While barriers are often implicated in larger concerns related to control and power structures, fences can also provide security and sanctuary. Drawing out these tensions, LeuWebb Project’s site-specific work ‘Long Division’ uses the fence as a starting off point to consider how the land around Mississauga, Ontario’s Bradley Museum has been occupied, settled and colonized.

The land art installation features a series of loosely concentric rings with discrete openings, inviting participants to move within the layers of fencing, ultimately drawing people to the impenetrable centre ring. Looking both forward and backwards, LeuWebb’s ‘Long Division’ calls into question the site’s origins and settlement while looking to the fence to expand outward to the current and near-future ideas of nation and boundary, the impermeability of borders and the shifting relationships and attitudes toward migrant’s and refugee’s freedom of movement.

The artists further explain that this work “engages in a dialogue with the Bradley Museum site and adds a new critical layer that opens up questions about control, exclusion and inclusion, ultimately seeking to complicate the idea of fence through subverting its function and formal qualities, inviting the potential for play and participatory structural manipulations.”

The work was commissioned for the ‘Public Volumes’ exhibition, May 2019, curated by Noa Bronstein, and including artists Joi T. Arcand, Germaine Koh, Morris Lum and others, in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

About LeuWebb Projects

Founded by Christine Leu and Alan Webb, LeuWebb Projects operates at a variety of scales and across a range of disciplines. Light, space, texture and sound are key components of their work that they weave together through the innovative use of materials and technologies to create site-specific art that is not only seen but is also experienced. Their collaborative practice draws on art and architecture, embracing the process of creative exploration to produce moments of beauty in the public realm. They seek to engage people with both the tangible and the ephemeral aspects of everyday life by creating art that stimulates curiosity, suggests play, and inspires its participants. They have lived and worked in Montreal, New York, London, Denmark, Rome and Helsinki, and currently, reside in Toronto.