The Mihevc/Miller/Artscape Development Wins
Council Approves Wychwood Barns Option 4
The fight for Liberty Village
Local artists struggle to keep creative spirit alive, writes Leslie Scrivener
April 22, 2007
In Ante Sardelic's basement studio, which is windowless and lit by unforgiving fluorescent lights, paintings and prints are stacked to the ceiling and a Mozart serenade fills the air.
He is in his element here, with music, art and poetry. "I started writing," he says, "when I found I couldn't express enough with my drawings."
For all its order, the Liberty Village studio isn't big enough to hold all the tools of his varied trades, so neatly arrayed in the corridor are two printing presses, a barrel of plaster, some high-quality paper and his paintings.
Croatian born, he is a sculptor, painter and printmaker who has exhibited in museums around the world. This is a new studio for Sardelic, 60, who moved in January from the nearby Liberty Market Building, where he'd had a studio for 25 years.
The Liberty building is part of the redevelopment in the Dufferin and King area, where condos, a Dominion grocery store, upscale lofts and spaces for "creative businesses" – mostly marketing and dotcoms – are taking over the early-20th-century industrial buildings that until recently housed many artists' studios. The best estimates today are that the area holds some 500 business and 6,000 employees.
A former munitions factory, the Liberty Market Building at 171 East Liberty St. – "where industrial chic meets the street," or so goes the developers' marketing slogan – was once decidedly down-market and home to dozens of artists, most of whom were forced to decamp when the new owners, Lifetime Urban Development group, bought the building in 2004. Lifetime is renovating it, in a smart red and black color scheme, and has raised the rents.
Bearded, with wire-rimmed glasses and the intense look of an Amish elder, Sardelic does not complain about the clean, serviceable, 500-square-foot studio he now rents at 60 Atlantic Avenue from Artscape, a non-profit organization that develops affordable work and living spaces for artists and "culture-led" projects.
Once in his studio, Sardelic doesn't look outward for creative inspiration – it comes from within, he says. But he misses the camaraderie of his old friends. "I don't mind business moving in, but don't push artists around," he says.
He hasn't met many neighbours in his new studio, though recently a pianist and two sculptors introduced themselves. "This is what we need, to connect in meaningful ways," says Sardelic. But artists also need to be connected to the community, he argues. Otherwise, he says, "We can become too sterile."
Sadly, though, in Liberty Village – as in other up-and-coming neighbourhoods in the downtown core – artists are now being forced to count their dollars, and often realize they can no longer afford the area they helped revitalize.
Out go creativity and eccentricity, to be replaced by commercial forces that relentlessly homogenize a neighbourhood.
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