When a place transitions from one thing to another – a forest to a garden, a farmer’s field to a subdivision, a house to a home – there is always a moment in between, a liminal state escaping definition, that doesn’t fully identify with the former or latter. Interspaces brings together four artists who look at places in this moment of transition. Through their documentary explorations they reveal these transformative moments, offering a chance to view the conceptual framework upon which these spaces are constructed.
In Under Construction, Peter Watson finds humour in the bizarre situations that arise in the moments before a building is demolished or completed. The former or future uses of the space are identifiable though objects like leftover church nativity props or palettes of seedlings but they do not fully embody their character. Through careful observation he identifies the artificiality of our highly advanced and efficient systems of redevelopment.
Similarly Daniel He’s project focuses on areas of land surrounding urban centres, positioned to become profitable through redevelopment and sprawl. Abandoned farmers fields are poised to entice homebuyers with their potential. His deadpan documentation reveals the absurdity of this artificial inflation with billboards bearing contradictory slogans and inaccurate demographics that sit above landscapes grotesquely reshaped to propagate development.
Dianne Davis’ research-based project green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous, pulls back the curtain on the systematic reshaping of the flora in the Niagara Region. Her science fiction-influenced documentation presents spaces used to cultivate non-native species used in European-style landscaping, a practice that has existed in the area since it was claimed as a tourist site by European settlers in the mid-1800’s. Davis’ series explores this unmitigated reshaping of the landscape in the region’s gardens, questioning this idealized concept of locality.
By carefully responding to his family’s adaptation to living in Canada, Esmond Lee’s Below the City captures the pursuit of home. Focusing on the domestic spaces of his parents and sister, he represents the tensions of cultural shifts inherent in immigration and the generational nuances of diasporic culture. By pairing cultural signifiers with the architectural features of suburban housing, Lee’s work quietly contemplates the challenges of rebuilding a sense of home and identity within a different places.
Interspaces does not serve as a documentation of place, but of transition. By looking at these moments in-between, the images do not read as nostalgic, but instead focus on the present, exposing the complicated construction of space.
