Ravines have always been sites of instability and change, and this is especially true in the age of the Anthropocene. By their edges, city pavement cracks and foundations falter. Slopes sink and slump. Water jumps its banks. Half-forgotten and often buried, the city’s creeks wind their way through the urban grid, frustrating our attempts to build in straight lines and demanding our attention.
SHADOWLAND explores the tensions between the rational, built world of the conscious city and the unbuilt, unconscious ravine world that undergirds and erodes it. Ravines are Toronto’s defining topographical feature; they are also its defining metaphorical feature. Dark, mysterious and often irrational, they function as the city’s unconscious, as Margaret Atwood observes. SHADOWLAND conjures up a dreamscape that challenges rational, human-centric ways of thinking and gestures towards mythic and ecological understanding.
Opening May 1, 2024, twelve images from this on-going project will be paired with a soundscape in the City Builders Gallery of the Evergreen Brick Works as part of Toronto’s 2024 CONTACT Photography Festival.
About Sasha Chapman:
Sasha Chapman is an award-winning writer and photographer who has spent most of her life in the Don Valley watershed. Her work connects us to the land and water we depend on. She gratefully acknowledges the first stewards who came to this watershed thousands of years ago and the Indigenous Peoples who continue to care for it today.
Visit Sasha’s Instagram or Sasha’s website
About the City Builders Gallery
This unique art and exhibit space is nestled inside one of the historic kilns formerly used for drying the bricks that built thousands of 20th Century buildings in the Greater Toronto Area. The gallery was created when a group of over 30 visionary and generous developers came together in 2017-18 to support the sustainable redevelopment of this heritage industrial space. It is a testament to their belief in a sustainable future for city building. The Gallery is located in what is now known as the TD Future Cities Centre, which is a beloved and coveted event and community space in Toronto. Showing this exhibit about the ravines in this space continues Evergreen’s work to bring together the built and natural worlds in our cities, for the benefit of both.
