SHADOWLAND
TORONTO, 2022–2024
Ravines have always been sites of instability and change, and this is especially true in the age of the Anthropocene. By their edges, city pavement cracks and foundations falter. Slopes sink and slump. Water jumps its banks. Half-forgotten and often buried, the city’s creeks wind their way through the urban grid, frustrating our attempts to build in straight lines and demanding our attention.
SHADOWLAND explores the tensions between the rational, built world of the conscious city and the unbuilt, unconscious ravine world that undergirds and erodes it. Ravines are Toronto’s defining topographical feature; they are also its defining metaphorical feature. Dark, mysterious and often irrational, they function as the city’s unconscious, as Margaret Atwood observes. SHADOWLAND conjures up a dreamscape that challenges rational, human-centric ways of thinking and gestures towards mythic and ecological understanding.
Twelve images from this on-going project will be paired with a soundscape at the historic kilns of the Evergreen Brick Works as part of Toronto’s 2024 CONTACT Photography Festival. Opening May 1, 2024.