In a world that is moving towards a “post-literate” state, the image is key to carrying meaning, as vulnerable as it is to redefinition. Connotations exploits this instability by pulling images old and new from a variety of sources and juxtaposing them in miniaturized, ever-referential photo-collages.
By reprinting a mix of found and self-taken photographs on Polaroid-style instax prints, the series aims for an impressionistic approach to photography. Beyond the nostalgic sentimentality that instax prints grant the images, the scale encourages viewers to get close to the work, inspecting it carefully, looking beyond the contents and into the contexts. Rather than viewing the works as singular objects, we are encouraged to piece apart the meaning built from their interrelations, their grammar. This, of course, is modulated by the bodies of knowledge that we as viewers—as diverse interpreters of art and history—bring to the table.
In a time when political points are scored from easy answers to complex questions, this series reminds us that the intricacy of the world is inescapable, communicated not only in our images but also in our methods of organization. Our hyperactive, oversaturated visual culture invites this engagement with multiplicity, but how we confront it is ultimately up to us.
Archiphrenic is a photographic exploration of architecture as a living, mutable entity. In each piece, images of buildings are combined and overlaid with faces or fragments of other structures, creating entirely new architectural forms that defy conventional logic. These hybrid constructions challenge our perception of space, identity, and meaning, suggesting that buildings, like people, are layered, multifaceted, and psychologically resonant. Archiphrenic blurs visual boundaries, revealing the emotional and conceptual narratives embedded in the buildings we inhabit.
Landscape of Nations is a living memorial set in Queenston Heights Park beside Brock’s Monument, honouring the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) Confederacy and other Indigenous allies who were pivotal in the War of 1812—and recognizing the 1815 peace and reconciliation council held in Niagara. Visitors enter between bronze statues of war captains John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) and John Brant (Ahyouwae̱hs), then pass beneath a symbolic “longhouse” and along a walkway patterned after the Two-Row Wampum. At its heart is the Memory Circle: eight Queenston-quarry limestone walls radiate like a sunburst around a bed of sacred sweetgrass; medallions name the Six Nations and Native allies. An eastern white pine—the Tree of Peace—marks the memorial’s exit.
Unveiled on October 2, 2016, the memorial was designed by landscape architect Tom Ridout in collaboration with Six Nations artist Raymond Skye (who created the Norton and Brant sculptures), with the project co-chaired by Tim Johnson and Richard Merritt. The site weaves through the historic earthworks of Fort Riall, blending battlefield landscape with contemporary public art to affirm Indigenous peoples’ central place in Canadian history.
Palm Springs’ iconic mid-century homes stand out with their playful modernist aesthetic, but behind the glass and clean lines lie human truths. Overlaid text reveals the regrets, anxieties, and quiet despair of the people who inhabit these iconic spaces. A collision of design utopia and real-life angst, this series asks: what do our homes say about the lives we live inside them?
This series documents Toronto storefronts photographed at night, when the glow from within reveals the traces of daily life otherwise hidden behind glass. The darkness outside becomes a frame, focusing attention on interiors where merchandise, furniture, and signage speak of long histories and changing neighbourhoods.
Many of the businesses depicted were photographed during their final years; some have since vanished, leaving only their faint architectural and cultural imprint. These images are not simply records of commerce, but portraits of resilience, decline, and memory. Each storefront becomes a vessel of stories—owners who devoted lifetimes to their work, customers whose routines revolved around these spaces, communities held together by the rhythm of the corner store, the barber shop, or the diner.
By photographing them at night, I was drawn to the quiet intimacy of these places on the edge of disappearance. The illuminated interiors, set against the surrounding dark, speak to a tension between presence and absence, continuity and erasure. The work reflects on urban transformation, the fragility of local culture, and the inevitability of loss.
Menu for Living is a series of text-based works that use the familiar format of small felt menu boards, traditionally seen in diners and corner stores, to question what we consume and how we measure value in contemporary life. Each board features carefully chosen words and phrases, spelled out in white plastic letters, that at first glance resemble straightforward menu listings. On closer inspection, they reveal layered meanings, ironic juxtapositions, and playful critiques of cultural norms.
By framing ideas such as EXPENSIVE CONDOS / CHEAP PIZZA / DIRTY PARKS as though they were daily specials, the works underscore the contradictions of urban existence—luxury and scarcity, convenience and neglect, desire and disillusion. Other boards push language further into paradox, as with VERITAS NUMQUAM PERIT USUALLY—a phrase that destabilizes the certainty of truth.
Presented in this modest, ubiquitous format, the series draws attention to how language shapes lived experience, how choices are presented to us, and how value systems are advertised and internalized. Menu for Living blurs the boundary between the ordinary and the profound, offering viewers a space to reconsider what is truly “on the menu” in the structures of daily life.
