Blue Spiral - A Public Art Project Transforming Eight Downtown Toronto Smokestacks

Online, July 23, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Blue Spiral is a public art project transforming eight downtown Toronto smokestacks into painted sculptures. Supported by the National Gallery of Canada, Toronto City Hall, Toronto's Museum of Contemporary art, elected politicians, prestigious galleries and Business Improvement Associations, this project adds charm and magic to the city as a cultural tourist attraction.

Downtown Toronto holds a number of smokestacks and chimneys, obsolete due to clean air laws, too costly to dismantle, some adapted to ventilation or heat dispersal. These smokestacks can depress neighbourhood values through the industrial cast of their massive cement structure, like the one at Toronto Western Hospital at Bathurst and Dundas. Others are unseen, hidden in a downtown high-rise office environment. It's said "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade" and this public art project brings that saying to life.

The project started in 2008 with the Toronto Western Hospital but I recently expanded the project to 8 smokestacks. While one smokestack costs $700,000 to paint and maintain for 10 years, 8 can be done for three times that at $1.9million. $300k administrative costs and $200k per smokestack. $1.9mil can be raised through naming rights like "Investment Banker's Blue Spiral", the sponsor name embedded in the artwork title.

A downtown Toronto art project of eight painted smokestacks is a huge undertaking resulting in a monumental artwork. Superlatives are not amiss in calculating benefits to the city of Toronto; international attention and an increase in cultural tourism as well as the local effect from this civic art project generating positive public attitudes towards downtown Toronto.

About Miklos Legrady:
Miklos Legrady is a visual artist, the web designer and art director of the www.ccca.ca, The Canadian Art Database. Legrady designs and produces documentary web sites for Nuit Blanche 2006 - 2014 for the City of Toronto. Legrady's photography is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada's Museum of Contemporary Photography and the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. His paintings are in private collections, with internet time-based artwork represented in the collection of the Rhizome Artbase, a New York online platform for the global new media art community. His work has been shown across Canada and internationally through exhibitions in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Belgium, Hungary, Spain and Japan. For more information, please visit www.mikloslegrady.com

For further information:
Miklos Legrady Studio, 310 Bathurst Street, Toronto +1.647.292.1846 [email protected]

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