RedBall Project, Toronto, Canada
Date uploaded: July 7, 2009
Artist Kurt Perschke infiltrated Toronto with the RedBall Project, an ongoing site-specific installation that catalyses interaction between community and urban space. Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity, brought Redball to town as part of its public art series. The project quickly became Luminato's headlining event in the press and amongst the enthusiastic public.
Travelling the globe and adopting various cities as its canvas, RedBall explores each locale through temporality, mutability, and migration. The15-foot inflatable, bright red sphere is compressed into a unique site each day for a series of 2 to 3 weeks at a time. All sites are previously chosen by the artist as a carefully plotted performance that reflects both the artist's perception of the city, and city-dwellers' own bodily experience of urban space.
From June 5th-14th 2009, Torontonians found the RedBall squished under bridges, wedged into alleys, and popping up unexpectedly throughout Toronto's urban landscape.
Having traveled from Sydney to St. Louis, Barcelona to Chicago, RedBall has garnered public, critical and media attention worldwide. "RedBall straddles the realms of formalist sculpture, street performance, ephemeral urban installation and hands-on art object, without ever deciding for any one terrain over the others - its presence in Barcelona was an unequivocal success." Jeffrey Swartz, Barcelona Critic
Luminato's Artistic Director Chris Lorway speaks about RedBall's popularity in Toronto: "We were thrilled by the way the RedBall's presence in the city ignited people's imagination and creative impulses. It just goes to illustrate that a simple idea can have a major impact on the way that people view and celebrate their city."
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Click here to learn more about RedBall Project and review the project's migration in Toronto
