Scenic City

"Scenic City", consists of a large series of digital photographs shot in and around the Owen Sound area. As with many small-town communities, Owen Sound has developed a moniker to represent its central qualities to the world. Underlining many of these upbeat and hopeful Utopic Façades lays the reliance and belief in The Promise of Progress and The Riches of Industry.

My Scenic City takes an alternate look at The City and its Dsytopic Reality. It observes and documents the City’s ongoing cycles of decay & ruin, and to rebuild, that is the fate of all built environments. The images refer to small town industry, with some signs of domesticity within that, and they provide a larger context for its place and draw some parallels between the state of Industry and the community that surrounds it. In addition to documenting the actual structures, there are latent structures being revealed--social, political, psychological, and economic--of our larger constructed environment. There's a sense of the Americana nostalgia--relics of the rural, albeit functioning relics....a reference to an older, mechanized world. They portray small town Ontario as it really is.

Though the images are specifically from the Owen Sound area, these scenarios are not, as this stalemate of modernity we are now so desperately trying to maneuver our way out of is playing itself out all across small town North America.