Take 5: A Heart-Shaped Park, Seletti’s BIC lamp, Carlo Scarpa’s Masterpiece + More

Love Park in Toronto by CCxA (and 18 Shades of Gay in Montreal)

Fittingly, I’m starting my very first Take 5 with this marvel of a park by CCxA (formerly Claude Cormier et Associés). Located near Toronto’s downtown lakeshore, Love Park brings literal heart to public space. Like much of the late Montreal landscape architect’s work, among which were many gifts to Toronto, Claude Cormier‘s Love Park is both heartfelt and cheeky. This is the same genius who created a fountain replete with sculptures of dogs and cats, who fashioned a pink-umbrella-ed beach next to an industrial sugar factory and so much more!

Cormier brought a distinctly queer sensibility to landscape and urban design – and one of my other absolute favourite works by his studio is 18 Shades of Gay, which canopied Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal’s Gay Village with a rainbow of balloons. Sadly, the work has since been taken down, but anyone who walked under its multi-hued glow will tell you that the joy it inspired is timeless. Photos of Love Park, c/o CCxA, top photo of 18 Shades of Gay by @ouramdream, bottom photo by Jean-Michael Seminaro.

Jeff Wall Retrospective at MOCA

On until March 22 at Toronto’s MOCA, Jeff Wall Photographs 1984–2023, is a monumental retrospective focused on one of Canada’s most respected living artists. It begins on the ground floor of the museum, with Children, a series of captivating circular light-boxes depicting kids close up and in mid-movement, and continues on the upper levels, where the Vancouver artist’s massive prints stretch across entire walls.

A master at crafting uncanny narratives, Wall has staged jaw-dropping cinematic scenes of military battle, vampiric debauchery and seedy domestic life as well as manicured landscapes, including a multi-frame sequence that culminates with a maze where the wanderers are mirrored in various stages of discovery. Even the most spontaneous-seeming or naturalistic image is carefully choreographed, blurring the line between documentary and artifice.

Photo: Courtesy of Nicolo Momsa Moyo

Nicole Nomsa Moyo’s Deeply Personal Art

Nicole Nomsa Moyo is one of my favourite designers. Born in Zimbabwe, raised in South Africa and now based in Florida, she created the much-talked-about Pearl Jam installation as part of Design Miami 2024. This work, installed at the Palm Court in the Miami Design District, pulled from her cultural heritage and referenced the artisanal jewelry of Ndebele, South Africa. Its sculptural outdoor furnishings included a necklace-shaped bench and “earrings” suspended from trees.

The pieces draw from the formal language of the Ndebele tribe as well as from Moyo’s own distinctive personal style and appreciation for the symbols of womanhood. In the Ndebele tribe, the women have typically owned the roles of artisans and architects, applying bold hues to houses and public spaces. And here, Moyo channels that sensibility with a new twist and undeniable passion. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Seletti’s Bic Pen light

Italian housewares brand Seletti always puts a smile on my face. Somehow, its pieces – from resin monkeys holding up lightbulbs to vases in the form of anatomically correct hearts – always manage to blend kitsch and sophistication in exactly the right proportions.

Newly released, the BIC lamp, designed by Mario Paroli, takes that familiar implement, specifically the BIC© Cristal, and super sizes it at a 12:1 scale to transform it into a light fixture. Everyone has owned a Bic Pen – our back-to-school shopping wasn’t complete without a carton each of blues, blacks and reds – and now this very familiar object finds transcendental function as a floor fixture, wall-mounted lamp or pendant. I want one desperately. Photos c/o Seletti.

Castelvecchio Forever

I left my heart at Castelvecchio last summer. On a sojourn to Verona from the Triennale di Milano, I finally got a chance to encounter Carlo Scarpa‘s masterpiece. I must have taken a hundred photos, but was particularly obsessed with Scarpa’s placement of the equestrian statue Cangrande I della Scala outside a gallery and suspended above a courtyard on an L-shaped concrete support. This moment captures the virtuosity of the architect’s reimagining of a tired medieval fortress into a vibrant museum. It exemplifies the height of adaptive reuse – to borrow an underwhelming term for such a colossal juxtaposition between old and new.