Brookfield Place continues their seasonal art installation series with the latest installment in their Snowfall project, Flurry. A series of 2,000 light-refracting sculptures, Flurry is an immersive art project conceived by Toronto-based public art and design firm Studio F Minus designers Brad Hindson and Mitchell F. Chan.
Last year, Studio F Minus and Brookfield Place unveiled Frost and Gust, the first iteration of the Snowfall series of innovative artworks designed to illuminate Brookfield Place for the festive season. Drawing from the other artworks in the series, Flurry takes its inspiration from the iconic architecture of Brookfield Place and from recurring patterns in nature. In Flurry, each snowflake is shaped through a deconstruction of the Galleria’s structural columns – the familiar Y shapes are combined and reconfigured to create 6-sided snowflakes, and highlight a conceptual connection between the fractal geometry of the building to that of trees and crystals in nature.
Each snowflake is made of a prism-like material, giving the entire installation a shimmering glow, and making the artwork change colors naturally through the viewer’s own movements. To create a realistic representation of a gust of snowflakes, Studio F Minus developed custom fluid simulation software that could generate semi-randomized layouts on the fly.
When developing the concept for Flurry, one of the greatest challenges was devising a way to hang and take down 2000 sculptures without damaging the ceilings of Brookfield Place. The artists developed a concept to attach each snowflake with a magnet, applying multiple coats of magnetic paint across 6000 square feet of the concourse ceiling to create the largest installation of magnetic paint ever produced. The hanging spots for each sculpture are labeled by writing directly on the ceiling in invisible ink that can be located using an ultraviolet flashlight for future use.
Thousands of these snowflakes snake and billow through the Concourse Level connecting through to Union Station. The project is easily accessible to visitors of the Allen Lambert Galleria at Brookfield Place, and to commuters via the city’s PATH network. Flurry runs from December 1, 2015 through until January 1, 2016. The Snowfall project is produced by Pearl VanderBerg Wagner.
