“Between Your Love and Mine”
River Trail, 1265 Parkview St.
Detroit, Mich.
Through Sept. 30
Sometimes you just want a quiet place to sit and think. Maybe it’s about borders. Maybe it’s not. Both options are welcome at “Between Your Love and Mine,” a landscape art installation in Detroit’s Little Village corridor, behind The Shepherd. The exhibit is essentially a creatively-mowed circular park that seeks to remind people of the longstanding, close relationship between the United States and Canada — especially Detroit and Canada — and ponder the nature of borders. It is part of Detroit’s Month of Design, curated by Canadian artist Stefan Novakovic featuring work from designers from Office for Strategy + Design, the Studio of Contemporary Architecture, Undecorated and Castor Design.
The park is made up of four sections: The Meadow creates a field of “flowers” using colorful utility flags — a humbling play on the idea of nationhood — that features a charming Munchkinland-esque curved path within it. The Grid features 36 wood posts arranged in a grid — a deconstruction of the linear use of stakes to create a boundary. The Porch is a modest stage made of recycled materials meant to represent a gathering space for cultural exchange.
But the best of the lot is The Swing, a set of three distinct tire swings that hang from a large, shared tree to express a defiance against the rigid nature of borders. There’s just something nostalgic and freeing about swinging, enhanced when it’s in a (somewhat) random tire swing from a protective-feeling tree, instead of an overly structured, child-filled playground. After walking around the rest of the park — which doesn’t take long — it’s a fun spot to sit and chat for a while where time seems to stand still.
While the borders concept is subtle — markers explain the concepts at each section — “Between Your Love and Mine” is incredibly peaceful and got better the more I walked through it. It’s a hint of nature within an industrial city and offers an interesting contrast of perspective of both at the same. There were only two other people at the park walking their dogs the evening I was there, which made me both happy for the solitude but also a little bit sad that more people were not taking advantage of this experience. There’s only one week left of the exhibit, when I assume the park will return to a big open field with no fancy mowing patterns or utility flags. But I do hope we can keep the swings.
Follow Midbrow Detroit on social media:
Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X.
