Dan Bergeron
Dan Bergeron is a public artist who employs a range of styles, themes and materials to activate and explore the meaning of our shared public spaces.
Category: Artist/Individual
Discipline: Public Art
Program Affiliations: Artist Roster
About Dan Bergeron
I am a self-taught visual artist who employs a range of styles, themes and materials to explore the meanings of our shared public spaces. Using various media - photography, sculpture, installation, murals - I create works that are responsive to their historical, social and environmental context. Growing out of this context, my artworks aim to open a dialogue with viewers, offering new modes of engagement through both intimate familiarity and wonder at the unexpected.
I have installed uncommissioned works in cities around the world including London, New York, Paris and Amsterdam. I have also completed commissions for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. My mural works are located in majour cities across Canada and I have created permanent public artworks for the City of Toronto, the City of Richmond, BC and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
https://www.fauxreel.ca
SGX Glass panel commissioned by The City of Toronto
Faces of Regent Park
Faces of Regent Park (2015) is a gateway artwork located in a large entry plaza that aims to represent and connect the newly revitalized community through portraiture. The mixed-media works depict members of both the old and new Regent Park communities, combining their portraits with local graffiti tags, patterned effects that symbolize the energy of human movement and the distressed surfaces of aged architecture and infrastructure found in and around the site.
Interactive Sculpture commissioned by The City of Richmond
We Three
We Three (2018) is an interactive playground sculpture comprised of three wave-shaped forms that invites users to climb, straddle, slide and play within the space it carves out. Like a traditional sculpture it is intended to function as an object of visual interest, as the form and colour of the work connect the user to the landscape of the nearby ocean and low water table that Richmond sits upon. As an interactive sculpture designed specifically for a children’s playground and inspired by ideas centred around free play, the work aims to invite play without fully implying how the play should proceed, creating an object that challenges the predictive play that traditional playground equipment often forces on the user.
Mural series commissioned by The City of Toronto
Ascent of the Embryophyta
The murals of Ascent of the Embryophyta (2017) were painted as part of a large-scale, green energy renovation on high-rise towers in a densely populated area of Toronto. Using imagery from the landscape in the adjacent ravine, the murals connect the natural world to the buildings and to the people living in them, signifying the greening of the energy grid, while beautifying the area and evoking the ideas of community growth through organic growth.
