84 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 85
Eldon Garnet Garden
of Hell on Earth #10 2 016
C-print 10 6.6 cm x 1.5 2 m
COURTESY CHRISTOPHER CUTTS GALLERYEldon Garnet has always moved with ease and assurance (and
with such obvious entitlement) among a number of genres —
poetry, fiction, photography, photo-installation, sculpture and
video. Moreover, he has continually infused his work in all
of these disciplines with an unassailably high level of quality.
A lavishly protean creator, Garnet has generated enough
material, over the years, to nourish and ornament half a dozen
separate art careers simultaneously.
A major part of his reputation rests upon his successes in
the demanding and often frustrating realm of public sculpture:
one thinks of his iconic Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese
Railroad Workers in Canada(1988–89), his mordant To Serve
and Protect (1987– 89) for Toronto’s Metropolitan Toronto Police
Headquarters, and Time: and a Clock ( 1996 ) his lacy, Heraclitus-
inspired bridge over the Don River at Queen Street East in
Toronto (“THIS RIVER I STEP IN IS NOT THE RIVER I STAND
IN” runs the meditative text under which automobiles and
streetcars so routinely pass).
More recent works include his funny and moving Equal
Before the Law(2 0 11) at the McMurtry Gardens of Justice in
Toronto—where a bronze lion and lamb really do lie down
together on a seesaw and balance each other perfectly—and
his brilliantly disorienting Inversion (2 0 11), at the James Cooper
Mansion condominium complex in downtown Toronto, a
rather unsettling hymn to our tenuous relationship, as city-
dwellers, with wildlife (here, a clutch of bronze wild animals —
deer, wolf, fox—just barely co-exist while, strolling straight
down the building’s facade, a huge bronze, many-antlered stag
casually disregards gravity, content to lend the work gravitas).
Given Garnet’s standing as a maker of public sculptures, it
may seem a bit perverse, then, to afford those highly visible
works short shrift here. But they are, indeed, highly visible and
very easy to find, and much has already been written about
them. Much less familiar, by contrast, are Garnet’s writingsThe later work of ELDON GARNET
THE
PLEASURES
OF HELL
BY GARY MICHAEL DAULTGarnet_ sp16_13TSLR.indd 85 02/01/16 10:17 AM