20 Polaroids
(10 Ft Sask/10 Toronto)
Artist Statement (2nd draft)


Toronto has enough variety to stay forever interesting. Fort Saskatchewan has smaller, more vernacular intimacies: the library, the post office, the Brant hotel, the Fort Hotel, the houses in the old part of town, near Ross and Lowe Drive.

All of those places mentioned are downtown. I am not sure how long downtown will last. Westpark works in symbiotic relationship with the highway strip. Those in Westpark, work in the plants, shop at Wal-Mart, and do not have to interact with the downtown---imagine their presence as slowly, but surely cutting off oxygen to our body politic. There is little effort to preserve the slightness of these places.

(I have one picture taken in Wal-Mart, the weirdest part, with the dead animals, smallest as well—I’m not a good enough photographer to take photos of anything else in that store.)

What doesn’t exist anymore, from the 24 years I have lived here: The White Clapboard United Church, the burnished maple and pebbled linoleum from the post office, the Saan Store, which used to be a signifier of prairie populism (Our Fields is also in jeopardy.)

Every time I come back home, Westpark, and the big box businesses near the highway, grows. The faster Wal-Mart grows, the faster down town dies. It is a race to the bottom. The charm and the preserving values of small places work in delightful opposition to the variety and strangeness of large places. Losing the balance is losing small towns. Toronto is not going anywhere.

The 10 photos of Fort Saskatchewan are what I would show Toronto folks, to indicate what is worth preserving, they are the small slippages of place and time that make Alberta towns so different and so consistent They are the Alberta that my mother’s father in Harmattan and my father’s mother in Galahad saw.

They also act as a ritual of remembrance. I do not think I can stay here, and sooner rather then later, when I am in some bedsit on College and Lawrence or Jane and Finch, I want to remind myself of the Fort, and I want to tell other people why this town is in me.

I took the Toronto pictures from my trip there between mid- September and early October, they also act as rituals of remembrance—that I want to live in Toronto. This is not a popular opinion. The west hates the east. My personal history is littered with slogans about the eastern bastards freezing in the dark, and discussions about the Globe and Mail being for eastern elitists or phone conversations about how those in Toronto, never understand our literature.

(That said, the photo I have shown in Toronto, and my writing career there and in American centers, has been about Country, the music and the landscape—there is something exotic and marketable about being from the west—some remaining, cowboy ethos that is rewarded)

The photos here are about the tensions about place, nostalgia, ambition, and seeing what is in front of you. They are about personal history and social history, in a place. I am glad that my first solo show will be in that place.