The subterranean commute through Toronto’s subway system can be a gloomy ride. Shoved into an underground tunnel, cut off from sunlight and crammed together with a few hundred other passengers, it’s often downright miserable.

And according to some amateur art critics, a new installation at Union Station isn’t going to lift anyone’s spirits.

“It looks tragic, for some reason. It’s so depressing,” said Kelly Moniz, who scanned the public art piece as she waited for a northbound train on the Yonge line. She wondered if repeated viewings might make daily commuters sad. “I don’t want to get out of bed and see that every day.”

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The huge installation, called zones of immersion, consists of a 150-metre screen of seven-foot-tall glass panels in alternating colours, erected between the newly renovated station’s two glistening platforms. Its mastermind is Stuart Reid, a multi-disciplinary artist and OCADU environmental design professor who, in order to create the piece, spent hours riding the subway, sketching passengers and writing poems. He later enlarged his drawings and text and transferred them to the glass, which was painted and acid-etched.

While some of Reid’s depictions of transit riders are amusing — on one playful panel a baby on his mother’s lap can be seen picking its nose — many appear to take a much darker tone. Some figures are rendered only as ghost-like outlines, grouped together like a ghoulish gang or the shadows of atomic-bomb victims. In one section a woman looks away while wearing an expression of utter despair.

Julian Detlor, a personal trainer who lives near the station, found the images disturbing. “You know in a horror movie where there’s always like the creepy kid’s drawing? That’s what it looks like,” he said. “I don’t know who thought that was a good idea.”

The artist himself explains that his goal was to create an authentic reflection of what it’s like to ride the subway, by capturing both its lighter and more melancholy moments. “It’s a bleak world down there,” Reid said in an interview. “I wanted to make it beautiful in some way, but I didn’t want to make it phoney beautiful.”

Reid likened his piece to listening to the blues when you’re already feeling down. “It meets you where you’re at and deepens that experience,” he said. “We are constantly in this world of being distracted by ads to the Bahamas and promises of advertising . . . This is to say, ‘here’s where we are, this is our life.’ ”

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Reid added that although his work has been installed, it won’t be fully finished until the renovation of Union’s platform is completed sometime in the coming weeks. He promised the piece will look more vibrant when it’s properly lighted.

According to the TTC, Reid received $160,000 for “services and expenses” related to the work, while the cost of physically installing the mural was included as part of the $137-million station overhaul. Depicting the darker side of the subway ride might seem like an odd choice for the TTC, which has made concerted attempts in recent years to rebrand itself as rider-friendly.

Commission spokesperson Brad Ross, however, said Reid’s piece “captures, in fact, the modernization efforts of the TTC.”

“The art wall is stunning,” he wrote in an email. “We look forward to Union Station opening fully where the installation can and will be fully-appreciated by the public.”

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