Recent Paintings

These paintings grew out of my experience of Ontario Place's West Island, a mature forest and beloved public park on Toronto's waterfront that I had been painting for about a year before it was demolished in October 2024 to make way for a private spa. W.S. Merwin's poem "Unchopping a Tree" provides the titles for both the exhibition and individual works, while decommissioned auction catalogs of Canadian painting supplied the material for the collages that informed the paintings. Merwin's poem also features in the accompanying video, "Reading Merwin at Ontario Place," in which I read it aloud from the Martin Goodman Trail as heavy machinery behind me pulled the last remaining trees from the ground. The paintings were exhibited in "Everything is going to have to be put back."