Winter Stations opening was a family and friends affair for Beacher Will Cuthbert
By ALAN SHACKLETON
Winter Stations 2026 is officially up and running on Woodbine Beach.
The opening ceremonies on Family Day (Monday, Feb. 16) drew a big crowd to the beach to take in the five outdoor art installations which will be on display until the end of March. The installations are located along the beach, from approximately the Donald D. Summerville Olympic Pools to the Woodbine Beach Bathing Station.
The theme of this year’s Winter Stations was Mirage, and it invited artists to “play with the boundary of what is seen and what is real in the age of AI, and explore public art as infrastructure that gathers people” into a shared reality.
For Beacher Will Cuthbert, designer of the Embrace installation, Family Day was the perfect date to celebrate the opening of Winter Stations as he had a large number of family members and friends for the launch.
“It’s really exciting and fun to be here, and to have such a big entourage that came out today. It’s really nice,” he told Beach Metro Community News while standing beside Embrace.
“It’s great to have all my family and friends here, and also for me to stay connected to the Beach. Everybody I know has been coming up to me and high-fiving me.”
Embrace is about viewers of the installation seeing change and gaining new perspectives depending on the angle they view the two hands coming up out of the sand (and snow and ice) and seemingly embracing the lifeguard station. Approached from behind the hands seem to be entirely black but as one walks around, more colours reveal themselves.
“I wanted to take the theme of Mirage and create something that would change depending on where you looked at it,” said Cuthbert.
“As you start to come in you see the silhouette from the back side and then as you get closer you start to see hints of colour and as you come around you get the full spectrum.”
For Cuthbert, this is the second time he has had an installation be part of Winter Stations. He previously was part of Winter Stations in 2022 for The Hive installation, designed with fellow Beacher Kathleen Dogantzis. Both Cuthbert and Dogantzis attended Malvern Collegiate Institute, and they are now married to each other.
Cuthbert moved to Saskatchewan with Dogantzis as she works there as a scientist. Her work schedule meant she was too busy to work on the Embrace design with him for this year’s Winter Stations.
Along with Embrace, the other installations making up this year’s Winter Stations are Crest (University of Waterloo); Specularia (United States); CHIMERA (Germany/Ukraine); and Glaciate (Toronto Metropolitan University).
Specularia designer Andrew Clark, from Portland, Maine, said designing artworks near water is a familiar concept for him. “A lot of what I do is connected to water and coastline,” he told Beach Metro Community News.
The Specularia installation invites viewers to walk through and experience five different views of the lake which blend “deception and reality” with only one of the views depicting the truth.
CHIMERA, designed by Denys Horodnyak from the Ukraine and Enzo Zak Luz from Germany, has mirrors on different angles surrounding the lifeguard station. Those mirrors present viewers with a “fragmentation of physical and digital realities” depending on their position.
Crest, designed by the University of Waterloo team ofClay te Bokkel, Isabella Ieraci, Matthew Lam, Sasha Rao, Simon Huang, Oskar Peng, and David Shen, is a large wooden structure appearing as like a cresting wave. There is a bench inside the “cresting” wave for viewers to sit and “share a fleeting moment of reality” before the wave breaks on the shore.
Glaciate, designed by Toronto Metropolitan University students Finn Ferrall, Nicholas Kisil, Marko Sikic, and faculty supervisor Vincent Hui; Toronto Metropolitan University, Department of Architectural Science, in collaboration with Ming Chan University; Taiwan, examines the freeze and thaw cycle of Lake Ontario through a series of translucent panels that can be viewed from different positions. From outside Glaciate, the red metal of the life guard station can only be seen in fragments, and from inside the view of the lake appears as if a mirage.
Since 2015, Winter Stations has been displaying outdoor art installations on Woodbine Beach and it has become a launching pad for new ideas in public art. Every year, the hundreds of submissions are reviewed by a jury. This year’s jury was made up of Jason Thorne, Katriina Campitelli, Alana Mercury, Luisa Ji, and Janna Hiemstra.
Winter Stations are made possible by RAW Design, kg&a, Northcrest Developments, City of Toronto, Mechanical Contractors Association of Ontario, Ontario Association of Architects, MicroPro Sienna, Feeley Group, Sali Tabacchi Brand & Design, and Meevo Digital.
To learn more about this year’s Winter Stations at Woodbine Beach, please visit https://winterstations.com/
