Once a central point of Edmonton’s urban core, the York Hotel was a bustling traveler’s hotel. It was shut down and scheduled for destruction in March 2010 as a part of efforts by the City of Edmonton to revitalize the area. In September 2011, Lancaster and Switzer took over three hundred photographs of the defunct space, exposing private worlds and telling fragmented stories of individuals who struggled to claim the space as their own. The series questioned the displacement of low-income residents in the midst of gentrification.
The YORK exhibition offered viewers a visually and physically intimate experience. Larger than life objects and images hung from the celling and protruded into the gallery space, allowing audiences to move around installations and become part of the scene.
Sydney Lancaster is a multidisciplinary settler artist and writer; an uninvited guest based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, on land encompassed by Treaty 6 and Region 4 of the Métis Nation. She has presented work in Alberta, BC, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and the US. Recent exhibitions include “Macromareal (a rising tide lifts all boats)” at SNAP Gallery (Sept - Oct 2020), “Boundary|Time|Surface” at the AGSA (Sept- Nov 2019), “Macromareal (redux)” at ~Diffuser Gallery, ECUAD (Mar 2019), and video work for the world premiere performance of the graphic score Slippages by Deborah Carruthers, at the Chan Centre UBC (Oct 2018). Her limited-edition artist book, “Boundary|Time|Surface: a record of change” was published in 2019. She is a Board member of CARFAC National. Her practice considers the potential in liminal states and places to expose gaps in our understanding, by exploring the relationships between place, objects, memory, knowledge, and time. She working in site-specific installation & sculpture, video and audio works, printmaking, and photography.
For more information about Lancaster, visit her website.
Marian Switzer is a photographer/painter from Kitchener, Ontario. She graduated from the University of Guelph with an honours degree in Fine Arts in 2004. In 2003, she spent a semester abroad in India where she attended the University of Rajasthan and was mentored by Dr. Rekha Bhatnagar in the traditions of miniature painting and traditional folk design. In 2005 she moved to Edmonton, Alberta, and in 2008 she left to travel Europe until 2010. Since arriving back in Edmonton she has received an EAC project grant for an upcoming photo based project, and has also gained representation with Feral Fine Arts.
For more information about Switzer’s work, visit her website.
YORK // Interpretive Essay by Katarina Trapara
To “be” is essentially past tense. For a thing to “be” in the first place is for it to have been. For subjects and objects alike, there is a haunting absence of what was the past that has a soul which informs the present. There are centers of spirit in all lost objects that beg us to say “hello,” rather than “good-bye.” Colonialism and, by extension, gentrification are the attempted erasures of this very act of saying “hello” to the past and the destruction of the spirit that lies therein.
Now, enter the YORK exhibition. Enter a space where lost fragments of lives can be reclaimed and re-experienced. Enter a space of resistance. Light leaks through decayed curtains and broken voices spill from other rooms; there is vibrant sound in the silence. Cast objects of knives and angels give photographs a physical form that refuse their very own erasure. Larger-than-life silk panels remind us of the importance and subtle power of a chair next to a window. In Lancaster and Switzer’s YORK, objects loom in the contested space between past and present, absence and presence.
Questions float in the air, begging the individual to consider the ethical responsibility that lies in the act of witnessing. What does it mean to witness the lives of people who have struggled to claim a personal space, to claim privacy, to claim the very things that are readily denied to them? The structure of the exhibition transforms the spectator into an active participant; one can skip between the silk panels and float into the photographs, almost stroking lost dishrags, tooth-brushes and children’s toys. The silk-framed images give a lingering sense of life to rooms while capturing them in their fading form.
YORK situates time and space in a digital continuum, which enables objects to exist in and of themselves. As such, Lancaster and Switzer tell the stories of individuals in an attempt not to speak for them, nor to appropriate their lived experiences. Instead, they evoke questions. How have minorities and the disadvantaged attempted to exercise autonomy through the establishment of place? What does it mean to “revitalize” this place of agency and privacy through displacement?
The narrative of colonialism bleeds through the process of gentrification, as both entail the theft of land, displacement, and the erasure of the past. However, when art and life are bound together, reconciliation and the act of reclaiming lost narratives become possible. Lancaster and Switzer’s photographs embody the counter-narratives of lives that have been structurally and historically denied. The light that comes from the windows and hits washing machines, mirrors and beds is a haunting presence, which means that it is not altogether lost. Photography, as exhibited by YORK, can be a form of resistance that remains within the participant; it has the potential to be embodied, and to escape the realms of the material.
Katarina Trapara holds a Masters of Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC Okanagan. Arriving in Vancouver as a refugee at a young age has informed and motivated her interests in Indigenous theory as well as minority and immigrant experiences. Trapara’s work specializes in Critical Animal Studies and Post-humanism, which uses an intersectional approach to destabilize traditional oppressive narratives.