Art at Distillery revulses residents

By Eric Morse —

Koilos is one of the Distillery District’s newest residents.

People may love them or hate them, but absolutely everybody seems to have an opinion on them. They are the new artistic installations in the Distillery Sculpture Park.
They are definitely large and metallic in the way of much modern sculpture, but what seems to be stirring unease among a fair number of Distillery dwellers is that two of them, by California artist Michael Christian, are anything but abstract.
IT, the massive 40-foot-high black mesh globe on three jointed legs with a single baleful red eyeball, is overtly modeled on the Martian war machines in War of the Worlds (by George Orwell, according to the published blurb in the promotional magazine—in fact H. G. Wells wrote the novel and Orson Welles narrated the legendary 1938 radio play).
Then there is Koilos, the silver-coloured sheet-metal thing crouching at the very entrance to Distillery Lane like a scaled, claw-footed Gollum with a head that would make a Venus Flytrap envious, “ready to move, pounce or play” according to the artist. District dweller Derek Barrow finds it Lovecraftian, evoking the nameless, loathsome Great Old Ones of the 1920s fantasy author—yet when we consulted our pocket Necronomicon, there was no mention. Perhaps Koilos is not nameless enough?
On the other hand, Pam Hyatt, who lives on Spadina but attends voice classes in the District, is entranced. “It’s nifty,” say Hyatt. “Look, the limbs are all holey, you can see through it—you know if you could see people like we see him, we’re all holey too.”
Oddly, IT has a kind of eerie affinity for its surroundings, since the architectural setting does recall the classic War of the Worlds epics, but as one resident commented, “who wants to live with that?”
Other sculptures in the area, of more abstract design and modest size, have not attracted the controversy that these two have. The problem seems to be that whatever else these two pieces are, they are unabashed, authentic and certifiable science-fiction monsters plopped down in a residential area.
The local sentiment does not seem to have found an organized voice, but has gathered enough profile to prompt Pam McConnell’s office to look into the matter. According to McConnell’s office, the pieces concerned were installed by developer Cityscape itself, are on private property and not subject to any city approvals.
One urban design professional who lives in the area but preferred to remain anonymous commented, “IT might have been more appropriate in a large, modernistic urban space like Metro Hall square. But in that relatively confined space, surrounded by traditional low red-brick buildings, with that single red eye glaring in your bedroom window it’s scary. And it’s not even anchored. That’s scary. At first they said they were going to let kids climb in it.”
She went on to suggest that when city hall and developers plan a whole district as a unit the way they have done the Distillery, it becomes difficult for them to let go and let humanity take its course, so that inappropriate over-tinkering results.
“They forget that at a certain point a mass of people move in and it turns from a project into a neighbourhood, yet there is still this tendency to treat it as an untenanted design concept and do things without asking anybody.”
Distillery spokesman David Jackson the art has attracted both favourable and unfavourable comment: “But that is what art is supposed to do”. The sculptures are on loan to the corporation through the artist for up to three years.
Rather as the inhabitants of New Jersey felt, one might guess, when the Wellesian originals dropped in for a quick snack back in 1938. As for Koilos, Derek Barrow says, “It’s unnerving, and you know that These Things Never End Well.”