Forks unveils public washrooms, public artwork

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This article was published 07/08/2023 (269 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Public washrooms are usually thought of as drab, unhygienic, and to be avoided except when necessary. The new second-floor washrooms at The Forks Market, however, seek to be flush with excitement.

The new facilities, unveiled Tuesday, boast floor-to-ceiling artwork from five local artists.

“New bathroom space was needed,” said Zachary Peters, communications and marketing manager for The Forks North Portage Partnership. “And then once creating and designing the new space, we decided, ‘Why not make it beautiful?’

“A little bit of the mantra of The Forks is ‘make it beautiful’ and one of the ways that we do that is with public artwork.”

The Forks then set about to find the right people to help fill the vacuum. It landed on Synonym Art Consultation, a Winnipeg-based recruitment and staffing business for artists, which recruiting three different artists to decorate the washrooms.

Botanicals in Motion by Erin Ahl wallpapers the stalls with images of wildflowers and prairie grasses. The new family washroom is covered by a series of designs by Jazz Aline, called L’eau a L’air. An exhibit called Flash Wall, which includes the hand-drawn designs of tattoo artist Kiana Jade, covers much of the rest of the space.

Neon lights displaying lyrics by local musicians Andrina Turenne and Alpha Toshineza covers the walls near the sinks, including “Le ciel est rose, ma vie en prose (the sky is pink, my life in prose),” from Toshineza’s song Supernova.

Toshineza said he was asked by Synonym Art Consultation for permission to use his lyrics, which he happily gave. Although it didn’t give a specific reason for choosing those words, Toshineza said he believes it’s because, in French, they rhyme and because they conjure up the type of evocative images The Forks wishes to display with the new installation.

“Le ciel est rose, ma vie en prose… that sums it up well, I think,” Toshineza said Tuesday. “(The Forks is doing this) to add some poetry to life and to mundane things.”

It’s easy to discount the aesthetics of bathrooms as being unimportant, Toshineza said, but “you can really judge a place by its bathroom,” and putting in a bit of extra effort for its patrons is worth The Forks’ while.

“I love it, I think it’s great,” Toshineza said about the use of art in such a space. “If I go to a restaurant or whatever, based on my experience with the bathroom, I might come back or never come back to that place.”

Toshineza is a francophone hip-hop artist and graphic designer originally from Luxembourg, who chose to move to Winnipeg in 2014, in part because he was curious about its music scene. Originally, he planned to only stay for a year, but found the vibrant underground art scene to his liking and decided to stay.

“The fact that geographically we are far away from all the big hubs… Manitoba is able to create its own creative niche or bubble (and) that allows us to be more creative and resilient,” Toshineza said.

The originality and unconventionality borne of Winnipeg’s isolated creative arts scene has found a home at The Forks many times before, and has once again with the downtown attraction’s most recent installation.

graham.mcdonald@freepress.mb.ca