Project Context
As Creative Development Director of CONTACT Photography Festival—now recognized as the world’s largest photography festival—my goal was to raise the international profile of Canadian art and elevate the festival’s presence on the global stage. A key part of my strategy was to curate high-impact public art installations that reached wide audiences and showcased Canadian artists outside traditional institutional settings. To achieve this, I initiated a landmark partnership with the National Gallery of Canada and secured a site of exceptional visibility beneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway—one of the city’s busiest commuter corridors.

Our Solution
The result was a bold, large-scale installation by Rodney Graham, one of Canada’s most influential and internationally recognized contemporary artists.  Featuring monumental photographs of an inverted forest, suspended under the Gardiner Expressway, the work created a moment of visual and conceptual pause within an otherwise banal urban landscape. By relocating museum-level artwork into the public realm, we broke down barriers between audiences and institutions, making contemporary Canadian art accessible to hundreds of thousands of commuters and passersby. The collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada was instrumental in lending institutional weight to the project, which in turn attracted financial sponsorship and media attention. Though realized over two decades ago, this project helped set a precedent for activating underutilized city infrastructure as cultural space—anticipating the kinds of urban interventions we now see from organizations like The Bentway.