CANADA AT WORK
My photographic explorations spanning a fifteen
year period have been an investigation of abandoned and distant technologies.
Admittedly, with changing economics and technologies, the industrial concentration
of eastern Canada experienced an enormous shift as witnessed in the abundance
of abandonment. As these structures were seemingly being demolished subsequent
to each of my random interventions, their imminent disappearance heightened
my intentions. My camera became the medium with which to learn, discover and
explore these colossal spaces and particular objects. Once inside these structures,
I was compelled by the sense of archaeological rediscovery through a contemporary
investigation. These once dominant and powerful industries have been transformed
into poignant skeletons still housing the secrets of their existence and by
extension, our own.
Within these industrial remnants silently lie the fragments of their former
processes. Violently lacking any sense of scale or function, these spaces
exist in a permanent state of decay often inhabited by what I would call,
unacknowledged sculpture. I believe I am transforming hideous decadent objects
into images that isolate their inherent essence while establishing a perceptual
ambiguity. My work attempts to introduce an arena of obsolete processes to
better understand its history. We unknowingly co-exist with infinite products
of these technologies in an environment which is 'much more structured for
the well-being of technology' than for our own, as stated by Ursula Franklin
in her book The Real World of Technology. And more recently, performance and
video begin to express new concepts about how things are made, where things
are made and why things are made. Is it by natural progression or by political
design that we live within a specific technological culture?
