improvement becomes a wall, and the river meanders still...
improvement becomes a wall, and the river meanders still...
Here, wherever you may be, is where you begin your journey through the exhibition improvement becomes a wall, and the river meanders still. Work by Danica Evering, Elijah Harper and Shelby Lisk is presented on a single-scrolling page curated by Treva Legassie. You may experience the exhibition while walking The Narrows of the Lower Don River Trail or anywhere. If you are at the Don River, begin your journey on the Lower Don Trail below the Riverdale Park Viaduct. Follow the guiding prompts and maps to orient yourself. Scroll slowly.
If you are at the Don River, walk north from the stairs of the Riverdale Park Viaduct, past a willow tree about 100 feet, until you come to a small opening between the trail and the river on your right. Here, or from anywhere, find a place to stand and listen.
Act 1: Source
If you are at the Lower Don River find yourself standing at the centre of the weathered red bridge—just about 20 feet north of the place where you stopped to acknowledge the land—at the intersection between the flowing meander of Woscontonach River (Don River) and the straightened channel of The Narrows. If you are elsewhere, find yourself at a river or other waterbody or imagine one.
Act 1 speaks to the many permutations of Woscontonach’s flows. Long before settlers sought to ‘improve’ the river by straightening and widening it into a tamed channel Woscontonach meandered. In ancient times, the Lower Don River and Valley was part of the prehistoric proglacial Lake Iroquois and even earlier in the Pleistocene epoch the Laurentide Glacier which covered present-day Toronto and helped shape the hills and valleys we know.
Songs for the Narrows
Danica Evering
Songs for the Narrows is a short soundwalk framed as a five-segment musical composition. Recordings were gathered from the Don Valley Trail along the Narrows. This section of the Don River was part of the 1886 Don Improvement Plan to “solve” slow-moving polluted waters believed to cause miasmas and overwhelming flooding, barriers to city development. The river’s meandering curves were straightened, widened, deepened into a single concrete-lined channel. It didn’t work.
Five movements echo a map of the River Don Straightening Plan, reflecting the river's pre-improvement state in 1886 and its current straightened path in 2022 at its five bridge points (different but intersecting interventions). Movement 1 opens with the river's solo/descant about kinesthetic sympathy and sound as mass. Movement 2 is a canon about following and taking between the concrete channel and part of the river that was filled in. In Movement 3, a fallen crane interrupts as a sign of the city's troubling reverence for revitalization. For Movement 4, the river runs up against the road like a bow, vibrant tension. Movement 5 closes the composition with rushing noise where the river runs into green reeds at the lake's mouth.
This soundwalk is meant to be heard in multiple environments, allowing the soundscape/environment the listener/reader is walking through to blend with the piece. Walk and listen at your own pace. If you are walking the Lower Don Trail, match the start of each movement with the corresponding bridge overhead.
Act 2: Meander
If you are on location you will find yourself closer to the mouth of the Don River, somewhere along the southernmost point of the Lower Don Trail. If you are elsewhere, imagine a city’s relationship to its waterways. You may think about Tkaronto, or another city; Tiohti:áke (Montreal, QC), Katarokwi (Kingston, ON). What is your relation to water?
Act 2 interrogates the colonial desire to tame bodies — water, human — that do not follow a ‘straightened’ trajectory. Here the canalization of the Don River finds a parallel with the queer experience of self-discovery in a landscape that seeks to control and discipline. The Don River was straightened, widened and deepened and most days the water trickles slowly carrying little life as it once did before ‘improvements’ polluted and punished the Don.
A harmony with the straight and narrow
Elijah Harper
The mouth of The Narrows is a highly modified landscape, the straightened canal leads water out to the lake by way of the Keating Channel. The concrete pillars of the Gardiner Expressway loom large. What was once lush and messy marshland is now a highly ordered and controlled place. A harmony with the straight and narrow is a soundscape crafted in relation to the base of the canalized Narrows of the Don River; articulating a connection to the river, a shared history of not fitting into a ‘straight line’ and the destruction that succeeds. A play between classical and electronic elements is woven throughout, building a tension between past and present influences; illustrating a before and after for the river’s flows (pre- and post- Don Improvement).
A collection of sounds—original piano and sound design, river recordings, and sampled videos of Toronto police sirens from YouTube—craft a storied encounter of communing with the highly altered landscape of the post-industrial lower river. A shared experience of suppression, between the river and listener, is woven together by a catchy synth beat. The Don River’s form—a meander that has been punished into a straight concrete line—reflects the experience of growing up queer. A harmony with the straight and narrow sonifies the pain and anxiety seeded by a colonial desire to tame, control, and use bodies of water and human bodies that exceed the bounds of banks and normative identities.
While listening you may choose to walk, sit, or dance to bridge a connection between your own body and the Don River.
Act 3: Mouth
If you are on location you will find yourself lost somewhere along the mouth of the Don River looking out upon the Port Lands mid-construction. Locate a place where you can sit down, preferably where you can see or hear the lake.
Act 3 speaks to the knowledge that water carries and the future of the river’s mouth. Wonscotonach’s mouth was once ecologically diverse marshy lowlands protected by a peninsula now known as the Toronto Islands. Today, the river’s mouth is encased in concrete diverting west out to the lake through the Keating Channel. However, water remembers. Wonscotonach is always at work eroding and flooding, returning to its meandering course. The 1886 Don Improvement sought to control the river’s flows, prevent flooding and create a corridor for travel and industrial development but it failed. Over 130 years later the river still floods, still exceeds its bounds, flowing over the limiting lines of progress. Water returns to the places from which it was was displaced.
Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Flood’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
-Toni Morrison
All that will remain
Shelby Lisk
Today, the ‘Port Lands Flood Protection Project’ will re-naturalize the river’s mouth, adding a human-made meander that will traverse through the formerly industrial Port Lands leading the Don River out into Lake Ontario. Hindsight shows us that the river’s meander was essential for maintaining the watershed and preventing flood damage at the river’s mouth. In the years to come The Narrows will be buttressed by meanders on both its North and South ends.
The video diptych All that will remain speaks to the power of nature to return to a time before colonial visions proclaimed to know better (they did not). If colonization is about control, containing and constraining the natural state of things, then water may be its opposite, cleansing, releasing, remembering, eroding, constantly moving back into its most natural and fullest expression. Once the canalization of the lower river (the Don Improvement Plan), followed by the Keating Channel, and today the dredging of a new meandering river mouth (the Port Lands Flood Protection), plans to protect the city from flooding by the river's waters have long taken an interventionist approach. There has been a failure to notice that these plans also stunt the natural state of the water. Gathering sand on the shores of Toronto Island (formerly Hiwatha Island) in Lake Ontario (formerly Lake Iroquois) is a futile effort, the small structure that is built is reclaimed by water. Tension follows the manipulation of sand in real time while Erasure is sped up significantly to match the temporality of human intervention. Water will always remember in its own time, a period we may not be able to imagine or understand. Taking in All that will remain amongst the ruins of the Port Lands – currently mid-revitalization – consider the memory of the meander, the interventions upon these lands and waters by human hands, and what the water holds in its memory.
If you are watching from a desktop computer press play on both videos together, they needn’t be perfectly in sync. If you are watching from a mobile phone play the videos one at a time, in any order. Find a rhythm between construction and water’s inevitable flow.
As you return to the rhythms of your day, express gratitude by giving thanks to the Land.
Artist’s bios:
Danica Evering was born in Cobourg and lives in Hamilton. With writing and sound composition, they work through spaces and people and power and memories. Their SSHRC-supported MA in Media Studies from Concordia University questions power dynamics and insider/outsider relationships in social practice through interviews with artists and creative analysis of their fieldwork. Evering's semi-fictional writing has taken the form of audio descriptions, sculptural biographies, soundwalks, and an experimental play. Their writing has appeared in Off Centre, No More Potlucks, Lemon Hound, Public, and other publications. They are a founding member of the editorial collective of Publication Studio Guelph, a sibling studio of an international publishing network that attends to the social lives of books and participated in the creation and development of the Benčić Youth Council, a radical arts education program for youth in Rijeka, Croatia.
Elijah Harper is a pianist, beat-maker and synth-pop producer based in Toronto, born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario. Influenced by his LGBTQ2+ identity and Jamaican roots, Harper’s work takes up remixing and the synthesis of classical and contemporary sound to question and dismantle established hierarchies and power structures. By way of sampling and instrumentation, his sonic practice lends itself to storytelling rooted in his connections to people and places. Elijah’s work takes the form of music, lyrical storytelling, soundscapes and soundwalks.
Shelby Lisk is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and photographer from Kenhtè:ke (Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory). She completed her degree in Fine Arts, with a minor in Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa (2015) and a diploma in Photojournalism at Loyalist College (2019). Additionally, she has a certificate in Mohawk Language and Culture through Queen's University and Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na (2020). Shelby uses her artwork to explore her connection to and place as a Kanyen’kehá:ka woman. Her artwork and films have been shown in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and the UK. Most recently, she had a solo exhibition of her photography at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre titled "Shé:kon se’onhwentsyà:ke ratinékere tsi nihá:ti nè:ne yesanorónhkhwa" (There are still people in the world that love you) in 2022. She was long-listed for the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award (2021) and is the recipient of an Indigenous Arts and Stories Governor General's History Award (Historica Canada 2018).
Curator’s bio:
Treva Legassie is a curator, and artist born and based in Tkaronto, Treaty 13 territory. As a curator, her process values embodied and incidental knowledge and a commitment to Land and its vast complexity. Legassie is one of the co-founders of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective. She has curated new media-based exhibitions such as Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines (2014) and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel (2017). Her doctoral research was supported by the J.W. McConnell Memorial Doctoral Fellowship and FRQSC Doctoral Research Scholarship.
Image credits:
Aerial view of the Don River from Bloor Street to Queen Street, 1948. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
Yves Ameline, Don River looking north, 1985. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
Unwin, Browne and Sankey, Surveyors, “River Don Straightening Plan,” showing lands to be expropriated, May 7, 1888. City of Toronto Archives, Series 725, File 12.
Keating Channel, looking east during construction, 1914. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
Rendering of Promontory Park and the River Valley Park, 2022. Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto.
Exhibition website designed by Treva Legassie.