ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

After repeated visits to the Emergency Department at our hospital, an ER physician looked me square in the eyes and said, “You’re lucky you are alive. You could have died… I’m sorry, but you fell through the cracks.” Soon after that, I had emergency surgery. After three months of recuperating at home, gingerly tending to the seven-inch diagonal incision on my abdomen as it healed into a permanent scar, I finally ventured outside for my first walk of the winter season. Treading cautiously into the howling Chinook wind, my head was tucked downward while my eyes remained focused on the ground with every calculated step I made. I started noticing large cracks in the wind-dried asphalt pathway. They were jagged, pronounced, precise, and almost surgical. Recalling the ER physician’s unforgettable words, the series Falling Through the Cracks found its initial beginnings.     

Months later, during a severe drought and in the long, sun-drenched daylight hours and scorching dry heat of the summer of 2022, I hiked the one hundred and fifty-five kilometres of our town’s rolling and winding coulee prairie trail system and the familiar neighbourhood routes I take on my routine evening walks and assembled an inventory of cracks. Some I found were hairline cracks, while others were old, sizeable, worn, and crumbling. At times, measures had been attempted to repair or slow down the deterioration of the broken surface covering material. Other cracks appeared butchered, barbaric, and blistered. Over time, the asphalt and the concrete cracked as the ground settled or shifted. The prolonged exposure to harsh sunlight, heavy rain, and dramatic temperature swings caused relentless freezing and thawing cycles, making it vulnerable to the elements. 

Once again, I found myself exploring the strange, bifurcated world of beauty and brutality exposed in these weathered cracks. My emotional response, embodied in these analogue prints, reminds me of the familiar expression, “Everyone is broken, the cracks are how the light gets in.” Given the focus of the subject matter on the various physical material processes of decomposition, deterioration, and degradation, it was critical to the logic of the series to maintain the immediacy of their chemical, indexical imprint on film, and its translation onto a slightly warm tone, fibre-based paper for gelatin silver prints, creating a substantial presence that would have been impossible to achieve digitally.