Dog Parc Gallery

Parc Gallery, located between Basin, Olier and de Seigneur streets, is a rectangular pocket of green space that contrasts dramatically with the surrounding urbanism of Griffintown, now famous as a site of post-industrial depopulation and urban decay, and presently the focus of intense speculation, development, and anti-corporate activism. Named for a local family of bakers, and one Ward councillor, Parc Gallery is presently a place where dogs and humans come to play and relax together. Its purpose and use, unlike much of the park’s context, are clearly articulated through spatial means: a simple, chain-link fence, flat green turf and double-gate system. To find a place of such clarity in the middle of a dramatically metamorphosing part of the city is a surprise, just as finding carefully mowed grass and happily playing dogs so close to acres of rubble and monumental tangles of rebar – the enormous demolition site of the former Canada Post sorting station lies immediately to the west – is delightfully unexpected.

The future of Parc Gallery is, however, uncertain. Plans for the area, which devolve around ideals of sustainability and restoring community to the “blighted” area of Griffintown, do not include the park, which is slated for development. And so, despite its effect as an oasis of calm and its importance as an already-existing community amenity, Parc Gallery may not be part of Griffintown for long.

Apart from the obvious loss that this change would mean for its users, building on the dog park would mean building over a history of community activism towards the creation of shared, green space. After the shift from coal to other forms of fuel, a substantial factory on the site of today’s Parc Gallery was demolished in the early twentieth century. Community activists fought to turn the site into a playground and public green. By the early 1940s the park was being used for informal recreation, organized team sports and public, community events such as children’s theatre. In recent years, since the depopulation of Griffintown, this little piece of history became dedicated to giving dogs – and their human companions – exercise and shared time in the fresh air. It is a mark of the success of the activists that Parc Gallery’s borders have not changed in over sixty years.

Urban spaces for “companion species” (Haraway 2003) are extremely limited in Montreal, yet the necessity of creating and maintaining such spaces for shared use between species is paramount as cities grow and wilderness shrinks. pouf! takes the stance that Parc Gallery is a successful and beautiful urban amenity, and that there should be more – not less – of these spaces.

pouf! proposes to work with the existing purpose and present-day users of Parc Gallery, animal and human, in order to continue our research on this important sitein Griffintown. We will offer users an opportunity to meet with our team, in the park, over a series of dates in Autumn 2010. Offering portrait photographs of the dogs in exchange for stories, historical facts and memories of Parc Gallery, we will compile a composite image of this public, green space. Our research will be made available in the form of an online project. Then, we propose to return to the park in Spring 2011 and make use of the invitation implicit in its name: (Dog) Parc Gallery. Using the dog portraits taken in the autumn, we will make a public exhibition on the perimeter of the park, affixing the portraits to the chain link border that both delineates this space for dogs and acts as a link to the park’s activist history. Through the project, dog parc gallery, our goal is to intensify and make visible the importance of this place within the cultural landscape of Griffintown.

Bios

pouf! art + architecture was founded by Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Thomas D. Strickland in 2006. For pouf! buildings and spaces are not simply the work of an architect or urban planner. Rather, we see the built environment as part of larger cultural landscapes of gender, power and shared history. Given how architecture and design play a crucial role in the formation and negotiation of identity, pouf! takes the position that the built environment has a lot to tell us. Consequently, as historians we explore the pasts that have formed the typology or morphology of our sites; as artists we seek to intensify and make visible the spatial and cultural relationships that might otherwise remain latent in these sites, and as designers we look for ways to collaborate with existing architecture and urban design. What is paramount for pouf! is to find ways to foreground the user/client in our process, whether our ultimate product is a spatial design, an exhibition, or the creation of a relationship, through time and community interaction, with a particular place. For more information about dog parc gallery and pouf’s! other projects please visit:

www.pouf.ca and http://pouf-blog.blogspot.com/

Cynthia Imogen Hammond teaches architectural history in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. She completed her Ph.D. In 2002 (Concordia) and her postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Architecture, McGill University in 2006. Her book on gender and the built environment of Bath, England will be published by Ashgate in 2011. In addition to research and publishing on architecture, cities and landscapes, Hammond maintains an interdisciplinary studio practice that incorporates public art, painting and drawing, sound and digital video work. Her most recent group exhibition, feminist practices, showed in nine locations and concluded its tour at the University of Melbourne.

Thomas D. Strickland graduated from the School of Architecture at Dalhousie University in 1997. He has designed for KPMB Architects in Toronto, Zeidler Partnership Architects in Calgary and has worked as an architectural researcher for the ARCOP Group and Dan S. Hanganu Architects in Montreal. Before returning to graduate school in 2005, Thomas organized and curated numerous public art events in Calgary such as the 2003 Artcity festival, and served as the president of the Visual Arts Week society in the same city. He is presently completing his doctorate on hospital architecture at McGill University, and publishes regularly in contemporary art and architectural journals, such as Canadian Architect.