Passages: Cities and People

Cities are an expression of the human race. Cities and people are systems that continually interact with each other, like water and seaweed. How does the city, the built environment, affect how we think, feel and behave? With that question in mind, I spent October 2019 in Montreal on a self-directed residency. I narrowed in on people moving through the city, in public places, particularly on the Metro system. This is where I best observed the interplay between people and spaces as they navigated their days, at once individually and collectively. It also tied into my abiding interest in transition, in liminal states, and in temporality. People and cities are in continual states of flux. Working with a combination of analog and digital processes, I make ink drawings on sheets of polyester film and digitally combine these with photographic images; this effectively adds a layer of light and shadow, texture and pattern. Embracing the concept of embodied cognition, my goal is integrated, expressive and intensified images that more fully convey what I perceived when shooting the original images. I then produce monoprints by manually transferring laser prints of the images to matte translucent polyester film, using an acrylic medium transfer process. The result is transparent images on translucent film. I enjoy the push and pull between control of the process and surrender to the imperfections - tears, scratches, finger marks, unevenness - that inevitably happen. These marks are integral to the work and, combined with the transparency of the work, contribute to an ephemeral, not-quite-solid, timeworn feel.