YORK is a collaboratively-created body of work that considers notions of privacy, permanence, and intimacy. I have the pleasure of working with Edmonton-based photographer and painter Marian Switzer on this project. Our exploration of the York Hotel’s rooms and the objects in the space draws on our shared concern with the use of objects and images to examine the various competing ‘truths’ of place and identity. The York Hotel was once a bustling place, a popular resting point for travellers to Edmonton in the early years of the city’s development and the rapid expansion of the prairie economy.

The years took their toll on the place, as they did on the neighbourhood as a whole. The York became associated with crime and violence in the press and popular culture of the city, but for a number of people, the York Hotel was Home - a place of refuge, a place to gather, a place to rest at the end of the day. This is not to romanticize it: what we found there when the hotel was shut down by the City was not in any way idyllic. Rather, it spoke to the many things that more marginalized members of our communities need, and often lack. Including safety. Including community. Including a small place to call one’s own. It also spoke to the capacity of humans to find ways to survive in otherwise overwhelming circumstances, and our shared responsibility in seeing to it that we all care for one another with more clear-eyed compassion, and the will to demand better for those of us least likely to be heard in place s of power.

This project has its own separate virtual home: You can find images and writing for this project HERE.

This work was first exhibited at Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture in Edmonton AB July 25 – August 31 2013.

YORK was also presented at the Multicultural Centre Public Art Gallery (MCPAG), Stony Plain, AB August 10 - September 23 2015, and at Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna BC March 11 – April 23 2016.

YORK:Moments was a residency project with Quarters Arts Society, which saw the images taken back into the Boyle Street community where the York Hotel once stood, as a way to spawn discussion and collective memory about the hotel’s place in the city. This project resulted in the creation of CARRIED, a public art sculptural installation that was shared with the wider community at the first Nuit Blanche Edmonton, and which was made with the assistance of community members.