A letter to a contractor stresses the urgency of a previously placed order for a hatch to be added to a roof. On an architectural plan, the hinges of a door have been reversed. Photographs show crowds of people, or an aerial view of a building. These fragments add up to an archive that attempts…
Category Archives: Texts
Artin’ Around Waterloo and Newfoundland
Several years ago, a 17-hour train trip brought me from Montreal to Moncton. I spent the next few weeks travelling the stony coasts of the Maritimes, wondering if I could squeeze in Newfoundland. But as Waterloo-based artist John Hofstetter recently told me, “you don’t ‘squeeze in’ Newfoundland.” Continue reading in The Community Edition →
Use It or Lose It? On preserving empty heritage buildings
Fifteen years ago, the spaces behind the red-brick façade at 48 Ontario Street North were emptied out, and so they remain today. But a group called Friends of 48 Ontario is pushing to reanimate the 106-year-old structure, which was home to the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 50 for half a century and is now owned…
Architectures of (De)Colonization
Follow the Grand River towards Lake Erie and you will find a bend in its waters encircling a significant place. From a nearby street, you can glimpse the building down a long driveway flanked by trees. The approach is leafy, and only upon emerging at its entrance is its grandiosity fully revealed: symmetry, neoclassical features,…
Poetry: Untitled
under a fruitless tree, you …..consider …..the crackle overhead …..transmission lines strung with intermittent …..messages – short thoughts …..expiring with the dying whine of cicadas the grass quivers, stomach all tied up …..in knots a naturally-occurring …..electro- magnetic field palms firmly grounded …..against the…
On Making Art that Makes Itself
The ambiguity of nets, curtains, veils, drapes—means of concealing that can also reveal—permeates the large-scale works by Barbara Hobot currently on exhibit at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG). On the wall hangs a piece of faux leather vinyl cut and flared like a skirt; on the adjacent floor lies its aesthetic relative, partly draped over…
From Instrument to Evidence: Selections from an archive of assimilation
The documentary remnants of these projects, built and unbuilt, locate these building typologies within the colonial agenda: whether carried out on the reserves to displace traditional ways of living on the land, or off the reserves, in the case of residential schools that were intended to indoctrinate children into Euro-Canadian customs. Continue reading in ARPA…
