A new temporary public art installation by Assistant Professor Victor Perez-Amado and third year Master of Architecture students John Nguyen, Anton Skorishchenko, Abubaker Bajaman, and Stephen Baik is drawing large crowds to Toronto’s Woodbine Beach.

Part of the Winter Stations exhibition, now in its 5^th year, the project is one of six installations enticing visitors to explore the city’s waterfront in the winter.

Four of the installations were selected via an international design competition and two were created by invited post-secondary institutions. The group from the Daniels Faculty was among the international competition winners, which included teams from the United States, Mexico, and Poland.

The theme of this year’s exhibition was migration. Cavalcade — the Daniels Faculty team's winning design — depicts brightly coloured silhouettes of migrants on a journey to a better life. Visitors may walk around them, their footprints converging in the sand and snow. At the centre of the installation is a mirror where one may view their reflection and see themselves as part of the collective.

Video and photos above courtesy of the Cavalcade team

"Cavalcade is an installation that reflects the collective spirit of human movement and transversal," wrote the Daniels Faculty team about their installation. "Not just in the contemporary political sense of global migration, but in the consensus that the human quest for a better life is one that is timeless and universal.”

Mayor John Tory visited the installations on the opening day, February 18, and was on hand to view presentations by each team February 13 at Rorschach Brewery.

Woggle Jungle photo by Yasmin Al-Samarrai; Obscura photo courtesy of Ontario Place

In their presentation, Perez-Amado and Skorishchenko, representing the Daniels Faculty team, shared other public art installations they created in Toronto that helped inform their approach, including Woggle Jungle, Obscura (pictured, respectively, above), and most recently a modular 3D printed design now on display at Autodesk’s Toronto headquarters.

Open to the public, the Winter Stations exhibition runs until April 1.

Read media coverage of the Winter Stations exhibition, via CBC News, and Now magazine.