Gerry Wright facility artwork pays homage to significance of public transit

Art designed by Shaheer Zazai is seen on the side of Edmonton's Gerry Wright Operations and Maintenance Facility is seen in this undated photogrpah. (Credit: City of Edmonton)

Edmonton’s newest public art piece is a 40-metre long installation along Whitemud Drive.

The artwork on the Gerry Wright Operations and Maintenance Facility depicts flowers growing along a vine, which its artist says represents the role public transit plays in cities.

“It mimics transit systems, which (are) the vines or the stems to the flowers. And the flowers, for me, are the communities… and wherever a community anchors – call it a stop on a transit system – that’s where a flower grows,” Shaheer Zazai told CTV News Edmonton in a virtual interview on Friday from Cypress, where he lives when he’s not in Toronto.

“The age of the community became represented in the size of the flower…. As a result, the work ended up being titled ‘In Community We Grow,’ nudging at the idea that transit and migration is what ends up connecting us and taking us places, and that ends up being the channel of nourishment.”

That the Gerry Wright facility is a service centre for the Valley Line was also a part of the inspiration, Zazai added, as was Edmonton’s diversity.

He designed the work over a few years, originally planning a mosaic-style design but ultimately throwing the idea out because the artwork is most visible from Whitemud Drive.

He sketched a first draft in Excel then created a mock-up of it on the building.

The logistics of the next part, the fabrication of the different layers in the piece, presented the greatest challenge of the project.

“Every colour is its own layer. It’s not like it’s been painted on,” Zazai said. “All the layers had to be designed separately. (Making) sense of how it would actually fit together, it was kind of like playing Tetris in Excel.”

The artwork was installed in the early new year. Although Zazai visited to watch part of the process, it didn’t feel real to the artist who had never created something so large.

“Which is why I need to come back when all of the construction mode is gone and the actual landscape is done and there’s just it living in the space,” he said.

“I would hope that people can live with it and drive by it and find something of their own within it, whether it’s finding your childhood or finding the textiles of your grandmother in it. It has a little bit of all of us in there, I hope.”