Kensington Market: Cat on a Chair

I'm Shirley Yanover and I created this sculpture with David Hlynsky, my partner, in 1997. You're looking at a cat on a chair 20 feet off the ground. This sculpture is a marker for Kensington Market. And when we put in our proposal for Kensington Market we had to address, it was part of the commission, the nature of the market.  So this sculpture, the cat on the chair, represents the domestic and the private aspect of the market that traditionally developed as waves of immigration came through Toronto. And most of the stores were in the first floor of houses where people lived. So it was a private activity in a public space that developed a community around itself.

So the chair is an old kitchen chair. It's based on a chair that would go back a hundred years, just as most of the houses do. And the cat represents the nature of the market, that there are so many cats in the market of necessity. Because you have all the food stores, the fish shops, the meat shops, cheese.  So, there's a large number of mice, so the cats are there to hold that in check. So at a certain point in time, every store I would go into had a cat or two. So that's what the cat represents. 

And the sculptures are 20 feet off the ground so they're actually much larger than life because of the perspective. The chair is one and a half times so it looks normal chair size from the ground, but they're actually very large. And the cat is perched with one paw up and its tail and its ears are all pointed forward.  And he's hunting, he's looking down the street and he's looking for some action.

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