Ground/works is an intervention into three sites across the University of Toronto Mississauga’s campus. It considers the relationship between infrastructure, land, and the ways in which the radical interference of human activities on the earth have been mediated by issues of ownership, power, cultural memory, and capitalism. Each work selected for the project offers a unique perspective on human interventions into the landscape, and the transformation and translation of materials between earth, ground, and infrastructure.

Lisa Hirmer’s series of photographs, Leslie Street Spit Geologies (2012), is a visual documentation of the accumulation of clean fill, demolition waste and other detritus that forms the seemingly “natural” environment of the human-constructed spit that abuts Toronto’s shoreline. Young & Giroux’s conceptual film installation, Infrastructure Canada (2010-2012), considers the intersecting relationships between industrial structures, residential development and Canada’s naturally occurring ecological infrastructure.

A third component of the project is an installation by curators7. A pile of soil will appear in the atrium of the Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) building and will be on display to the public three days prior to the opening reception. Launching the project, the dirt pile is an intervention of raw land that draws attention to the surrounding infrastructure by contrasting dirt with architecture.

Together, these projects are immersive, disruptive, and raise questions about the expectations we have of land and its use value. By distributing these works across multiple sites, the exhibition challenges viewers to reconsider how meaning is inscribed in the UTM landscape. Ground/works reveals how infrastructure itself can both facilitate and interrupt our movements on campus, and how art can interject new narratives by temporarily interceding into these spaces.