STANZIE TOOTH
A Persistent Crossing
a public art installation with The Bentway
May 9, 2026 - Spring 2027
Join us at The Bentway for the public unveiling: May 9 from 2 - 3:30 pm
Bentway Staging Grounds hosts the final chapter of its immersive installations, where human silhouettes, native vegetation, and Ontario pollinators invite visitors to reflect on their place within the city. The work blurs boundaries between people, place, and the natural world, revealing the interconnected rhythms of built and living environments.
Located within Bentway Staging Grounds, Toronto-based artist Stanzie Tooth presents A Persistent Crossing, a public artwork that explores the relationship between humans and the urban environments they inhabit.
In this final commission at Staging Grounds, Tooth creates a series of images that function as thresholds between the rigid world of Toronto’s industrial grid and the fluid resilience of its urban ecology. Extending her investigation of the figure-ground relationship from the scale of paper to public architecture, the work wraps three sides of the site’s scaffolding towers, inviting viewers to reconsider themselves not as the focal point of the urban landscape but as part of its intricate ecological fabric.
Across the large-scale images, large human silhouettes appear as open spaces filled with native Ontario vegetation and shifting skies. These absent figures act as windows into an alternative landscape within the human body, suggesting a porous boundary between people and place where the figure and ground continually shift. Imagery of local pollinators—including the Luna moth, Cecropia moth, and Monarch butterfly—grounds the work in the ecologies of both the site and southern Ontario. Moving between bright daytime scenes and indigo night skies, Tooth stages the daily urban rhythms of the city underneath the Gardiner Expressway.
Together, these images position the site itself as a threshold between the built and the natural worlds, encouraging viewers to recognize that nature is not something separate from urban life, but a living presence woven through it.
https://www.blogto.com/arts/2026/04/the-bentway-new-pieces-art/