New York-based artist Mary Mattingly’s installation Second Shade is part of The Bentway’s 2025 summer exhibition, Sun/Shade.SAMUEL ENGELKING/Supplied
On a recent afternoon, a six-metre sand dune was being shaped beneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway. Its contours caught the warm light as a loader beeped and reversed, stirring and mixing.
What looked like a construction site was in fact preparations for a performance in the shade: Sand Flight by Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksdal and director Jonas Corell Petersen. Running June 12 to 15 at The Bentway, the work imagines a Toronto so changed by heat and drought that desert dunes have migrated into the city and locals are seeking refuge from the heat in the shade.
The performance is the centrepiece of Sun/Shade, The Bentway’s 2025 summer exhibition, which runs through October 5. Curated by Alex Rand, the season brings together artists and designers to explore the meaning of shade in a warming world. Several installations – by LeuWebb Projects, Celeste, Edra Soto, Natalie Hunter, Tania Willard and Mary Mattingly – use fabric, latticework and flora to consider how the city might offer refuge from intensifying sun. Meanwhile, Moving Forest by Dutch firm NL Architects, will send a group of 50 maple trees in shopping carts across the city, delivering shade where it’s needed.
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“As our cities are getting hotter, there’s a unique positioning of the Gardiner as a canopy,” said Rand, programming manager of The Bentway. “We are thinking about how we can collaborate with the sun in a new way.”
That line of inquiry now resonates beyond aesthetics. Toronto’s climate is changing, and fast: The number of very hot days – above 30 C – is projected to triple by mid-century. In a place that thinks of itself as a winter city, this demands a new sensibility.
The concept of “shade equity,” Rand suggested, will be relevant. “We need to bring awareness to who has access to shade, and who does not,” Rand said. “How can we design our public spaces to be more forward-thinking in their shade design?”
The works in the exhibition pick up on this logic. In Willard’s Declaration of the Understory, the concrete columns of the highway are reimagined as trees, supporting the forest floor below. Soto’s La sombra que te cobija / the shadow that shelters you creates a sculptural gateway inspired by the decorative façades of Puerto Rico, filtering patterned shadows onto the pavement. And in Casting a Net, Casting a Spell, artist duo Celeste suspends a handwoven canopy above one of the site’s brightest areas, reframing it as a new space of gathering.
In Sand Flight, eight dancers will move on and with the sand, accompanied by a 50-voice choir and an immersive soundscape. “The sand is something that can help them move, not only as an obstacle,” Petersen explained.
The dancers will be “working both with and against nature,” Fiksdal added. “It’s also about the human relation to cities and to landscapes.”
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The Bentway itself provides a tool to explore that relationship. The unique space, which runs for 1.75 kilometres under the Gardiner on the west side of Toronto’s downtown, has embraced shade as a feature since it opened in 2018. By repurposing the Gardiner as a sheltering canopy, it has become a venue for art, skating, community gathering – and now, through Sun/Shade, a test bed for climate-adaptive urbanism.
A new phase of development called Bentway Islands will soon expand that logic westward. Designed by Field Operations and Brook McIlroy, the project will convert three traffic medians east of Spadina Avenue into an extension of The Bentway. The site is part of the city’s Under Gardiner Public Realm Plan, endorsed in 2024, which reimagines the full seven-kilometre corridor as a network of shade-rich public spaces.
The signal is clear. What was once residual infrastructure is being reframed as civic canopy. “We’re collaborating with the sun,” Rand said. “And we’re asking how shade can help shape the future of the city.”
