This workshop will invite participants to explore the built environment through personal memories. The city is often explored as an external observer through architecture and street photography, which focuses on facades and pedestrians. Artist Esmond Lee will encourage everyone to look deeper by examining their own relationship with place. Lee will expand the notion of the city beyond urban centres to include the beauty of peripheral landscapes. Participants will learn to build concepts from a personal experience or memory, and explore the built environment with intention and purpose.
Based on time allowance, participants are encouraged to bring personal experience or memory of a place for group discussion, which can be developed into a project after the workshop. As an option, bring one image (found, archive, your own) that reflects your idea to share.
Esmond Lee is an artist, researcher, and architect based in Toronto’s suburbs. He explores long-term, intergenerational experiences of migration in peripheral spaces, examining identity, belonging, and nuanced cultural and political borders in the built environment. Recent works include a continuous 250-foot vinyl mesh installation for Nuit Blanche Toronto, developed during his time as the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence, and a 30-foot tall installation at Malvern Town Centre for CONTACT Photography Festival. His upcoming projects include a photobook, Below the City, recognized by the Burtynsky Grant, and a community photobook for Toronto
Public Library’s Artist-in-Residence program.
