IN PLACE
The name “Kiosk” still exists on northern Ontario maps, but it is a virtual location – a village in memory only.
When the Kiosk lumber mill burned down in 1973, the townspeople were given twenty years to vacate their properties. Today, the forest has covered almost all traces of the three hundred people who once lived there.
“In Place” is a series of dry-points that addresses one phase in the ongoing transformation of landscape, recording the return of flora to former mill sites. The present is seen in the image of a single plant. The past is indicated by small iconic emblems of day to day items that might still be found in an archeological dig – evidence of townspeople who have disappeared as thoroughly as nomadic tribes.
This work speaks not only to the specific site of Kiosk, but to the ebb and flow of nature and humanity itself, both of which are inescapably subject to changes in the economic or ecological climate. These drypoints document transition, the displacement of one reality, by another.
Snaige Sileika
Fifth Street Gallery
2002
snaige.ca
