A Group of Seven (2000)

Bill Jeffries , January Wolodarsky

Empire Centre Shopping Centre, 4600 No. 3 Rd.

Area: City Centre
Location: In parking lot of the shopping centre.

Materials: Basalt, fountain and garden.

Program: Private
Ownership: Private
Sponsored By: Hazelbridge Development Corp.

Description of Work

A large earthen-coloured concrete ellipse is inset with three circular components. One circle is the Chinese calendar, another is a pond into which water flows, and the last is a miniature garden of native plants. The ellipse contains the pond and the planted area, just as nebula are containers, and interacts with the calendar as if the ellipse and circle were engaged gears.

The work is based in geographic/cosmological themes. The large oval shape is a lightly incised system of cartographic reference lines and is criss-crossed with grid lines referencing the earth's latitude and longitude lines. Set into that macroscopic context is a Chinese calendar and a ring of seven columnar basalt rocks, the work's key visual element, which forms a henge-like circle around the pond. Each of these rocks has a classical Chinese character sandblasted onto its top surface - each character signifies a day of the week, a planet and one of the seven basic 'elements' that make up the structure of the world in ancient Chinese thought (moon, fire, water, wood, gold, earth and sun).

Artist Statement

It is not always easy to 'nest' a bit of nature in the bleakness of the modern shopping mall - there is never the space or the money allocated to introduce, or retain, a substantial piece of local nature. We have placed a 'nest' of native plants in the central circle as a reminder of what was once here. The 'seven' in this work are, on the one hand, an ironic reference to the seven 'shopping' days of the week, no longer just the 'seven days'. The Group of Seven, Canada's most famous commemorators of 'the natural', are here quietly commemorated themselves, in our title, as a reminder of how 'unnatural' this site has become. Our seven stones surround a pond, as if they are looking into it for inspiration in the midst of automobile culture.