist Judy Chicago.
It was Chicago’s first smoke sculpture show in Canada, and the grand finale to the Toronto Biennal of Art, “Canada’s leading visual arts event focused exclusively on contemporary art from around the world.”
On Saturday at 8 p.m., viewers gathered at the waterfront for Chicago’s installation, which released environmentally safe, non-toxic coloured pigments into the air from a barge near the shore.
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Footage taken at the event proved that the display was as spectacular as it sounds. The barge lit up in bright colourful lights as smoke filled the air and shot into the sky like fireworks.
“I wanted to use colours that related to the environment, water and sky, thus my choice of purple, blue, green, yellow and white for this performance,” said Chicago about her Toronto show in an interview with Maclean’s.
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“I decided to create a scaffold structure that creates multiple positions for the coloured smokes, allowing for complex colour mixing— horizontally, vertically, from front to back on the scaffold and also from the barge’s deck.”
Chicago said in the interview that this smoke sculpture took over two years to plan. And with such an incredible finished product, it seems that the hard work was worth it.
