Alt-Arts: Project Underwing in the backyard
A series of profiles, written by Ashley Culver, highlighting alternative art spaces in Toronto and the people who make them.
Emma Welch, installation view from Mane Pattern, 2022.
Photo: LF Documentation.
I walk along Lonsdale Road on the shady south side of the street. Arrows drawn in sidewalk chalk direct me up a driveway. It is Sunday, August 25, and Katie Lyle and Stefan Harhay are hosting the opening of Laura Demers’s exhibition Season Creep with Project Underwing, their backyard project space. Entering the yard, I survey the scene. Cyanotypes hanging from the laundry line. Ice chest of petite cans of natty wine and bubbly water. Oil paintings on the exterior of a green shed. Acquaintances matching in striped shirts. Goldenrod blooming. Dappled afternoon sunlight. I join a few people encircling a tree. My eyes take a moment to find a bronze weather stick attached with wire to the trunk. Demers explains that the exhibition’s title “is a scientific term that refers to changes in the timing of the seasons. This causes other natural phenomena to fall out of sync.”
Two weeks later, early September, school is back in session and the goldenrod has faded from yellow to brown; I return to chat with Lyle and Harhay. This time, inside the brick house over tea sweetened with honey.
The couple met at an opening at Mercer Union and now calls this house home. Yet, when they refer to it as a family home, they are speaking of Harhay’s maternal grandparents, its previous occupants. Harhay moved into the house in 2013, after his grandparents passed and he returned to the city from Montreal, Quebec. Lyle moved in the following year. As they recognized their unique privilege in having access to a garden, Lyle and Harhay thought of how to share this sentimental space.
Laura Demers, installation view from Season Creep, 2024.
Photo: Miles Rufelds.
On August 13, 2017, they hosted a one-day exhibition, Things slowly curve out of sight until they are gone, featuring oil paintings by Jennifer Carvalho. Lyle and Carvalho were studio mates. Soon after meeting, they shared a space in the Coffin Factory at the southeast corner of Niagara and Tecumseth Street (once factories of the National Casket Company, it’s now being redeveloped ), and subsequently a space in The Bradshaw Studios on Adrian Avenue. “There’s a familiarity from watching each other’s work develop in the studio. The artists whose work you tend to connect with and continually have conversations around—it builds an understanding,” says Carvalho. “The familiarity builds over time. There’s this understanding of all the iterations they’ve been through. That is very rewarding.”
This was not the first time the two painters had worked together. In July 2015, Carvalho included Lyle’s work in the exhibition What she is not, what she is, what she can be, part of the summer-long backyard project in Carvalho’s then-home, called Garden Avenue.
“I feel there was an ethos of that around a similar timeline,” Lyle says of the beginning of what became Project Underwing. Her work was included in an exhibition in another nontraditional location: a small island in Stoney Lake in Peterborough County. Connor Olthuis and Caleb Dunham, who organized As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead (The Island), installed Lyle’s paintings as well as work by twenty-nine others in November 2017. Returning to the granite island six months later, in April 2018, Olthuis and Dunham documented the weathered and aged state of the exhibition before retrieving the work. “It captured my attention. My painting collapsed and sagged and weathered. And that stayed with me,” says Lyle. Garden Avenue and the attunement to site central to Olthuis and Dunham’s curatorial project, www.puddling.info, informed Project Underwing as it took shape.
Sara K. Maston, installation view from Watersnake, 2019.
Photo: Daniel Paterson.
Whether in her own art practice, art history, or otherwise, Lyle has a “preoccupation with artworks that change over time or break down.” This has led her to see their outdoor exhibition space “as an advantage.” Because it “is going to be exposed to the elements,” it is unpredictable in nature. She urges exhibiting artists to be receptive to this.
Harhay recognizes he acts as a support to Lyle in organizing Project Underwing, he takes the lead in tending to their garden and the ecological aspect of Project Underwing. He is pleasantly surprised when exhibiting artists share his interest in local living organisms and environmental concerns.
Harhay has been ripping out invasive species in the backyard his grandparents once presided over. Planting native vegetation is a way to create his own version. “It raises interesting questions about how much history you carry forward and how much you’re allowed to rethink history, especially familial history, when it’s problematic,” says Harhay, who navigates this tension in conversation with his mother, who lives nearby in the Riverdale neighborhood. The couple has a family photograph of Harhay’s mother as a baby in the backyard; some elements still stand, such as the green garage and the five-foot-tall ferns near the back fence. Others show the passage of time, such as a now-hollow apple tree and cedar trees noticeably larger than in the image. Harhay has planted a pawpaw tree, a now-endangered species in Ontario following a chestnut blight, and an oak tree.
Carl Marin, installation view from Good Days and Bad Days, 2021.
Photo: LF Documentation.
After an exhibition in 2018 with another of Lyle’s fellow painters and studio mates, Dylan McCauley, she longed to expand beyond her immediate connections. Lyle sees Project Underwing as an opportunity to work with other artists and to sometimes meet new people. “Toronto ends up feeling small in different ways,” she says. “In small ways, I’ve attempted to branch out.” So she reached out, with an invitation to exhibit in their yet-to-be-named outdoor project space, to Sara Kay Maston, whose work she admired in a group exhibition at Sibling, a since-closed garage space in the Stockyards neighborhood. Maston responded positively and, with Lyle’s encouragement, invited Kathleen Taylor and Benjamin de Boer to join her. The trio worked together at Art Metropole at the time.
“Maston, who is perennially interested in other-than-human life worlds, asked if I could help her dig some very precise holes up in the backyard, and I obliged,” de Boer recalls. “I met her dad out front, and we talked about masonry trowels for probably too long. We spent hours in the green, well into the darkness, getting low, carefully shaping octagonal holes for canvases to fit in, and filling them with water. Bugs, root strata, the smell of clay, evidence of rodent life, all tucked away behind that beautiful house.”
Their activities culminated in Watersnake, a one-day exhibition of work by Maston with a performance by Taylor and a reading by de Boer on September 15, 2019.
Lyle and Harhay run Project Underwing with ease rather than rigid rules. As artist Holly Fedida, who exhibited in 2023 in collaboration with Jasmine Yu, says, “their openness and playfulness are really special.” They aim for consistency more than anything. Exhibition runs range from a day to multiple months. Although programming occurs only once a year, usually in the warmer months, they acknowledge and accept exceptions. For instance, in 2020, no exhibitions were held, but in 2022 they hosted two exhibitions. This embrace of potential in a relaxed manner has allowed for longevity.
“I didn’t have a plan when it started,” says Lyle. “There is possibility in Project Underwing not being a commercial space. It’s not even an artist-run center. It’s make of it what you want, and that maybe means different things can happen.”
Holly Fedida and Jasmin Yu, installation view from Resemblances, 2023.
Photo: Garett Lockhart.
In 2022, Lyle and Harhay officially selected the name Project Underwing. They took the name from a gorilla naturalism project Harhay was undertaking in the Beltline Trail. This, in turn, admiringly adapted the title of Project Swallowtail—a collective in the west end of Toronto “empowering residents to restore nature.” The swallowtail is a type of butterfly, often with yellow and black coloration, found in Ontario. The underwing is a type of moth and also a native insect.
From the beginning, Project Underwing involved combining life and art. This only intensified when, in 2021, Lyle and Harhay had a child. “Having artists living and working in close proximity to domestic space is beautiful,” says Lyle. “To me, exposing Francis to an artist making a show in the backyard is beautiful.” This way of being and sharing space was not new to Lyle. In 2011, she worked as the administrative assistant at Western Front, an artist-run center in Vancouver, British Columbia, and recalls eating lunch with the residents, artists, and staff workers in the backyard.
Before leaving, I ask about Demers’s work, curious if they’ve noticed any changes since the Sunday afternoon opening. “The wooden weather stick right out the kitchen window has moved. So it’s responding to the temperature or the humidity, but we don’t know what it means,” says Lyle. Spider webs have grown across some of the weather sticks also, something Demers was keen for, and the family welcomed the activity of their fellow inhabitants of the backyard.
Laura Demers, installation view from Season Creep, 2024.
Photo: Miles Rufelds.
by Ashley Culver
Ashley Culver (b. 1986) is an artist and writer based in Tkaronto/Toronto.
