community lanterns – dylan toymaker

Air Quality Health Indicator Lanterns

blue wooden lantern with purple lights inside, edmonton city hall inside architecture in the background — My first Air Quality Health Indicator lantern inside Edmonton City Hall

Did you notice the air recently? Have you looked up the weather on your device to see what Environment Canada’s testing sites have to say about how safe your air is? I write this a week after forest fire related air quality challenges hit Alberta in the worst way in years. I was checking every day. Am I biking my kid to school? Wearing a mask all day? Kinda like how you dress for rain or sun or snow. Except where I am, we usually don’t have to think about if the air is going to damage you.

Carbon Monoxide map of Alberta showing enormous levels in fire locations. 17 May 2023 — Carbon Monoxide heat map of Alberta 17 May 2023

So 5 or so years ago, one of the open data people at the City of Edmonton called me up to ask if I could make them a lantern that would work with a wifi lightbulb they had hooked up to Environment Canada’s website. It was a cool script that pulled the current Air Quality Health Indicator number, referenced that colour, and displayed it on the wifi smart RGB LED bulb. Yes of course I said. That lead to a design you can still find on my web store called “Sporiffic”. At that time we hadn’t had the regular crazy fire smoke outs, but I was getting hit hard by spring pollen and snow mold spores. I built the lantern to hang from a ceiling in city hall, but then when they decided they didn’t want to have to hang it, I also built a plinth to put the lantern up on. The project was well received, and I really enjoyed putting together an artistic vehicle for a practical informational display purpose.

Over the next three years a couple of other Airshed Alliances in Alberta contacted me to design cool display lanterns for them using the same wifi bulbs and widgets. I integrated the size of the plinth to make a full size yet portable public art piece. The current full size versions stand 6′ tall, and have artwork related to the organization and land they live on. Lakeland Industry and Community Association (LICA) and Peace River Area Monitoring Program Committee (PRAMP) have this newer style lantern. The next year I made some desktop models at about 20″ tall, so that they can have an office version as well.

This whole process took me down a fascinating rabbit hole of sensing devices, display options, where monitoring takes place, how individual vs institutional technology can work, and what kinds of things are legible at what levels of monitoring. It seems like there is much greater consumer access to sensing and monitoring now, with on going technology improvements and years of focus of air quality and safety. I think there is room to do this artistically still, and I hope to integrate some of the sensing as the open source side of sensing and monitoring gets more accessible.

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Skate Path Lanterns

Skate Path Lanterns is a fun project I’ve been working on since 2016, when Edmonton Parks approached me to develop some work for their new Freezeway/IceWay alternative skating paths. They had some room to run ice trails through trees and around a park, so they wanted some artistic lighting in the darker areas. The first couple years I used my regular hanging lanterns, and then some alternate styles. For the 3rd year I believe I developed a new post mount lantern that has become my go-to for this application.

There are now Skate Path Lantern sets in Edmonton, Lacombe, Strathcona County, and St. Albert, all in Alberta, Canada. Each one has a different custom design pattern, often a snowflake related to their community design.

It’s been great to see this grow. I would love to see this project encourage other forest skating paths around the places that have snow. I can support this as an artist or work with other artists as a consultant and platform supplier.

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Flying Canoe Volant 2023

2022-2023 was an exciting winter for me, a lot of events happening almost on top of each other. This edition of Flying Canoe Volant brought me to some new collaborations, and the realization of some long held dreams.

The Airship was a big project, a collab with GABS, another local Edmonton light based artist allowed me to work on a dreamed of upgrade to my Canoe Chandeliers. Last year after the event my brother Robin and I were looking at all the things we’d set up. That may have been his first time looking at everything set up in a while, so he was pretty excited about some of the work. We came up with the idea of an Airship Canoe, with flapping paddles for propulsion and flame (effect bulbs) for lift. Later that year I talked to GABS about collaborating on a crew, and she developed an amazing soft sculpture cast of birds and rodents. Apparently they were not on good terms with each other, so the title of the installation is “Squabbles” and features captured birds on a Squirrel lead ship. The birds may have been accused of stealing the squirrels nuts, but I imagine they would have an alternate explaination.

I also put together a new set of fabric lanterns, now called the Fab4 (cause there are 4 of them) and got to involve Marissa Mars in painting them. She came in for a day and sprayed the set with my stencils- I love seeing other artists us my stencil set because it always turns out so different than what I do with them.

I also got to make some cut up canoe installations. This is part of a bigger project that I hope to see develop, but that’s top secret. Anyway, first step has happened and they were super fun.

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Flying Canoe Volant 2017

2017 featured a lot of community art participation, I lead a workshop at Bonnie Doon Community League to make a series of “Church Steeple” lanterns (for the church steeples that the voyageurs were supposed to avoid running into on their canoe flight) out of cardboard and coloured tissue paper. These lanterns were featured on the street way into the ravine, in yards of community members.

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Flying Canoë Volant 2016

Every first weekend of February, in my hometown of Edmonton, we have this amazing weekend festival in the woods of Mill Creek Ravine. This is one of my favourite places in the city, and it is such an honour to be trusted with lighting it up for tens of thousands of people to explore.

This is a short video from Explore Edmonton that highlights a lot of what our event is all about.
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2016 Lantern Craft! Workshop and Parade

In March 2016, I was funded by Make Something Edmonton’s Winter Project Accelerator Grant to run a lantern craft workshop and parade. It allowed me to offer a free workshop with a fairly fancy set of materials, so I was quite excited about that.

The Lantern project was based on twine, twigs (branches) tissue and twinkle lights, and has a diverse set of possibilities within a fairly unified colour scheme.

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Flying Canoe Volant 2015

coat of arms- canoe with crossed paddles and wings, moon over with crown of stars, snowflakes beneath — new design for the flying canoe volant

The Mill Creek Adventure this year was a major stretch for me. Scheduled for a week after my other biggest winter festival commission, I had to juggle 5 workshops, up to 10 workers, a whole class of artists, dozens of projects, and hundreds of details. Sometimes I felt like I was driving between sites for a month. But in the end, it worked out. and the last two days of installation were surprisingly easy. Delegation to competent staff pays off… except in the visceral sense of feeling like I’m focused on making art. I suppose that’s what large scale art management is about.

In the chaos, I managed to bring 3 new major lanterns to the event, and a much deeper colour palette to my older lantern work. New LED colours… as fun as christmas for me!
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This gallery is from Paula Kirman; you can find her edmonton events photography on flicker

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New lanterns!

New may be an exaggeration in this particular case, I’ve had this style for several years now. But I did do a recent run of new cuts and added some fresh LED options to the colour palette. You can find many of these on my ETSY store, which you can access from the menu above.

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wood cut lantern in new colours- pink, blue, green.

Winter Light 2012: Mill Creek Adventure Walk

People passing thru the Gate of Winter Light
January 27 and 28, 2012, myself and the rest of the Winter Light team launched an ambitious project; to do more with less at our now hopefully annual Mill Creek Adventure Walk. The story this year was seeded by Carol and Bill, and told the tale of an Eager Beaver’s attempt to build a Lodge big enough to Block Out the Stars.

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Mill Creek Adventure Walk Flys Again

Adventure Walk Flys Again

February 1st and 2nd marks the 3rd Mill Creek Adventure Walk, and the first time this walk has been produced by La Cité Francophone. As you may or may not know, Winter Light, the previous producer has ceased operations in September, so myself and vast numbers of the public are grateful and excited that La Cité has picked up this amazing event.

This year’s event featured the legend of The Flying Canoe and The City of Light, an old French and native story about some Voyageurs who make a deal with the devil to fly their canoe home to visit loved ones. And they had to be back by midnight or they all turn into pumpkins. Or something like that, I never have much time to follow the story, to busy setting up lanterns.

Installation-wise, we had a limited new-work budget to play with, so the focus was on revising and re-arraigning. Fortunately I have a lot I material that has never shown in the creek before, so that plus some subtle upgrades and the new, shorter walking path made for fresh lighting experience.

The other big change was a fancy new home base at La Cité. Great venue for performance and gathering. Also an amazing workshop setup to develop and stage from.

I’m going to take this opportunity to
thank and recognize some people:
Robin, Brett, and Scott for throwing down without much notice, yet with enough understanding of my scene to deal with the work efficiently.
Memi for the use of her fabric lanterns.
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Winter Light for putting all that material into the hands of artists and event producers.
La Cité (Daniel, Mirielle, Shannon, and the rest) for picking this event up.
Matt for being the full time winter guy that makes it all stick.
Marissa for keeping track of batteries an all the rest.
Hydrosion, for supporting my design with the robot-assisted cutting you all saw.
Rose, my boss, for all the time off to make this happen.
The weather for being awesome.
And my wife Janelle and baby for coming out to enjoy the walk with me, and patience thru the way too busy develop and install phase of the work.
And you know, everybody …

You can see more at the city of lights.

Send an email to someone ( La Cité, City Councillor, Edmonton arts council) if you want to see this event again next year!

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