A building in critical transition is emblazoned with one of the city's few examples of modern public art, and that art's entire theme is transition.
The piece is entitled Transition From Static To Expansionist Thinking and was created by local artist and philosopher Jean Jacques Gigure. It was placed on the eastern exterior wall of 1245 Third Avenue in 2005 when it was inhabited by Spruce City Resale.
The building was recently transitioned to the urban lifestyles store Homework but in that business's infancy in that location it burned in the fire on May 6 that destroyed the pizzeria next door still under construction.
The artwork, however, survived the calamity.
"The forms have not been burned. The art is mostly intact," said Gigure.
"I'm crossing my fingers - because that building has to be knocked down, no doubt about it - that they will take the time to unscrew the forms from the wall and carefully save the pieces. It is easy to do with a drill, they are attached with simple screws, and it would only take a couple of hours, easy."
The true owner of the art is the owner of the building, said Gigure, but the public is also a major stakeholder in this piece of art. It was deliberately installed as a symbolic conversation with the passersby.
He has contacted the owners of Homework, as well as City Hall, urging the owners to spare the art and, if they don't want to be the caretakers themselves, simply hand it all over to the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul Society. Protocols between those agencies and the artist have already been set up.
"I've given them 100 per cent copyright," said Gigure. "It is there to use, make prints, make posters, whatever they wish, as long as there is someone homeless in Canada."
He said the colours of the mural needed to be touched up anyway, after years of weather, and colour is precisely the message the artwork is trying to convey.
Gigure is a pioneer thinker and artist in the genre of transitional colour and its connected schools of thought. In brief, he suggests through artworks like this one that just as nature has provided the human ear with a precise scale of sounds, and those scales have to be used together in proper sequence or the brain gets stressed, so too is there a scale of colours that blend one from the next to the next. Also, the forms used to depict colour (everything from the cars we drive to the buildings we inhabit to the clothing and tools of our lives) have transitions and construction traits that can either vex the brain (hard edges, straight lines, few curves) or inspire the brain (fluid lines, colours that are in the correct visual key). Without curves in most elements of architecture and engineering, he said, the human subconscious is stressed. In western civilization, almost everything built uses hard edge and straight line features, holding back positive and productive thinking.
"That mural is very, very, very important," Gigure explained. "For one thing, it is a rare mural these days in that it was painted by hand brush."
The piece also incorporates the tree growing beside the building as an intrinsic aspect of the work. Its colours represent the greens in Gigure's discussion and the object of the tree is also important. A partner artist, Mike Campbell, included a subtle eagle image to symbolize the rising of our thoughts to higher levels of consciousness if we come to understand the tuning of colour and form as much as we have for music.
"The tree is like the many countries of the world, and humans' view of nature. Eventually we will see we are all these branches and twigs in directions going here and there, no two the same, but we are all of the one tree."
Transition From Static To Expansionist Thinking could easily be transplanted to another wall, it just needs a substitute tree. For more information on the principles of transitional colour, visit Gigure's website at www.vitockey.com.
