Thematically, my work deals with living in a precarious world. My point of view is secular. I use narrative to puzzle out how, without an external guiding code, we can determine and maintain humane social relationships.
Everything needs everything: rehearsal for disaster plays out under Toronto's Gardiner Expressway. While depicting Toronto today (and it could be any city), it is also a projection into the future - a bleak apocalyptic future. Emptied of people, except for the girl and the baby, the scene is a backdrop for a moral crisis. It portrays the moment of action when the girl, regardless of consequences, has committed herself to saving the baby.
We know disasters happen and we can't control that. We can, however, try to control how we respond and the idea of a rehearsal for disaster relates in this way, to the Freudian idea of obsession as a psychological preparation. The series as a whole revisits disasters and tries each time to show courage - at least in the imagination - our last and first defense. Along with the thrill and pity of vicarious destruction, the work is concerned with mutual dependency, with not giving up and not giving up on each other. In this work the sense of place comes from the physical, temporal and psychological place in which the girl finds herself.
The artist would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for a Material Assistance Grant for the installation at Loop
at Elora Centre for the Arts
earlier print work
