Town is a project I started in 2012; I makeimages in my home town of Bowmanville by re-visiting places that held significance to me as an adolescent. Locations range from the corner stores where I stood outside to ask adults to buy me cigarettes and the Post Office where my friends and I would skateboard, to the old tire plant where we would hold bush parties. These are the places that had some part in shaping my experience growing up, and figuring myself out. What a time, what a place – Towns can be.
As I spend more time with the project I’ve been able to explore my fascination with fixing things and the Auto Wrecker is a great example of this. Weather that’s inanimate objects or oneself (perhaps through reflection) I am transfixed with the quotidian notion of improvement, not by throwing something away and getting a new one, but by examining, problem solving and persevering as gesture, as the incremental existence of pushing forward even when the surface appearance is still. That is what I get from this series. I revisit familiar places that I was connected to in the past, I photography and as a part of that process I reflect, yet I reflect as the person I am now. I coalesce my past memories with present mindset and gain an enhanced understanding of myself and my relationship to these places as a boy and now as a man. This enhanced understanding gives me new memories, or at least augmented memories that are less tangled than the memories of a confused adolescent and hopefully less selfish. Memories are selfish.
BHS
