The Power Plant

This summer The Power Plant is partnering with Bowery Project for the inaugural edition of Smokestack Garden: a series of temporary gardens commissioned specifically for a strip of land lying at the foot of the gallery’s iconic chimney, a flue-gas stack built in 1926 for the burning of coal. Each summer, the landscape adjacent to The Power Plant will be revitalized with unique gardens that can be viewed throughout the summer months.

This ongoing project revisits Artists’ Gardens, a series of commissions presented on the Harbourfront Centre campus during the 1990s that engaged numerous local artists. Thirty years on, creating space for artists, gardeners, and thinkers to reflect on issues of climate justice, food production, inter-species care, and the harmful effects of the energy industry is more necessary than ever. The Smokestack Garden series allows them to do so in a particular and thought-provoking location that lies between natural and post-industrial worlds.

Bowery Project is a Toronto-based non-profit organization dedicated to creating opportunities for urban agriculture by temporarily transforming vacant and underutilized public spaces. Focused on mobile urban farming, it designs, builds, and manages above-ground growing systems across downtown Toronto. For the first garden in the Smokestack Garden series, Bowery Project is growing a variety of indigenous pollinator-friendly flowering plants, using The Power Plant’s discarded shipping crates as planters. Their project is designed in response to the exploration of gardens and botanical life in the exhibitions by Toronto-based artists Shelagh Keeley and Emmanuel Osahor inside the gallery.