Same As It
Ever Was
By Morgan Sears-Williams
To be in relationship to a place is to be in constant mourning. To lose what was once there. To feel loss for the potential or future of a place. To be constantly shifting. It is to force yourself to accept that things as they are now, will never be so again.
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Last summer I moved from my home of 10 years across Turtle Island to the land of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A place that held early childhood memories as my family lived here from 1992-2000, and which has changed drastically since I was 8 years old. Our old haunts that held visceral memories are now gone or no longer recognizable. I reflect on how I have attached myself to otherwise unimportant spaces, such as a street corner or a park, leaving them steeped in meaning that was created by me. As I sit with the works grouped by the theme ‘place’, I am ruminating on how the ways we remember can fail us as years pass, so that our imagination - or the lens, in the case of this exhibition - fills in the blanks.
Throughout the Place section, the selected works explore remnants of memories, home, and displacement. Landscapes, seemingly abandoned spaces, portraits of community members, acts of cultivation and destruction are all intertwined to question our human relationship to space. An air of haunting leaves traces on these works making me question: what makes a place?
Ida Arentoft’s Fallen Apples suggests both the narrative and gesture of collecting apples, the communal resources of land and food. Against the backdrop of the north shore of Georgian Bay, Kate Schneider’s work The Weight of Your Cool Embrace includes two images of rocks balanced carefully on her extended arm, contemplating our sense of belonging and responsibility to the land we are on. The title of the work also leads me to consider how our idea of home grounds our sense of responsibility to each other. These works speak to an embodied sense of the intertwined nature of landscape, kinship and place.
“An air of haunting leaves traces on these works making me question: what makes a place?”
Landscapes are not the only illustration of our connection to a place, the works of Raquel Diniz and Gina Lundy speak to larger social constructions of space, what is deemed for ‘development’ by corporations but was already being used by local residents. In Raquel Diniz’s image Space of Possibilities, “DON’T BUILD HERE” is written in black capital letters on a bed sheet tied to a fence. Although taken in London, it could be mistaken for Toronto or Vancouver as the fight for affordable housing plagues so many cities across the world. In dialogue with Gina Lundy’s Fantastic New Community in which we see a large black construction barrier next to a clear winding path, these works question how capital’s interests intersect with the human right to housing and quality of life. We can even see these ideas in the titles of the artists work Space of Possibilities and Fantastic New Community both tongue-in-cheek references to new development billboard advertisements and questioning: who is this new community, who is the space of possibilities for?
While some works in this collection reflect on personal memories and shared community histories, some show places from history that are in the process of crumbling, such as Stacey Tyrell’s Chattel series. Tyrell documents the island of Nevis where her family is from, many of the images are of chattel houses where enslaved people were kept and their descendants lived, and this larger history casts a shadow over her idyllic childhood memories of playing in the lush vegetation and hazy ruins.
Each image is a pause in time and space that these artists have created through the lens. Every time we revisit a location steeped in personal memories and it isn’t the same, it feels like an act of displacement, making us question our own place in the world. The works in Place evoke both a re-membering of what made us feel belonging and an everyday haunting: the decay of memory and land under advanced capitalism.