Aeon
Permanent public artwork · 2025
- ArtistDavid Spriggs
- LocationSimcoe Place, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- CommissionCadillac Fairview through Paul Kyle Gallery
- Dimensions470 × 69 × 305 cm
185 × 27 × 120 in - MaterialsLayered cut aluminium sheets and custom structural framework
Aeon is suspended above opposing escalators at Simcoe Place, where its radiating metal structure frames a dark, offset void. Movement through the atrium transforms the work from a concentrated emblem into a shifting architecture of planes, reflections, and intervals.
The form suggests an eye, an aperture, and a portal without resolving into a single symbol. Its centre exerts a strong visual pull, yet remains open. What gathers the image is not an object but an absence.
Because the work is encountered in circulation, no position provides a final view. As visitors rise, descend, and cross the atrium, its apparently continuous curvature separates into individual aluminium profiles and forms again.
The eye and the interval
The eye like form makes vision both the means of encountering the work and one of its subjects. Its diminishing profiles organise attention towards the void, while their displacement prevents the image from becoming perfectly centred or static.
From the front, the planes cohere into a concave field. From the side, the depth of the construction becomes legible. The work holds these readings together: a complete image and the visible intervals from which that image is made.
Time as a spatial condition
The title derives from the Greek aion, referring to an age, a duration, or eternity. Here, time is not pictured as a sequence moving from past to future. It is experienced through repetition, return, and the changing relation between a stable structure and a moving body.
Aluminium gives the work architectural weight, while its shifting reflections make that solidity visually unstable. Light travels across the cut edges and changes the apparent depth of the form, allowing permanence and transformation to occupy the same structure.
Commission context
Aeon was commissioned for Simcoe Place in Toronto by Cadillac Fairview through Paul Kyle Gallery. Suspended above the building’s escalators, the permanent work is integrated with the principal paths of movement through the atrium.