Trajet
Caroline Monnet and Dean Baldwin Lew, Trajet, Lassonde Art Trail. Photo Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker
Trajet, 2025
Caroline Monnet and Dean Baldwin Lew
Bronze
Trajet acknowledges footprints made by Indigenous ancestors that were uncovered in blue clay on the floor of Lake Ontario in 1908.
Using a sketch made before the footprints were erased by the building of a waterworks tunnel in 1908, Monnet and Baldwin Lew invited Indigenous community members to reaffirm this 11,000-year-old historical presence. Guided in ceremony by late Elder Pauline Shirt, Anishinaabe, Cree, Dene and Haudenosaunee Torontonians cast their prints in clay, creating a monument in real time that was later cast in bronze.
Trajet is permanently integrated into the landscape of Biidaasige Park at the bend of the new Don River mouth. The artists’ intention was to locate the sculpture as close as possible to the river, so that when the water is high it may touch and even fill the footprints. This placement allows visitors to pause and look in the direction of the lakebed where the footprints were found.
The names of all those who contributed to the making of Trajet, including those who walked across the clay in 2019, are etched into the edge of the sculpture.
Trajet was commissioned by the City alongsideTypha, a second sculpture by Baldwin Lew that can be viewed at Leslie Street and Lakeshore Boulevard.
Caroline Monnet
Algonquin Anishinaabe - French
Caroline Monnet is a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and French ancestry, originally from the Outaouais region, who lives and works in Mooniyang/Montreal. With a deep interest in communicating Indigenous identity through complex cultural narratives, her artistic and cinematographic work grapples with colonialism’s impact, updating outdated systems with anishinaabeg methodologies. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and across Europe at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, New York; the Toronto Art Biennial, Ontario; KØS Museum, Køge, Denmark; Musée d'art contemporain, Montréal, Quebec; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario among others. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America and at the Maison de l'UNESCO in Paris. Caroline Monnet is represented by Blouin Division in Montreal and Toronto.
Portrait of Caroline Monnet. Photo Max Richard Tremblay.
Dean Baldwin Lew
Canadian
Dean Baldwin Lew gambols down many avenues of art production, prioritizing projects that cajole people into various forms of gathering. He is of Irish-Acadian-English-Scottish-Chinese ancestry and is the current generation of family restaurateurs going back a century. Having grown up in his mother's restaurant, he iterates on themes of hospitality, conviviality, performative still-life, and the structural discrepancies around which we pivot. He is represented by MKG127 in Toronto, Ontario where he was born. He lives in Montreal, Quebec and he also makes wine.
Portrait of Dean Baldwin Lew. Photo Karen Kraven.
