The Republic at Yonge and Eglinton, North Toronto Collegiate Institute
Toronto, ON Canada
Installation date March, 2011.

Commissioned by Tridel and the Toronto District School Board.
4.2 mhigh Stainless Steel Sculpture.

“What’s Your Name?” is the first question we ask someone; by answering, we announce ourselves to each other and to the world. From childhood, students are taught to introduce themselves, to write their proper names on all of their schoolwork, and to respond when their names are called. But in adolescence, our relationship to those proper names often changes because a name is no longer something given but something made, crafted and personalized by the deliberate art of the signature and of the nickname. Schools, and particularly high schools, are where the proper name and the signature intersect: here adolescents begin to learn the intellectual and moral requirements of the social world that has been created for them, while at the same time they are learning to create themselves.

I am creating a stainless steel sculpture that identifies North Toronto’s students, past and present, by reproducing their proper names and their handwritten signatures on large plates of steel shaped like pieces of paper. A stainless steel sculpture depicting two sheaves of paper leaning against one another will show first names of students who have attended the school since 1912. Their given names will be cut out of the steel, allowing light to pass through the surface of one sheaf and on the other sheaf signatures used by current and past students will be cut into the steel. The sculpture is made of stainless steel, it is dynamic and porous rather than monolithic and opaque.

Paper and print, which are the core tools of education, become dynamic sculptural forms on which an imprint of students’ public and private identities is inscribed.