Eric Glavin

Dufferin

In the work, Dufferin Eric Glavin draws upon the architectural vocabulary associated with the neighbourhoods and storefronts of Toronto, in this case the now vanished façade of Yen’s Flower Shop at 2020 Dufferin St. The front of this store was once embellished by an opaque blue plexiglass grid reaching to the roofline, broken up slightly by an air conditioning unit, and a white lattice section. The façade gave the building a noticeable presence, as if it was a small section of something much larger, perhaps an office tower. The effect was accentuated by many implied contradictions between form and function.

Glavin has taken the enigmatic Yen’s as a starting point, re-envisioning the façade on the gallery walls as fragments of the original fragment. The gallery space is no longer a simple interior with corners and walls, it feels a bit inside-out. He has taken the viewer into deep spaces where oppositional forces duke it out, where the humble flower shop transforms itself through an architectural sleight of hand into a decorated shed*, in other words it settles somewhere between utility and adornment, an area of overlapping narratives that reflect upon the rapidly changing face of the city.

*Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977

March 2019