In Community We Grow: Where art and movement intersect

Commuters along Whitemud Drive can now spot a striking new addition to the city’s public art landscape: a vibrant floral artwork climbing along the exterior of the Gerry Wright Operations and Maintenance Facility. Created by Toronto-based Afghan-Canadian artist Shaheer Zazai, In Community We Grow depicts a pixelated vine system with flowers in different stages of bloom. The pixelated floral design symbolizes growth, unity, and resilience, forming a dynamic visual story about interconnectedness and the relationships that help communities flourish. 

To explore the inspiration behind In Community We Grow, we spoke with artist Shaheer Zazai about how the project evolved from his usual studio practice, and how the artwork explores transit’s role in supporting movement, connection, and collective growth.

What drew you to apply for this public art call?

I saw the call for submission on Akimbo, and then curator Nadia Kurd encouraged me to apply. I don’t have a background or history in public art, so I was hesitant, but when I got that message, I thought I should give it a try. 

This is the first major large scale work I’ve taken on. Technically, this is the first public art I’ve done that is going to stay up permanently; I’ve done some temporary public installations: some light box works that were up at U of T Mississauga for about four months; video work at Emily Carr; a small-scale work with a community arts organization that works with low-income housing in Etobicoke, Toronto. But this scale and magnitude was not anywhere in my imagination. 

As this was your first permanent piece of public art, what surprised you most about this process? 

The big surprise was how much an idea transforms with time. When I work on artworks of course ideas evolve and things change in the process, but I hadn’t experienced an artwork evolve over this much of a duration. When there’s years involved and you explore the materiality and start working with the logistics of it, everything ends up informing the artwork in different ways. 

From what I imagined I was going to do, to figuring out how this could even be done, the idea had to evolve and change so that the logistics and ideas could come together on the same plane. Before that it’s like they were sitting on completely different levels, and they both had to slightly adjust till they came to being on an equal playing field. I didn’t expect this much evolution to happen, but I’m quite happy with the outcome. I would have not done what I’ve done if it wasn’t for it being such a durational thing. 

Tell us about the inspiration behind the design of this project and the connections you’re exploring in the work. 

Flowers are in most of my recent bodies of work. That also comes from my work’s history referencing textiles and culture. When we look at different communities and cultures around the world, when it comes to textiles, we’ve all been speaking the same language; we just don’t look at it that way. We’re so focused on the differences, but if we actually look at the textiles of the world, we can see that everybody speaks the same language. 

Textiles were the core, but the more I looked into communities in Edmonton and how diverse they are, and the more I thought about the fact that the public art is going to live on a transit systems property, it made me think deeper into the relationship of transit, migration, communities, and diversity. All those things go hand in hand. 

I’ve designed and imagined the piece In Community We Grow as a vine; the vine stems become the transit system that moves the nourishment required for the flowers to grow. For me, the vine stem is the transit system, and where there is a flower, communities have anchored. The communities are connected by the transit system; it’s what moves them around and fuels the communities. The different sizes of flowers in my work represent the different stages of a flower blooming, from a bud to a fully bloomed flower, which also speaks to the different ages of each community. There are some communities that have been around for thousands of years, and then there’s ones that just appeared yesterday, but they’re all living in this ever-evolving way. Communities evolve, but transit systems and migratory routes connect us. So, we have a lot of parallels as humans in nature, we just don’t look at nature as much anymore to reflect on it and see ourselves in it. 

Tell us more about your process of creating digital designs using Excel.

To map the design, I had to look at the building and understand what kind of grid would fit the space, and that ended up being a four-inch grid. That four-inch grid told me what my pixelation limit was, and how it could still be perceived as pixelated and yet appear floral. 

This goes back to textiles. Textiles are a series of numerical decisions. We choose how many knots it takes to make an image in the same way image making digitally is a series of pixels. Image making computers owe a lot to textiles. Computer language — binary language — comes from a Jacquard loom. 

Going back to Excel and Word, it all started with Microsoft Word for me. It was a self-prescribed punishment because I was opening my laptop too much and not actually doing anything with it, just scrolling Instagram or Facebook. I told myself that that day’s task was to sit and type 2013 dots and spaces. That’s all I was allowed to do. When I finished it, I started giving each highlighter color a numerical location on the page. I would count the number of characters and place the red where it belongs, yellow where it belongs, etc. And because of numbers and repetition, patterns started forming. That’s when I realized that I’m not doing something unique here, what I’m doing is using the language of textiles. That led to the works looking textile-like. 

Ending up in Excel was kind of a natural progression. There is software that is designed for textile design that looks pretty much like an Excel file. Coming from my project management background, I’m sitting on Excel all day for work. It is a tool that was already there that gives me perfect control when making grids and placing things where they need to be. 

What do you have coming up? Anything exciting happening that we can share?

I think the most exciting thing that is coming up is rest. I have a solo exhibition right now at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Other than that, I don’t have anything immediately scheduled, which is kind of nice to say. I’m focused on fully finishing this public art piece — there are a few more flowers to be added. Once those are up, I can actually look at it and be like, all right, we’re done. I’m looking forward to when the landscaping is done and it’s fully blooming in the area. 

Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto-based Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. His practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora.