The Artists

Hilary Martin

Hilary Martin has been interested in top-down government planning initiatives since childhood. At a tender young age, she chanced upon the image of a fisherman towing his house across the ocean.

She wondered if his mother knew what he was up to.

She later learned that this man was one of thousands of people who resettled to communities along the shore of her home province of Newfoundland from small isolated islands off the coast. Many brought their houses with them. This all happened during Joey Smallwood’s massive resettlement program for the province, which went hand in hand with joining Confederation.

Ever since, Hilary has wondered about the power of government leaders to displace their own constituents in the name of progress. Townsend seemed like an interesting example.

Hilary has taken documentary and sound workshops with Oliver Hockenhull, Darren Copeland, Chris Brookes, Hildegard Westerkamp, Victoria Fenner, Ian Birse and Laura Kavannah, and worked as a video intern for GIRC’s Guelph Social History Project. In 2001 she received funding from the Ontario Arts Council to complete an experimental, narrationless video documentary about the Ontario Provincial Government’s 1970s megacity planning initiative in Townsend. The audio material presented in this website was originally collected for that project.

Hilary has worked as a stone mason apprentice in Toronto for the past few years. Currently she is a board member for New Adventures in Sound Art, Ontario Public Spaces, and is pursuing her MA in Philosophy at York University. She gets back to Newfoundland whenever she can.

Stefan Rose

Townsend Retraced is the artistic result of several years of travel to the community of Townsend, Ontario, studying the changes in weather, planting, and habitation through the photographic lens.  My visits are guided by a government-published catalogue of the Townsend area, Townsend Traces, that documents the plan area prior to development.  My photographs and poems will be juxtaposed in the exhibition with the clinical and detached qualities of text and images reproduced from Townsend Traces and other government planning documents.  Referencing these past images, my photos aim to reveal both change and continuity within the Townsend plan area.

Using large-format cameras with sheets of film ranging in size from 4x5 inches to 8x20 inches, the hand-printed black-and-white prints offer the viewer fine visual detail across the entire image.  With these cameras, the photos tap into the tradition of photography as both document and social interaction.  Itinerant photographers would travel from small town to small town creating images of people both in their everyday clothes and during important events.  The cumbersome large camera, requiring time to set up, enables protracted conversation with the subject, or contemplation of the landscape, and creates a sense of ceremony to the act and interaction.  Though my photographic prints are contemporary, a casual view of the architecture contained might suggest a scene from twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred years previous, and gently insist that the present is still close to past history.

Talking with the residents of the farm sites and obtaining their permission to make the photographs, I am able to record the scenes both on film and in a notebook, taking note of the residents’ first-hand experiences, memories, and feelings about the Townsend plan.  These conversations shape the content of the poems, which are filtered with my experiences in their landscape, my reading of historical documents about the area, and insertion of text from planning documents. 

My artistic practice follows the tradition of photography as document and window into specific time and place, suggesting meaning to the viewer who later sees them.  I use groupings of photographs, with text captions as poetic sign posts, to create a context that adds a deeper aesthetic complexity, in addition to the beauty of the fine print.  I am interested in the observation of sites over long periods of time to record them in different states and light.   An early exhibition, Convocation Hall Stone Surfaces, is comprised of abstracted photographs that monumentalize the weight of stone pillars on one building, but are suggestive of other architecture.   DayTrip/Night Transit, an exhibition in 2000 with Karl Kessler at the Rotunda Gallery, contrasted long-term experiences of mass-transit travel in two cities - New York City, and Kitchener, Ontario.  My night-travel photographs portrayed sparsely populated buses and terminals, cluttered by text within the scenes, complemented by poems chronicling my experiences and memories.

Photographs for the exhibitions Two Open Ears, One Open Eye and Sound Travels Documents were documentary images of musicians and concerts in Kitchener and Toronto Islands, using long-exposures and viewpoints inferring the "textures" of concerts of "New" music composed for classical and contemporary instruments.  Video work for projection during concerts by the Penderecki String Quartet, of the Steve Reich composition Different Trains, featured strong graphic images of trains, both historical and new, as triggers for memory for the viewer to engage with multiple layers of meaning within the music.  A 2001 commission by NUMUS new music concerts was to create a concert-length slide-dissolve sequence plus a 15-minute video for projection during the performance Le Minotaur, by musicians with modern dance by DanceTheatre David Earle.  In retelling the Greek story of Theseus, Minotaur and labyrinth, my images ranged from staged photographic tableaux of plastic animals, to rural landscapes, parking garages, fragments of signs, close-ups of automobile names, and road drains, suggesting through imagery, sequencing, and text that the Minotaur might be technology run amok.

All aspects of my work - photography, video, and poetry – are about the use of a variety of interconnected  and sometimes seemingly unrelated images to create discrete layers of information, resonance, and interaction by the viewer.  The Townsend Retraced exhibition provides an accessible forum to bring the experiences of individual community members into a public realm, in a creative way.  This show utilizes a range of media – from large-format photographs and poetic text, analytical documents, voices from poetic construction based on historical documents to interwoven oral histories.  This creative treatment of history will allow the audience an opportunity to recombine the work in the light of their own experience and memory.