A new installation by Alex McLeod at Toronto’s recently launched public space, The Bentway, uses 3D software to create layered still and animated scenes which form a space between worlds. Green Hills Discovery is on show until 18 February 2019. Displayed as digital images mounted on pivoting panels, the piece brings the hyper-real into contact with the real - visitors can walk up to and interact with the work.

The piece, titled Green Hills Discovery, is a landscape blending digital and arboreal, dense city scapes and dense woodland, to create a semi-mythical, hyper-real, oddly familiar space perpetually on the brink of transformation or the revelation of secrets. Located in a new public space beneath a 1958 concrete expressway, the piece is a meeting-point of digital, industrial and natural architectures.

Green Hills Discovery was developed through an iterative collaboration between artist and software. McLeod planned the elements of imaginary worlds, which were simulated by the software - scale, placement and colour determined by algorithm. The mounting of the images on pivoting panels means that the space between worlds can be altered by the wind, or by people passing by.

Green Hills Discovery is part of the Bentway’s Fall Season Public Art Exhibition, If, But, What If?, which runs until 30 November and foregrounds the work of local artists. The exhibition questions the past, present and future of the city, asking how Toronto should evolve in the future and what to learn from historical events that have altered the cityscape. Exhibiting artists include Michael Awad, Steven Beckly, Wally Dion, Mani Mazinani and Sanaz Mazinani, Alex McLeod, Sans façon and Jon Sasaki.

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See Green Hills Discovery at The Bentway, 250 Fort York Blvd, Toronto, ON M5V 3K9, Canada until 18 February 2019.