A plastic pond filling up a rectangular well with paper water-lilies floating, bubble wrapped salmon made from shoe boxes, cardboard trees springing up along columns and elevator shafts, with their leaves splayed out against walls and railings, all these are transforming The Montréal Eaton Center into an ecosystem using various by-products from the shopping center’s recycling bins.
The artists behind this project are Roadsworth and Brian Armstrong (a.k.a ’2Youth’), both renowned in the urban artistic landscape of Montréal. Their installation is not an attempt to recreate nature in all its glory. On the contrary. It emphasizes the irrecoverable loss of a natural and original state.
“There is also something comforting in this artificiality despite the loss that it represents. It confirms for us a suspicion that humans are somehow separate from nature and satisfies a desire to insulate ourselves from our environment, an evolutionary response perhaps to the threats that have always existed there. The orderly arrangement of bottles that make up the waterfalls and pond and the regular placement of trees along architectural lines satisfy a longing for order and the illusion that we are somehow above the messiness and chaos of the natural world, an artificial representation of nature preferable perhaps to the reality of it. “(via projekroom)



