After West Island

These paintings grew out of my experience of Ontario Place's West Island, a mature forest and public park that faced demolition. I work by harvesting images from decommissioned auction catalogues, primarily of Canadian art, tearing them apart and reassembling the fragments into collaged compositions that become the source for my paintings. The titles come from W.S. Merwin's poem Unchopping a Tree, which describes the impossible task of reconstructing a felled tree, leaf by leaf, spider web by spider web.When 850 trees were slated for removal, Merwin's meditation on nature's complexity felt urgent. On October 3rd, the forest was razed overnight. The following morning, as the last trees fell, I read the poem aloud. That moment is captured in the video Reading Merwin at Ontario Place. Some of these paintings were made after that loss, reflecting on what it means to witness destruction and to try, however futilely, to put things back together. In several works, small figures stand among the trees, dwarfed by the task.