explorations in toronto art.

I’ve been digging into some of my back-burner projects, as I try (but often fail) to do during periods of downtime. Right now, the project is to revisit and work on some photos I made during a trip to Iceland, more than one year ago now. I processed the film and scanned them almost as soon as I got back, but then quickly got wrapped up in something else.
Now I’m looking at them, along with other images I made around the same time, during a trip to Montreal. Most of these are just fun, sentimental pictures, but it’s kind of mind-boggling how easily I had forgotten about them.. partly due to the usual “sands-of-time” sort of reasons, but probably more due to some flaw in my workflow and image filing.

Here’s a selection of some favourites that I had forgotten about:

Sabrina and I made a trip to Montreal with Bob in May of last year, for visiting and preparing for Le Mois de la Photo. Sabrina and I bought some fancy foraged mushrooms at the farmers’ market, and this is a photo of the dinner prep (we ate them with peas and asparagus, in pasta with some cream.) We/I got cold feet on the mushrooms at the last minute, fearing their safety.. but that’s another story.

Here is a diptych of the train ride home.

Here is a terrible scan of a landscape.. but just to look at it I can’t tell where it is. Most likely Iceland or the Ottawa river.

Yet another “How have I lived in Toronto for four years and never been here!?” moment happened this weekend: I ventured eastward to the Leslie Street Spit.

On the beyond-unseasonably-warm afternoon that we were blessed with on Sunday, I met up with a good friend of mine (an explorer and wanderer extraordinaire) and together we biked  into the hazy sun at the lake. The light was incredible, in the way it can only be at changing seasons, when the sun is close to the earth but there are barely any leaves to block out all the light. Between this, the bizarrely warm weather, the quiet and breeze, and the long path stretching ahead of us with no visible end, there was a definitely otherworldly feeling to the whole place. My companion remarked that it felt like we were walking toward the afterlife, and it was a pretty apt description.

We came upon a place that looked like, for lack of better description, a prehistoric swamp. I half expected to see some dinosaurs come stomping by, like no big deal. These formations of logs and little rounds of wooden fence were so bizarre-looking, and it wasn’t until I began to edit these pictures that I realized that combined with the skyline in the background, they really throw off the sense of scale. Check out my tiny friend, who is definitely not tiny in real life.

In case you didn’t know, the spit is a man-made extension of land that extends out into Lake Ontario. It goes out even farther than the islands, and it’s made of clean fill and construction materials. Much of it is covered by grass and soil and growing things, but at the water’s edge, its humble and odd origins are made visible. The shores are scattered with weathered, rounded bricks, rebar, and a wide selection of excellent skipping stones.

It was such a magical place— I can’t wait to make more visits in all seasons.