The thing that devoured Fort York!

Something strange has been growing under the Gardiner Expressway. It took root in late April, when the artist Leeroy New arrived in Toronto with members of his Manila-based studio. For six days a week, New and his team were at The Bentway, cultivating a web of monstrous vines — curling tentacles made of woven bamboo and upcycled plastic. 

As of today, their creature — an installation called Balete Bulate Bituka — is ready to be seen by the public. The piece features as part of The Bentway's summer season (Beyond Concrete), a free exhibition of public art and other programming that launches tonight with a ticketed block party on The Bentway Skate Trail.

Other artists featured in The Bentway's outdoor exhibition include locals Alex Sheriff and Lisa Jackson, but even mixed in with the other projects, New's contribution will be impossible to miss. Balete Bulate Bituke has fully ensnared the south-facing façade of the Fort York Visitor Centre, and the building will remain in its squiddy embrace until Sept. 24 (Beyond Concrete's final date). 

From the right vantage point, Balete Bulate Bituka suggests a sort of sci-fi siege. (I'd recommend viewing the scene from the grassy park above the visitor centre — the sight of giant tendrils rising over the ledge really sells the notion of an alien presence run amok.)  

Is Toronto being invaded by kaiju? Kraken? Or is Mother Nature herself in revolt — bursting through the roads and condo towers to take back what's hers? It's your call, really. The installation suggests a beautiful nightmare, however you slice it. 

To build it, New wrestled with bamboo and plastic trash to weave Balete Bulate Bituka's twisting limbs, and the artist has created similar installations in cities around the globe. Other examples of his work are currently on display at the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna and the Green Island Human Rights Art Festival in Taiwan, but the piece for The Bentway marks his first major commission in North America. 

Balete Bulate Bituka is actually part of an ongoing series of works that reference the balete tree, whose sinewy trunks are a common sight in the Philippines, where the trees figure in old myths and stories. "It's a sacred tree in Southeast Asia," New explains. 

Past Balete installations have been built using industrial pipes, film reels, hoses and other second-hand plastic: colourful trash that the artist acquires from local sources.

"There's always this element of chance and improvisation. You never know what you're going to get in terms of the discards," says New. But at the same time, his practice requires extensive planning. 

To secure enough raw material for the Toronto project, New says he began hunting for resources more than a year ago. Ultimately, he gathered approximately 7,500 pounds of building material, including heaps of donated plastic: things like water-cooler jugs (factory rejects) and other used containers, items that were destined for the recycling bin. (In fact, they still are; when the installation is removed at the end of the summer, the plastics will be sent to a recycling centre.) 

The installation will also serve as a sort of garden, and a variety of real live plants have been added to the structure. With luck, they'll flourish over the course of the season, enveloping the art installation in leafy vines.  

In a lot of New's work, sustainability is an undeniable message. But when asked about his interest in the theme, New explains that his upcycling habit is often just a practical choice. For years, he's been committed to making large-scale installations, artwork that's meant to be shown in unconventional public spaces like The Bentway. 

"It's just good practice to set limits and be more mindful of the materials we use," he says. "It wasn't meant to be some world-saving, world-changing attempt, you know, until it gained a life of its own as an art practice." 

When New began working with discarded objects, his logic was simple: "Why not?" And back home in Manila, he was seeing used plastic everywhere. "We are a big market for global companies, for their products in plastic containers. It's a major problem," he explains. Still, the city's trash "was almost like an infinite resource." 

"Everywhere" extends far beyond the Philippines, and you can learn a lot from a place just by looking at its garbage. "It's always different with every country," says New. In Japan, he discovered that plastic bottles were plentiful — and the citizens were fastidious about cleaning and sorting their recyclables. In the Philippines, people rely on bottled water — "so you get all of these large, plastic containers." As for Toronto, New doesn't reveal what he's gleaned about the city so far, but it has something in common with every other place he's worked: "You can't get rid of plastic," says New. "It seems to be everywhere."

Balete Bulate Bituka isn't the only project that New will be bringing to Toronto. For the Beyond Concrete launch party, the artist will also present his Aliens of Manila — a project that began as a spoof on Humans of New York. Over the years, New's "aliens" have been played by a rotating cast of collaborators, folks who don his wearable sculptures in surreal street-style photos. 

"You feel like you're displaced in your own city," says New, talking about life in Manila. "There's horrible public transportation, like crazy traffic," he says. "We have just really poor planning, generally. So we wanted to capture this … in the costumes that I make."

New has built 10 new garments for The Bentway launch, and they're all made of discarded objects. Toronto-based vogue/ballroom artist Danah Rosales, a second-generation Canadian-Filipinx, has choreographed a dance for a cast of extraterrestrials. If you miss the show, a repeat performance is being planned for this year's Nuit Blanche, and the piece is intended as a nod to Toronto's overseas Filipino workers (OFW). 

The Philippines' migrant workforce includes members of New's own family. His mom is a nanny in New York, he says, and she's worked as a caregiver in the States for nearly 17 years. His team members have relatives working abroad, as well, and as New is increasingly commissioned to make art around the world, he's felt a stronger kinship to the OFW community. "I've learned to kind of associate my working in different countries as part of that phenomenon," he says. 

"The labour part of it, like the actual building of something on site … it's all part of the performance, part of the experience, part of the concept and the context of the work."

Beyond Concrete. Featuring Leeroy New, Genesis Báez, Public Visualization Lab/Studio, Double Happiness, Alex Sheriff, Lisa Jackson. May 26 to Sept. 24. The Bentway, Toronto. www.thebentway.ca